We had our first rehearsals on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony yesterday, and it was one of those days where I was tired from the very beginning, but I thought I could at least dredge up nine observations about this well-loved work from an insider’s perspective. In the spirit of full disclosure, I cannot vouch for the veracity of these thoughts, they are just what came forth as I as pondering what to write today.
1. I don’t like the “Ode to Joy” – it’s my least favorite part of this symphony. Sorry.
2. I love the Turkish March section of the last movement, with the off-kilter beat patterns, the silly juxtaposition of the piccolo and contrabassoon, and all the great wind writing.
3. I absolutely adore the first movement – it’s so celestial in scope, you feel like you’re approaching an enormous galaxy from light-years away, and watching as its myriad details resolve themselves with the inexorable logic of the universe.
4. My favorite moment in the entire piece is a simple chord in the first movement, a reprise of the opening string figures, the descending octaves which go down by fifths as they’re repeated, all in unison – then, like a powerful, brilliant pure light from very far away comes the addition of a harmony – and we have the quietly blazing key of D major. It takes my breath away every time I play it. Here’s a clip of this moment:
[audio:beethoven-clip.mp3]5. The last movement of the symphony is sooo tiring – there is so much time spent playing passages that cross over most of the strings, and very loudly at the same time, plus the rigor of rhythm which is required to make the fugues come off makes it very taxing from both a physical and mental standpoint.
6. Musicologist Jan Swafford has a great look at why the Ninth has kept its mystique for so long over at Slate.com – here’s an excerpt:
One reason is its mystery. Figuratively speaking, everybody knows the Ninth. But has anybody really understood it? The harder you look, the odder it gets. In a singular way, the Ninth enfolds the apparently contradictory qualities of the epic and the slippery.
First movement: loud, big, heroic, no? No. Big and loud all right, also wildly unstable, searching, inconclusive—everything heroes aren’t. The formal outline, on the surface a conventional sonata form, is turned inside-out: The development section in the middle, usually a point of maximum tension and drama, is the relatively most placid part of the movement; the recap, the return of the opening theme and usually elaborately prepared, erupts out of calm like a scream, with a major chord that somehow sounds hair-raising. (Major keys and harmonies being traditionally nice, hopeful, that sort of thing, minor ones darker, sadder, etc.) At the end there’s a funeral march over a slithering bass. Beethoven wrote funeral marches earlier, one the second movement of the “Eroica” Symphony. There we can imagine who died: the hero, or soldiers in battle. But who died in the first movement of the Ninth?
7. The third movement, one of Beethoven’s great slow movements, almost gets lost amidst the greater drama of the surrounding movements, but it is such a lovely set of variations that is akin to the Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo movement of his Op. 135 string quartet.
8. One of the things that I most like about Carlos’ interpretation of this piece is that it is never made “precious” – tempos are brisk as a rule (most coming close to Beethoven’s own metronome markings as marked in the Del Mar edition of the score), and there is none of the Ormandy/Philadelphia Orchestra massive weight that makes the whole thing seem like an elephant on quaaludes.
9. I know that the audience will love hearing this piece again – it is a real experience to hear it live in the concert hall, to see the many intricate pieces of the orchestra working to craft a humming machine of Beethoven.
Hope you can make it!