This is a piece I wrote about the film and my journey. It will appear in the March/April issues of Symphony Magazine
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.
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