Tuesday, October 26, 2010

An Ode to the Ode to Joy

The Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has been played so often, in so many different guises, that we sometimes lose sight of how beautiful it is. Featured in countless films and television shows, rearranged for a thousand middle school concert bands, appropriated as the international anthem of the European Union, perhaps no other snatch of classical music has so deeply penetrated the consciousness of listeners the world over. The opening bars of Beethoven’s own Fifth Symphony are the only rival I can conceive for it, but even then I would give the crown to Ninth. Whereas that famous three-note phrase is laden with doom, the Ode to Joy is a, well, joyous expression of all that is good and noble in the human soul.

Maxim Gorky once related an anecdote about Vladimir Lenin:

“I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day… But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. One can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. They ought to be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly…”

Lenin could choose not to listen; he could choose not to let the attraction continue beyond the final bars. But while that music lasted, he was constrained, by the laws of his humanity, to face up to the essential beauty at the heart of humankind. So am I constrained by the laws of my humanity when I hear the Ninth. I listen to the fourth movement, about five minutes in, as the orchestra takes off into the development after the first major statement of the Ode to Joy. As the strings strain up, I am, without fail, reduced to tears. I have no more choice in the matter than does a rubber ball to feel the gravitational pull of the Earth below it.

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