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On music: Beethoven's monster still looms so large
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 23/08/2007
Ivan Hewet celebrates the enduring power of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
This year the Proms has something unprecedented; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is being played twice. Nicholas Kenyon's rationale for this bountiful gesture is that last year's Prom performance was cancelled because of a fire, and he wanted to make it up to the audience.
It's a sweet, almost medieval idea. It suggests Proms audiences have been wandering about ever since in a state of spiritual vacuum, and only a double glimpse of the holy relic can restore them. Or perhaps the Proms itself in some odd way needs to be reimbursed for its loss.
The Ninth has been played complete in almost every season since 1929, and is as immovable a fixture as the Last Night. But no excuse is needed for playing a piece that always exceeds one's grasp, no matter how many times one's heard it.
Nothing can compare with the Ninth's craggy singularity, its heroic aspiration, its almost monstrous grandeur. No piece of music better illustrates Walter Benjamin's dictum that the greatest works of art destroy an old genre yet at the same time create a new one.
What the Ninth destroyed was the classical idea of a symphony as something purely musical. The battle to put music on the level of the other fine arts had been won only because the classical composers - Mozart and Haydn above all - showed that it was a pure, self-contained world of sounding forms. But Beethoven blew that hard-won victory apart, by showing that to rise to its true grandeur, music needs take on the Word.
That, according to Wagner, is the unspoken message of the Ninth's stupendous choral finale, which sets Schiller's great Ode to Joy. But Wagner had an axe to grind: he wanted to prove music would find its true destiny by joining drama, and he needed to claim a noble forebear.
Wagner was the first of many who bagged the Ninth for their own ideological ends. The piece has been called in support of almost any cause you care to name.
It can be regarded as the quintessential musical statement of Enlightenment principles ("all men shall be brothers," reads Schiller's text). Others have found a call to revolution in that stirring finale, an idea that may have been in Schiller's mind - an early draft of the ode contained the line "Princes shall be beggars".
The Ninth appeals equally to left and right. For the Nazi Arthur Sanderberg, the symphony made its composer the spiritual führer of the German people. Anatoli Lunacharsky, cultural commissar of the fledging Soviet Union, said the work proved Beethoven was the composer "whose world vision co-incides with that of the Proletariat".
Being so ideologically malleable, the Ninth has been co-opted for any scenario where a feeling of aspiration and joy is called for.
In Japan, the piece has become a New Year's day ritual, performed by choirs across the country. It's been played at Olympic Games opening ceremonies, and for European Cup football matches.
When the Berlin Wall came down, Bernstein conducted a celebratory performance of the Ninth, in which every appearance of the word "joy" was changed to "freedom". The EU has adopted it as its anthem, though with the marvellous words removed - an act which speaks volumes about that institution.
All of this leaves unanswered the question: is the symphony actually a great one? Not everyone has thought so. Stravinsky found the first movement pedestrian, and criticised the tune of the finale on the grounds that it's too four-square to be developed - so Beethoven was reduced to "spreading it out like a military parade".
This must be one of the most wrong-headed remarks ever passed by one great composer on another. The tune is a stroke of genius, starting off sturdily four-square but raising its eyes to heaven with that off-beat accent in the last phrase. And it's the necessary fulcrum for Beethoven's Shakespearian way of uniting high and low.
It's a drinking song that can transform itself at one moment into a learned fugue, and the next into a Turkish march. In between come visionary moments, when the music opens a door on to a hereafter that can't quite be defined. It could be Christian heaven, a pantheistic exuberance, or the earthly paradise of universal brotherhood. The music's joy embraces them all.
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony will be performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and chorus, conducted by Mariss Jansons next Thurs. Tickets: 020 7589 8212. Information: bbc.co.uk/proms
(That is Thursday 30th July)
On music: Beethoven's monster still looms so large
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 23/08/2007
Ivan Hewet celebrates the enduring power of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
This year the Proms has something unprecedented; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is being played twice. Nicholas Kenyon's rationale for this bountiful gesture is that last year's Prom performance was cancelled because of a fire, and he wanted to make it up to the audience.
It's a sweet, almost medieval idea. It suggests Proms audiences have been wandering about ever since in a state of spiritual vacuum, and only a double glimpse of the holy relic can restore them. Or perhaps the Proms itself in some odd way needs to be reimbursed for its loss.
The Ninth has been played complete in almost every season since 1929, and is as immovable a fixture as the Last Night. But no excuse is needed for playing a piece that always exceeds one's grasp, no matter how many times one's heard it.
Nothing can compare with the Ninth's craggy singularity, its heroic aspiration, its almost monstrous grandeur. No piece of music better illustrates Walter Benjamin's dictum that the greatest works of art destroy an old genre yet at the same time create a new one.
What the Ninth destroyed was the classical idea of a symphony as something purely musical. The battle to put music on the level of the other fine arts had been won only because the classical composers - Mozart and Haydn above all - showed that it was a pure, self-contained world of sounding forms. But Beethoven blew that hard-won victory apart, by showing that to rise to its true grandeur, music needs take on the Word.
That, according to Wagner, is the unspoken message of the Ninth's stupendous choral finale, which sets Schiller's great Ode to Joy. But Wagner had an axe to grind: he wanted to prove music would find its true destiny by joining drama, and he needed to claim a noble forebear.
Wagner was the first of many who bagged the Ninth for their own ideological ends. The piece has been called in support of almost any cause you care to name.
It can be regarded as the quintessential musical statement of Enlightenment principles ("all men shall be brothers," reads Schiller's text). Others have found a call to revolution in that stirring finale, an idea that may have been in Schiller's mind - an early draft of the ode contained the line "Princes shall be beggars".
The Ninth appeals equally to left and right. For the Nazi Arthur Sanderberg, the symphony made its composer the spiritual führer of the German people. Anatoli Lunacharsky, cultural commissar of the fledging Soviet Union, said the work proved Beethoven was the composer "whose world vision co-incides with that of the Proletariat".
Being so ideologically malleable, the Ninth has been co-opted for any scenario where a feeling of aspiration and joy is called for.
In Japan, the piece has become a New Year's day ritual, performed by choirs across the country. It's been played at Olympic Games opening ceremonies, and for European Cup football matches.
When the Berlin Wall came down, Bernstein conducted a celebratory performance of the Ninth, in which every appearance of the word "joy" was changed to "freedom". The EU has adopted it as its anthem, though with the marvellous words removed - an act which speaks volumes about that institution.
All of this leaves unanswered the question: is the symphony actually a great one? Not everyone has thought so. Stravinsky found the first movement pedestrian, and criticised the tune of the finale on the grounds that it's too four-square to be developed - so Beethoven was reduced to "spreading it out like a military parade".
This must be one of the most wrong-headed remarks ever passed by one great composer on another. The tune is a stroke of genius, starting off sturdily four-square but raising its eyes to heaven with that off-beat accent in the last phrase. And it's the necessary fulcrum for Beethoven's Shakespearian way of uniting high and low.
It's a drinking song that can transform itself at one moment into a learned fugue, and the next into a Turkish march. In between come visionary moments, when the music opens a door on to a hereafter that can't quite be defined. It could be Christian heaven, a pantheistic exuberance, or the earthly paradise of universal brotherhood. The music's joy embraces them all.
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony will be performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and chorus, conducted by Mariss Jansons next Thurs. Tickets: 020 7589 8212. Information: bbc.co.uk/proms
(That is Thursday 30th July)
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