And through the peace of worldly space,
The ninth wave washed to the very stars
O Thought, reveal yourself! Word, become music,
Strike to the hearts of men, let the world rejoice!
Nikolai Zabolotsky. Beethoven
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ranks alongside such great works of art as Homer's poems, Dante's La divina commedia, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust and Bach's High Mass... It expressed the aims of its age in an utterly perfect manner, and at the same time it gave a voice to human ideals to which we remain faithful to this very day. It concluded Beethoven the symphonist's artistic path and it also paved the way for the future.
By including poetic verse in the symphony, Beethoven took an incredibly innovative step which initially staggered his contemporaries. For the composer himself, the writing of the Ninth Symphony was the result of many years' work in an attempt to find a musical embodiment for Schiller's Ode an die Freude.
For the first time, Beethoven took a text in order to express the philosophical concept of a symphony. But the most important thing, even starting with Beethoven himself, is that the symphony – as subtly expressed by German music historian Paul Bekker – performs the role of a "secular mass" that brings concert hall audiences together in the same way that a Sunday mass brings parishioners together at church. And it is not by chance that Beethoven's brilliant rendering of Schiller's Ode an die Freude is the official anthem of the European Union, a united Europe. It is not by chance that it is performed everywhere as an apotheosis of freedom and fraternity of all mankind.
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was first performed on 7 May 1824 in Vienna under the baton of the composer.
Beethoven was the founding father of the new symphonic genre of the programme overture. The Coriolan overture (1807) was written for the eponymous tragedy by Heinrich Joseph von Collin, Beethoven’s contemporary and friend.
Heinrich Joseph von Collin (1771–1811) was a poet and playwright, all but forgotten today, though who during his lifetime was hailed and acclaimed as the “Austrian Shakespeare”. Like Shakespeare, and apparently influenced by his tragedy Coriolanus, von Collin borrows the story of the Roman general Coriolanus from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. It was for a theatre production of the tragedy in 1807 that Beethoven wrote what was subsequently to become this famous overture.
The composer was taken by the tragic figure of Coriolanus, who turned his gift as a military leader and general against his native Rome. Banished from the city and filled with a seething desire for revenge, he led a vast army to the walls of Rome. Coriolanus is utterly unbending regarding his former compatriots, but ceding to the prayers of his mother and his wife, he lowers the sword he has raised over his native city; the proud and uncompromising warrior turns this very sword upon himself.
Beethoven’s instrumental drama with its unusual expressiveness conveys all the psychological collisions of the tragedy. The contradictions that harrow Coriolanus’ soul are reflected in the main theme, which consists of a passionate impulse and a barrier standing in his path – the sharp accords of the tutti. The tortuous contradictions, full of the drama of suffering, are shaded by the secondary theme – melodious and feminine; here we can hear intonations of prayer. The emotional tenseness of the music reaches its culmination in the reprise, when once again we can hear the powerful opening accords of the overture. They slowly fade away, the impetuous leitmotif of Coriolanus measures its own pace and, powerless, it dissolves in the barely audible pizzicato of the strings.
In the series of heroic overtures by Beethoven that sing the victorious praises of the human spirit (Egmont and Leonora), the Coriolan overture occupies a special position. It depicts the tragedy of a broken conscience. Broken, but not recalcitrant – within it there burns the eternal flame of the Promethean Beethoven.
Iosif Raiskin
An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98, was, in music history, the first song cycle which was later taken as a conceptual pattern by romantic composers. Beethoven wrote it in April 1816 after he had per post received the cognominal sequence of poems by Alois Jeitteles, a young physician and a fledgling poet. The composer was deeply impressed by their tallying with a situation in his personal life. Some researchers suggested that Beethoven’s song cycle was dedicated to his mysterious beloved to whom his few 1812 letters remained. However, she has not yet been identified. The cycle An die ferne Geliebte is secondarily titled Liederkreis (Song Cycle), and consists of six episodes which go with no interruption. It is written so that the theme of the first song reappears as the conclusion of the last, thus completing the cycle.
Natalia Rogudeeva
