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When we think of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, there is so much in the four movements it seems impossible to grasp the whole. From the opening movement’s subtle descending fifths that seem to signify the idea of the creation of all that is, through the stirring rhythms of the brilliant scherzo, through the serene yet sometimes mournfully tender third movement, and finally to the celebration of all of being in the great choral fourth movement, Beethoven has given us more to experience and to be inspired by in this symphony than any of us has the ability to conceive, let alone to express.  While the musicologists will examine and discuss the technical aspects of the Ninth as long as people can hear or read music, for those of us who are simply lovers of music, there is something else, too.
The music of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sweeps us ultimately to heights that had not been reached by composers before—and some would say, since.   Mahler may take us to great heights in the end of his cosmic Eighth Symphony. There are those who love Bach and Mozart and so many others, but who find Beethoven less “controlled” than Bach or Mozart.  Certainly Bach, Mozart and Mahler are themselves sui generis, each with his own tenderness, liveliness, power, and ability to inspire, but we do not find their music performed around the world is such varied socio-economic settings, in such intimate and public venues, nor in such politically transforming ways as we find the music of Beethoven, and especially as we find performances of the final movement of Beethoven’s great Ninth.  This is the music the European Union selected as its anthem.  Here is the music that thousands sing as they move their countries from totalitarian regimes towards democracy, comforting political prisoners as they hear the masses sing Schiller’s words of unity in the world’s most perfect melody.  This  is the music that reminds us that each of us is not completely alone, that, instead, we are one family. Beethoven here reminds us that we should celebrate Being rather than mourn losses; that there is absolute Hope; and above all that exists there is, for Beethoven and Schiller, a loving Father.
Yet there is something else yet again in this experience of the Ninth. There is an individual behind the music, an individual whose personal struggles make this celebration-of-all-of-creation symphony all the more inspiring.   Beethoven was a man who walked on the earth, who had relationships, who lived, as most do, a mundane, quotidian existence, but with challenges that were not so mundane, especially during the composition of the Ninth late in life.  Here is a man who wrote on his calendar during the composition of the Ninth, “Six days and nothing to eat!” Here is at times a manipulative man, so desperate to be a father that he  tried to control his nephew’s life so absolutely that his nephew attempted suicide. Here is a man who was so involved in his music that others would slip into his flat and surreptitiously replace his dirty clothes with clean clothes, without notice or care from the maestro.  Here is a man arrested as a “Peeping Tom”.  A family living on the edge of Vienna told the story of one winter evening in their home.  As they looked up from their family dinner, they were frightened to see a man looking through their window.  The man’s visage was surrounded by night, his gray hair whipping about, and tears were streaming down his cheeks.  The man was Beethoven, looking in at what he didn’t have, at what he desired, and what he eventually celebrated in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” used in the Ninth Finale.
Here was a composer who was deaf.  His loneliness was almost inexpressible. But while his lonely mind, surrounded by silence, could reach great heights in the music he alone could hear, his feet were very much on the ground.  Anyone who has had an idea to create something grand, whether that creative work is delivered in music, business, literature, painting, politics, a poem or film, that individual knows the courageous loneliness that is involved in the actual act of creation, whether the creative  act lasted an evening or for two years.  Beethoven was additionally alone and courageous in the frustrating silence that surrounded his everyday life, and in his every  musical rendering. That silence for this great man, had to be loud.  To be sure, deafness does not keep anyone from being fully alive.  To be sure, Beethoven heard music clearly, in brilliant hues; but the composer was in a prison of silence, too. And yet, from this silence he burst forth to embrace the world.
This lonely silence the musician knew is impossible to comprehend.  His personal difficulties are exhausting to recall—as are our own if we care to remember.  Yet, we do not carry Beethoven’s burden; rather, we celebrate what Beethoven was able to accomplish despite his burdens. Beethoven showed us a way through even our deepest sorrows, as he did via a concentrated attention to and love for his art.
And what does the Ninth Symphony tells us about Beethoven’s art? The Ninth contains both the love of his most cherished musical creations, and a love for all of humankind in an absolute realization of agape.  This realization is, in-itself, beyond our comprehension. Yet, it is that strength of character that may, at our best moments, be in each of us.  It is the power we draw upon that allows us to persevere, to triumph, to overcome, and–with all of mankind and with all that is in the universe–to celebrate just being.  Beethoven, celebrating the God he and Schiller knew to be “uber sternen,” “above the stars,” becomes one of those stars himself, guiding us through the darkness but guiding us with hope and transcending Joy.

http://radioornot.blogspot.com/2009/08/remembrance-and-celebration.html

Part of this video from the Beethoven Bragg Ninth concert in Santa Monica in August, 09, will be used in Following The Ninth. Billy sings the new words to the Ninth libretto.

I met the Abonwabisi Brothers when I travelled to Capetown with Ben Zander to film two Beethoven 9 concerts he conducted there. The screenwriter Barry Berman was kind enough to introduce me to the Brothers, and then arranged a trip to the Khayalitsha Township to film them in their homes. The Abonwabisi Brothers are now learning a version of the Ninth that will appear on the Nine on The Ninth CD to be released with the film. In the tradition of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the Brothers are magnificent singers who have been perfecting their skills six days a week along the wharf in Capetown. Catch them during the World Cup this year.

The day is cold and wet and, for a Californian, somewhat intimidating as I have not, sartorially speaking, been properly acclimated. But I have already made my morning pilgrimage to the Burggarten, a park near Vienna’s center where Beethoven enjoyed an occasional stroll. The trees are ablaze in tones of crimson, the yellow, orange, and red leaves brushed and pushed by shifting winds and rain in dramatic counterpoise to the stately Habsburg-era palaces that serve as the park’s border.

I imagine Beethoven meandering through the park as seen by Johann Peter Lyser in his now famous sketch, the composer’s hands folded behind him, black trench coat and top hat, hunched upper body leaning into life. The year is 1823, November—only six months before the Kärntnertortheater premiere of what will become the most heralded symphony in our history. I conjure my Beethoven to suit my obsession. Oblivious to the storm around him, Ludwig was hearing the full blossoming of the third movement of the Ninth, a music so eerie and serene, so stunningly sad in its longing in those brief few minutes before the sky is lit up in the race to the glorious choral end, the “Ode to Joy.”

It was the third movement of Beethoven’s final symphony that drew me into his world many years ago when I heard the Ninth for the first time. As I drove alone up the central California coast in the late afternoon light, I found in the Adagio and Finale a staggering revelation: here was a music as moving as my beloved rock and soul, as powerful as the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” as tender and touching as Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine.” I had found another beautiful reason to feel fully alive.

The third movement seemed to me at the time, and still today, less a peacefully idyllic retreat than a yearning “heavenly melancholy,” as one early critic had it. Here I found an artist who captured in music the full measure of our predicament as human beings: all of us must ultimately confront the unavoidable fact that we will remain incomplete, fragmented, often existing in chaotic and inscrutable surroundings, but with a desire to coherence, transcendence even, and constantly on the move toward that inviting and deceptive home that recedes as we approach. In the Ninth, Beethoven mixes strong accents of despair and disillusionment, even outright terror, and balances these emotions with musical acts of overcoming, noble and life-affirming artistic creation, and, at times, joy. Within the anguish of his life and music there is Beethoven’s amor fati, the love of one’s fate—the love of his fate—and a stoicism that accompanies acceptance. For example, when he played his own witness to the cosmic joke that was his increasing deafness, Beethoven wrote in his famous 1802 Heiligenstdat Testament, “Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not; I am ready.” And in the midst of this crisis he wrote to Franz Gerhard Wegeler, “I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely.” Shall not “crush me completely.” We have not had many such testaments to heroism—a near-defeated warrior whose spirit is almost spent, and yet remains dedicated to creation instead of destruction.

On that languorous afternoon drive up the California coast, Beethoven had reached me where it hurt. So I listened—piano sonatas, violin sonatas, cello sonatas, string quartets, concertos, string trios, and the rest—and read Maynard Solomon, Lewis Lockwood, Esteban Buch on the politics of the Ninth, Beethoven’s letters, reminiscences and sketches by friends, even wandering into the weeds of formalist music criticism, where a musical savage like myself, a man who cannot read the music for “Hey, Jude” much less the “Jupiter” Symphony, should not tread. As I say, Beethoven got me where it hurt. I had to find out more. And then I had to make a film.

As I studied the Ninth and Beethoven himself, I found that the symphony has had a profound global presence in the 186 years since its first performance, in 1824. At Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example, students played the Ninth over makeshift loudspeakers as the troops came in to crush their democratic moment. Feng Congde, one of the leaders, told me how he and his fellow protestors wanted the world to hear their message of hope for China, and how the Ninth summed up that hope. Congde borrowed car batteries from supporters who lived in the neighborhoods near the square, and powered up a pirate radio system to counter the droning music and speeches of the Chinese Communist Party. For dictatorships, the drone is the chosen timbre, at all times, under all circumstances.

The Ninth in Japan is a rather different affair. Both a lucrative business and a seasonal celebration, the Ninth—known as Daikuor the Great Nine—is performed hundreds of times in December, sometimes with 10,000 people in the chorus. And Tokyo is the only city I know of where the Ninth can be chosen in a karaoke room. Akira Takauchi, a businessman, arranged for me to film a 5,000-performer Ninth at the Ryogoku Kokugikan Sumo Hall in Tokyo. 

Amateur singers from every social stratum and of every age practice with senseis (master teachers) for six months before tackling Schiller’s German in a public sing-a-long. They stand together, united in their egalitarian sameness: a love for the Ninth. Singers carry photos of family members who have died during the year, or a list of commitments for the following twelve months. There is a mystery in the Japanese Daiku that I am trying to unravel in my work, and earnestness in its presentation that I have seen nowhere else.

In Chile the “Ode To Joy” was used by women who sang the “Himno a la Alegria” (Hymn to Happiness) in the streets during the Pinochet years, sometimes marching to the walls of torture prisons where those trapped inside heard the music. The Chilean poet and musician Isabel Lipthay took us on a 2,000-mile journey down the coast of Chile to the Island of Chiloe. Unlike the films that most of us see in theaters, documentary films are generally not scripted, and therefore are full of surprises. A left turn instead of a right on a dirt road led us to the boat-building village of San Juan, a collection of two hundred residents where we met musicians who played traditional songs of the Chilean south. They were practicing for a town celebration the next morning, but joined us in a rousing version of the “Ode” with accordion, guitar, and drums.

Every generation needs its own version of the Ninth. But who would have imagined that the British folk/punk singer Billy Bragg would provide a Ninth for our time? Asked to write a new libretto in English, and risking the wrath of the purists, Billy responded with typical élan, true to the sentiments of Schiller’s and Beethoven’s words but revised for a new century. The London Philharmonic performed the Beethoven Bragg Ninth, with Her Majesty the Queen in attendance, in 2007. Billy’s mum, even after 25 years still unsure about his line of work, let him know that she now viewed his career choice as honorable. She stood with pride and watched her son shake the hand of Queen Elizabeth II. Billy responded to the occasion with an arresting article for The Mail two days later: How The Queen Charmed the Pants Off Me. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-487796/How-Queen-charmed-pants-Confessions-old-Leftie.html

But I could see that Billy Bragg charmed the Queen as well. I was in the audience in London at the world premiere of what has come to be called the BBB9 (Beethoven Billy Bragg Ninth). I sat about twenty feet from the Royal Box. I couldn’t tell if she was tapping her foot, and she certainly was not rattling her jewelry in time. But I did notice Queen Elizabeth digging into the new libretto, her eyeglasses held steady with one hand as she read Billy’s English words in the tune of the “Ode”:

What’s to be then, O my brother?

Sister, what is in your heart?

Tell me now the hopes you harbour

What’s the task, and where to start?

Though now speak ten million voices

Every word is understood:

Furnish every heart with joy and

Banish all hatred for good!

She looked up from her program and nodded in the direction of the chorus. After the show she requested that Billy Bragg sign the new Ninth libretto. The world, it seemed for a moment, had turned upside down.

In 2009 I arranged for the BBB9 to come to Los Angeles for its stateside debut. On an evening during which seven musical groups from across the ethnic and musical spectrum of the city performed their version of the Ninth, the Asia America Youth Orchestra’s played the BBB9 with chorus, and four cameras were there to capture the event. www.beethovenbragg.com Not only I had followed the Ninth, I had brought it home.

In documentary research, I traveled online as well, having numerous conversations, and a polemical exchange or two, with individuals from across the globe, most of them belonging to online classical or Beethoven chat groups.Many of these Beethoven fans are ambivalent about a project such as mine. Some insist that only a recorded or full live version of the Ninth are worthy of their time, and that paying attention to lesser orchestras, choruses, and soloists, as I have, is to neglect the important matter of listening to, and then putting in order, the top ten best performances and conductors.

And not surprisingly, the divisions that we face in society at large show up among those who have embraced “the Master,” as he is referred to often enough by online aficionados. Many of my interlocutors want a Christian Ninth, and emphasize his (always non-denominational) glorification of God or the “almighty,” in the libretto or in letters to various individuals throughout his life.

Others prefer a revolutionary Ninth, as if Beethoven were a premature Marxist. They note that the composer both supported the French Revolution and pushed against the political reactionaries of the Habsburg monarchy, while at the same moment accepting aristocrats’ patronage, which created irresolvable psychological tensions, as one of his biographers has argued.

I have no singular, uncomplicated Beethoven or a singular, uncomplicated Ninth. I don’t care if he was a virtuous man, did or did not frequent brothels, cheated his publishers, or mocked his colleagues. I will never be convinced by Hitler’s view that the Ninth expressed some kind of Aryan or ultra-nationalist German genius (the Führer had the Ninth performed on his birthday). And I don’t believe that the apartheid regime of Ian Smith discovered the deeper meaning of Alle Menschen Werden Bruder (“All men will be brothers”) when it turned the “Ode To Joy” into the Rhodesian national anthem in 1974. (“Rise o Voices of Rhodesia.” Sure.) But I hold no brief for Beethoven as political revolutionary. That he believed in human connection across all borders—that the Ninth represents a utopian call to brotherhood, a belief in human progress, and perhaps even a nod to democracy during a time of political reaction—is fine enough for me.

Beethoven had no use for bloated ideologies, strict programs for art or behavior, and no ethical fatwas blinded him to the messy reality of life. Beethoven was human—all too human. Artistic honesty was his ultimate commitment, music that embodied “a full and unfalsified history of humanity, fantastic yet real, splendid yet terrible,” as Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard described intellectual freedom in his 1986 novel Extinction.

I love Beethoven for his artistic honesty, for asserting that the heart and brain that created the world’s most profound music was not for sale. His patrons would pay, but Beethoven called the tune. Late in life Beethoven, even more intently than in the early and mid-period works, insisted on following his own commands, into a musical world of sublime tension and angular catharsis.

Especially in his late string quartets and piano sonatas, one hears the fine lineaments of his distress, the quivering hand of a worker in music, tired but not worried by the fact that his strength is leaving him near the end of his days—the “governance of flesh by the spirit” breaking down, as French writer Romain Rolland described the process. I imagine him writing quickly because he knows his life’s time has drifted off tempo, allegro agitato, then to finale.

As I sit in the Hawelka, I imagine Beethoven’s hands. Not those of Raphael, a loving display of long and tapered fingers, knowing in their crenellated age. Beethoven’s thick hands were made to scrawl, to be as erratic as his music was to the ears of some of his early critics. His hands were in rebellion against the precious musical world he had inherited, as rude and common as his clothes, impassioned and wild as he scribbled mysterious runes that would be deciphered for centuries to come.

Tomorrow I will film Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Ninth Frieze at Vienna’s Secession museum. The next day I and Isabel Lipthay, the Chilean poet and musician, and our cinematographer, Nick Higgins, will visit Beethoven’s grave. I don’t think he will offer his blessing for the film. Nor do I think he will give me a wink about my endeavor, or pronounce on the best recording of the Ninth to date. I expect to hear nothing from him, for I have already heard everything from him.