I dug up this thing I wrote (or, should I say, the young, impressionable 25-year old I was at the time wrote) in our choir's newsletter after singing Beethoven's 9th for the first time.
Here it is, warts and all... enjoy!
My First Ninth
Beethoven is my favourite composer. To satisfy the young audiophile in me, he left a sufficient number of orchestral works to keep my eardrums busy. Yes, I get a big kick out of his symphonies, overtures and concertos, especially when there is no one else in the house to keep me from cranking up the volume.
However, for the chorister in me, there isn't as much. Besides his two Masses, the Finale of the Ninth Symphony and his single opera Fidelio, Beethoven usually kept his best stuff for the orchestra. So one doesn't get to sing Beethoven very often.
Well, I've gotten lucky in recent years. In the fall of 1993, we of the Ottawa Choral Society sang Beethoven's Mass in C at the National Arts Centre. And last September, we performed the Ninth Symphony with the NAC Orchestra and Trevor Pinnock. It was my first time.
I had listened to the Ninth numerous times before - my loudspeakers have the scars to prove it - but singing Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy must be something else, I thought. Plus, choir members get the best seats in the house to hear the instrumental movements - free of charge! Paying customers can only see the conductor's back.
I had reckoned that learning the tenor part wouldn't be too hard. After all, this was a work I had heard very often, and there were plenty of other singers who had sung it before who would help me if I had any trouble with the notes.
Boy, was I wrong. At the first rehearsal, I discovered what kind of a torturer Beethoven was. Most lines were exhausting, with wicked intervals and hardly any time to take a breath. Basically, Beethoven treated the vocal parts as if they were played by instruments, with brutal disregard for human lungs and vocal cords.
I suppose he had a good reason for doing this, being the genius that he was. It was probably his way of preserving the symphonic unity of the work; had he used the voices in the traditional manner, the Finale would probably have sounded like a separate choral piece that follows a three-movement symphony. But geez, did anyone ever tell the guy that humans, unlike violins, need to breathe once in a while? I began to think the old man was frustrated at being deaf and crippled with financial problems, and took revenge on whomever he could.
All of this would have been hard enough already without having to deal with text. It seemed to me that nearly every sentence of Schiller's poem was a tongue-twister. Here is a little test to help convince the reader: Can you say, “Seid umschlungen, Millionen, diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!” in less than 3 seconds? Good. Now, try singing it, fortissimo, with perfect German diction, perfect pitch, perfect timing, perfect style and a smile on your face.
Fortunately, Iwan [Edwards, our choir master] knew how to help us overcome the difficulties in the score. Like others who were doing this for the first time, I grew more and more familiar with the part. Finally, during the final rehearsals, I found myself singing the music rather than wrestling with it, and I realized again that Beethoven wrote this Finale to celebrate Joy, not the suffering of singers. I realized it even more during the performance, and afterwards when the applause broke out. It was a Joy we had to work hard for, but it was all worth it.
After the second and last performance, I had thrown a fair amount of spit on the singers in front of me, and I could barely speak the next morning. But even after what he put me through, Beethoven is still my favourite.
Here it is, warts and all... enjoy!
My First Ninth
Beethoven is my favourite composer. To satisfy the young audiophile in me, he left a sufficient number of orchestral works to keep my eardrums busy. Yes, I get a big kick out of his symphonies, overtures and concertos, especially when there is no one else in the house to keep me from cranking up the volume.
However, for the chorister in me, there isn't as much. Besides his two Masses, the Finale of the Ninth Symphony and his single opera Fidelio, Beethoven usually kept his best stuff for the orchestra. So one doesn't get to sing Beethoven very often.
Well, I've gotten lucky in recent years. In the fall of 1993, we of the Ottawa Choral Society sang Beethoven's Mass in C at the National Arts Centre. And last September, we performed the Ninth Symphony with the NAC Orchestra and Trevor Pinnock. It was my first time.
I had listened to the Ninth numerous times before - my loudspeakers have the scars to prove it - but singing Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy must be something else, I thought. Plus, choir members get the best seats in the house to hear the instrumental movements - free of charge! Paying customers can only see the conductor's back.
I had reckoned that learning the tenor part wouldn't be too hard. After all, this was a work I had heard very often, and there were plenty of other singers who had sung it before who would help me if I had any trouble with the notes.
Boy, was I wrong. At the first rehearsal, I discovered what kind of a torturer Beethoven was. Most lines were exhausting, with wicked intervals and hardly any time to take a breath. Basically, Beethoven treated the vocal parts as if they were played by instruments, with brutal disregard for human lungs and vocal cords.
I suppose he had a good reason for doing this, being the genius that he was. It was probably his way of preserving the symphonic unity of the work; had he used the voices in the traditional manner, the Finale would probably have sounded like a separate choral piece that follows a three-movement symphony. But geez, did anyone ever tell the guy that humans, unlike violins, need to breathe once in a while? I began to think the old man was frustrated at being deaf and crippled with financial problems, and took revenge on whomever he could.
All of this would have been hard enough already without having to deal with text. It seemed to me that nearly every sentence of Schiller's poem was a tongue-twister. Here is a little test to help convince the reader: Can you say, “Seid umschlungen, Millionen, diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!” in less than 3 seconds? Good. Now, try singing it, fortissimo, with perfect German diction, perfect pitch, perfect timing, perfect style and a smile on your face.
Fortunately, Iwan [Edwards, our choir master] knew how to help us overcome the difficulties in the score. Like others who were doing this for the first time, I grew more and more familiar with the part. Finally, during the final rehearsals, I found myself singing the music rather than wrestling with it, and I realized again that Beethoven wrote this Finale to celebrate Joy, not the suffering of singers. I realized it even more during the performance, and afterwards when the applause broke out. It was a Joy we had to work hard for, but it was all worth it.
After the second and last performance, I had thrown a fair amount of spit on the singers in front of me, and I could barely speak the next morning. But even after what he put me through, Beethoven is still my favourite.
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