I’m looking forward to Thursday night and the opening night performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D minor, under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Premiered in Vienna in 1824, this symphony, certainly among the finest achievements of the human imagination, is also among the world’s most familiar, especially its fourth movement; and indeed, “the Ninth is the work most often used to solemnize an important event — the opening of the United Nations, the signing of a peace treaty at the end of a war, the fall of the Berlin Wall,” as Harvey Sachs has it in his book about the symphony. “It has been used as a battle flag by liberals and conservatives, by democrats and autocrats, by Nazis, Communists, and anarchists.” A celebration of the tenacity of the human spirit, yes — but because of those Nazis, Communists, and anarchists, that celebration seems to call for some thoughtful distance between ourselves and how we perceive the work. To paraphrase Nicholas Cook’s excellent monograph about the Ninth (which unfortunately I do not have in front of me), it may be that the Ninth is so familiar to us that we have lost the ability to hear it, especially in 2026. Well, I will try to listen to it, and to hear it, on Thursday night.
As I listen I will bear Harvey Sachs’ observation about its Romantic, revolutionary reputation in mind:
The conjunction of Beethoven’s last symphonic masterpiece with crucial works or events in the lives of so many other outstanding artists made 1824 a particularly fertile year. …. The fact that the Ninth Symphony, Byron’s death, Pushkin’s Boris Gudunov and “To the Sea,” Delacroix’s Massacres at Chios, Stendhal’s Racine and Shakespeare, and Heine’s Harz Journey and North Sea Pictures all futhered, in one way or another, Romanticism’s rear-guard action against repression underlines the significance of that speck of time. And perhaps these brief glances at those artists and their states of being at that moment will have helped to remind readers — as they reminded this author — that spiritual and intellectual liberation requires endless internal warfare against everything in ourselves that narrows us down instead of opening us up and that replaces questing with certitude. Nearly two centuries later, the world still overflows with people who believe that truth not only exists but that it is simple and straightforward, and that their truths — be they political, religious, philosophical, moral, or social — constitute The Truth. Federico Fellini’s characterization, a generation ago, of the fascist mentality as “a refusal to deepen one’s individual relationship to life, out of laziness, prejudice, unwillingness to inconvenience oneself, and presumptuousness” describes the obedient adherents of most prefabricated beliefs, everywhere and at all times. The others — the disobedient, the nonadherents, those who think that the world is not easily explained and that human experience does not fit into tidy little compartments — are still fighting the eternally unwinnable War of Liberation. Until our sorry species bombs or gluts itself into oblivion, the skirmishing will continue, and what Beethoven and company keep telling us, from the ever-receding yet ever-present past, is that the struggle must continue.
I fear that the meaning of this struggle, too, is provisional, especially given the contradictory, sometimes perverse human spirit.
My good friend Bruce Hodges takes a look back at the recorded history of Beethoven’s Ninth here.
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