The Nine Symphonies

Symphony No. 1 in C, Opus 21 (1799-1800)
Symphony No. 2 in D, Opus 36 (1801-2)
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, Opus 55, "Eroica" (1803)
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat, Opus 60 (1806)
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67 (1807-8)
Symphony No. 6 in F, Opus 68, "Pastoral" (1808)
Symphony No. 7 in A, Opus 92 (1811-12)
Symphony No. 8 in F, Opus 93 (1812)
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125 (1822-4)

Introduction

Beethoven grew up playing J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and that prodigious collection had an indelible effect on his music. Among other things, the WTC may have implanted in Beethoven a sense of a synoptic body of work, meaning a collection of pieces in a single medium that seems to explore the full depth and breadth of what that medium can do, and beyond that the depth and breadth of what music itself can do. By the end of his life Beethoven had created three synoptic bodies of work: thirty-two piano sonatas, sixteen string quartets, and nine symphonies. In each of those streams of music stretching from his exploratory early phase to his transcendent final period, we find a steady renewal and growth, as if with each major work he set out to remake a medium and a genre.

To the conception of a synoptic body of work Beethoven brought historic new elements. There was the sense of powerful personality. Where Haydn and Mozart even at their most poignant maintain a certain poise and Classical detachment, Beethoven seems to be grasping your lapel, speaking passionately to you person to person. In an age rocked by revolutions, it was inevitable that he would be called a revolutionary, yet he never called himself one. His music was a singular new voice, but one at the same time grounded in the legacy of Haydn, Mozart, Bach, and Handel. Call him not a revolutionary but a radical evolutionary. 

All the same, his music was revolutionary in its impact. With the Eroica Symphony (No. 3) he expanded and intensified what Haydn had done in making the symphony the king of instrumental genres. Having absorbed his models, he systematically, synoptically, in every dimension, took his works further: longer, more intense, more contrasting in material, more grand and more intimate, more complex and more simple, from tragic to comic and prophetic to nostalgic. His symphonies stand as a collection of individuals unforgettable from the first time you meet them. Beyond that, they can be counted among history’s enduring testaments both humanistic and spiritual.

Symphony No. 1 in C, Opus 21 (1799-1800)

(Program of January 9-11, 2025)

First performance: April 2, 1800,  in a concert given by Beethoven at the Hofburgtheater in Vienna.

First American performance: evidently in the highly musical Moravian community in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, on June 13, 1813; who conducted is unknown.

First BSO performance: October 29, 1881, Georg Henschel conducting. Most recent BSO performances: April 2012, Bernard Haitink conducting. The BSO has played the First Symphony about 144 times (complete performances, excluding open rehearsals).

Instrumentation: 1 flute, 2 each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses)

The immediate inspiration for the First Symphony was Beethoven’s debut solo concert in Vienna. At that point he was enjoying a handsome career as a keyboard virtuoso and composer of solo piano and chamber music, celebrated for his fiery improvisations. Now he wanted a symphony premiere to make a big finish for his concert. He wrote the piece at top speed, shaping it audibly on Haydn’s model. 

The first movement has an extensive introduction, starting quietly in winds with a provocative gesture: a dissonance, in the wrong key. Only after a few searching measures does the piece reveal itself as being in C major. There follows a vigorous, military-toned Allegro con brio (Fast, with brio), its phrasing foursquare, its modulations restrained, its development and coda not excessively long. Much of the movement is forte (loud) or fortissimo (very loud) and scored for the whole band. Beethoven wanted the piece to make a noise in the world. 

As for the lyrical second movement, he would never get closer to the lyrical and elegantly precious mood of the 18th-century galant. The third movement he called Minuetto, but its tempo of Allegro molto e vivace (Very fast and lively) reveals it as a scherzo. Haydn had invented this speeded-up and usually lighthearted version of a minuet (“scherzo” means “joke”) and used it in string quartets, but never in a symphony. Beethoven’s scherzo here is as dashing and gay as scherzos are supposed to be. The tone of dashing gaiety in moderation is maintained in the finale, which begins like the first movement with an Adagio introduction. 

Beethoven’s journey from the modest First Symphony to the Second to the Third, three giant strides that travel further than most artists manage in a lifetime, would take him less than four years.

Symphony No. 2 in D, Opus 36 (1801-2)

(Program of January 9-11. 2025)

First performance: April 5, 1803, Theater an der Wien, Vienna, Beethoven conducting

First American performance: May 8, 1821, Musical Fund Society, Washington Hall, Philadelphia, Charles Hupfeld conducting

First BSO performance: November 11/12, 1881, Georg Henschel conducting. Most recent BSO performances: February 2016, Vladimir Jurowski conducting. The BSO has played the Symphony No. 2 about 174 times.

Instrumentation: 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings

Beethoven’s Second Symphony in D major, finished in summer and fall of 1802, has long been seen as a model of creative detachment. This most brash, rollicking, and youthful of his symphonies was completed in some of the darkest months of his life, when he could no longer deny that his hearing was failing, that his health would never be good, that pain was likely to be his closest companion. For good reason as he finished the Second, Beethoven was contemplating suicide. Somehow, in the midst of that anguish came an explosion of high spirits. 

Even if he was still not settled on where he was headed with symphonies, the Second is a different matter than the First: big, ambitious, with a richer treatment of the orchestra. The mood of the first movement’s slow introduction is warm, expansive, lighthearted. The Allegro con brio that breaks out in due course recalls, say, the overture to a Mozart comic opera, the music full of kicks in the pants and faux pathos. Yet nobody would mistake this piece for its models in Mozart. There is a driving nervous energy unprecedented in the literature to that time, its engine less melodic than rhythmic. 

In its gentle songfulness the second movement, as in the First, recalls the perfumed and ironic atmosphere of the Classical galant. The movement is summery and relaxed, one of the sheerly loveliest he ever wrote. In contrast, the darting and bumptious scherzo is in love with its own quirkiness, with nimble banter between the sections of the orchestra and eruptive jumps from soft to loud. 

The rondo finale starts out with an absurd whooping gesture like a full-orchestra hiccup, which dissolves into skittering comedy. A central element of the joke is that the little two-note fillip is actually the main motive of the movement; it keeps coming back, ludicrous every time. The curtain falls, let’s say, on an operatic scene of laughing couples with glasses raised.

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, Opus 55, "Eroica" (1803)

(Program of January 9-11. 2025)

First performance: Private performances at the palace of Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz in the second half of 1804; first public performance April 7, 1805, Theater an der Wien, Vienna, Beethoven conducting 

First American performance: February 18, 1843, Philharmonic Society, Apollo Rooms, New York, Ureli Corelli Hill conducting

First BSO performance: November 18/19, 1881, Georg Henschel conducting. Most recent BSO performances: Tanglewood, July 5, 2024, Andris Nelsons conducting. Most recent complete subscription performances: March 2017, Andris Nelsons conducting. (Omer Meir Wellber led the second-movement Marcia funebre as part of the BSO’s subscription concerts of January 5-7, 2023.) The BSO has performed the complete Eroica about 428 times.

Instrumentation: 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 3 horns (unusual for the time), 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings

Around 1801 Beethoven told a friend that he was not satisfied with anything he had written and intended to strike out on a new path. That path we call the Second Period, and its first great manifestation is the epochal Third Symphony. 

Its creation probably began with an idea for a variation finale founded on a simple bass line. In 1801 Beethoven wrote music for a ballet called The Creatures of Prometheus. Its plot: the demigod Prometheus sculpts human figures in clay and brings them to life, but he discovers that while they can walk and talk, they have no human spirit, no soul. To imbue them with soul he takes them to Parnassus and introduces them to the various gods of the arts: music, tragic drama, dance. Thus imbued, his creations become truly human. At the end there is a general dance expressing the joy of the enlightened creatures. 

Here was an idea that hit Beethoven where he lived: it is through the arts that we become fully human. This was a high-Enlightenment credo. For Beethoven the musical essence of that credo seems to have been embodied in the repeated bass line that underlies the final dance of the ballet. Perhaps for him it symbolized the dumb creatures, the foundation on which their enlightenment is built. The bass line is something near nothing than can be the foundation of anything. 

In 1802 he wrote a set of piano variations on the bass line, which we know as the Eroica or Prometheus Variations. By the time he finished the piece he had probably already decided to write a symphony with something like those variations as the finale. He would base the symphony on, and dedicate it to, the great Promethean figure of the age: Napoleon. The symphony was to be called Bonaparte. Napoleon was widely seen at that point as a progressive leader who would bring peace and better governments across Europe.

The epic first movement begins with two towering chords. Call its narrative something in the image of a battle or a military campaign led by Napoleon or one of the classical heroes: teeming, surging, searching, full of contrasting themes, with a sense of vast forces moving across a landscape and across history. Call the opening theme the Hero; that theme infuses the kaleidoscopic ideas to come, until at the end of the first movement it is proclaimed triumphantly by the horns as the orchestra gathers around it, like a conqueror leading his forces after the victory. 

After the battle comes the burial of the dead—a funeral march with its mournful theme, imitations of muffled drums, distant wails of grief, and in the middle a soaring fugue that seems to capture an essence of aspiration and nobility: a hymn not to God, but to humanity. After the mourning there is a return to life and joy in a racing, almost delirious scherzo, with an interlude for hunting horns. Then the unprecedented finale, variations on that little bass line, starting in a light, dancelike mood that will be transformed in the course of the movement to a place of exalted grandeur. The finale can be called an image of what the hero has wrought, a just and harmonious society, expressed as a little dance that becomes an apotheosis. The symphony ends in overflowing jubilation. 

But its title would not end up as Bonaparte. When Beethoven learned that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor of France, that after all the conqueror was just another tyrant in it for himself, in a fury he ripped up the original title page. It was published as Sinfonia eroica, with a rueful addendum: “composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” It was not the death of a hero Beethoven mourned there, but the death of a dream. 

History would nickname Beethoven’s Second Period after this symphony: the Heroic Period. Though by no means would his coming work all be in the heroic voice, the connection to his deepest ideals was the essence of the new path. To embody those ideals he had created the most ambitious and profound symphony ever written, a work that would make its mark on the whole of music to come.

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat, Opus 60 (1806)

(Program of January 16 & 17, 2025)

First performance: March 1807, in a private concert at the Vienna town house of Prince Joseph von Lobkowitz (the Coriolan Overture and Piano Concerto No. 4 also receiving their premieres on that occasion)

First American performance: November 24, 1848, Philharmonic Society, Apollo Rooms, New York, Theodor Eisfeld conducting

First BSO performance: December 2/3, 1881, Georg Henschel conducting

Most recent BSO performances: Tanglewood, August 4, 2024, Alan Gilbert conducting. Most recent subscription performances: January 2022, Andris Nelsons conducting. The BSO has performed the Fourth Symphony about 240 times.

Instrumentation: 1 flute, 2 each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses)

The Fourth Symphony was written near the end of Beethoven’s white-hot year of 1806, when despite grueling illnesses he produced a collection of historic works including the Appassionata piano sonata and the three revolutionary string quartets of Opus 59, the Razumovsky quartets. He wrote the Fourth Symphony quickly on a commission, and in it made a virtue of necessity with a radical simplification of form and content, adding up to a work of surpassing grace, wit, and charm. Here Beethoven’s symphonic pattern becomes clear: odd-numbered symphonies heavier, even-numbered ones lighter. 

The first movement of the Fourth begins on an expansive introduction with a mysterious, nocturnal atmosphere. A scintillating, dancing Allegro vivace breaks out with an effect as if doors were flung open onto a glittering ballroom. That dancelike quality carries into the second movement, much of it based on an obsessive figure that a later age would call a tango rhythm, which underlies a long-breathed melody prophetic of ones in his sublime last period. After a rowdy, tripping-over-its-feet scherzo, the finale has a madcap fiddle tune for a main theme and barely departs from it.

Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67 (1807-8)

(Program of January 16 & 17, 2025)

First performance: December 22, 1808, Theater an der Wien, Vienna, Beethoven conducting (in a concert also including, among other things, the premieres of the Pastoral Symphony and Choral Fantasy, and the first public performance of the Piano Concerto No. 4)

First American performance: February 11, 1841, German Society of New York, Broadway Tabernacle, Urelli Corelli Hill conducting

First BSO performance: December 16/17, 1881, Georg Henschel conducting. Most recent BSO performances: Tanglewood, July 19, 2021, Andris Nelsons conducting. Most recent subscription performances: November 2018, Andris Nelsons conducting. The BSO has performed the Symphony No. 5 about 454 times. 

Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, contrabassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings. (The addition of piccolo, contrabassoon, and trombones was a distinct departure from the typical symphony instrumentation of the era.)

The simplification of content and form of the Fourth Symphony carried over into the succeeding symphonies, each in its own way. In the Fifth, it is a matter of simplification plus intensification. The symphony begins with what became perhaps the most famous gesture in music, an explosive four-note tattoo that introduces a searing, force-of-nature first movement founded on that little motif implacably repeated. In this symphony there will be no stated narrative subject as in the Eroica, but still an implied journey from the fateful first movement to the triumphant finale. Beethoven is reported to have said of the opening tattoo: “Thus Fate knocks at the door!” Maybe he said that, maybe not, but there is no question that the first movement, with its relentless rhythmic figure, evokes something like fatality. And no question that the implied narrative from fatalism to triumph is full of significance for a musician to whom fate has dealt the worst of cards. 

The double variations of the second movement are a lyrical respite from the stormy first, the beautiful main theme gently lilting, the lush second theme in the brass. The scherzo is the darkest and most ambiguous in all Beethoven’s symphonies, rising to a pealing, rather demonic horn theme, that contrasted by a robustly comic Trio. Finally a kind of fog descends, from which the joyous and exultant finale emerges in a blaze of brass. The exultant tone is sustained to the coda, except for a moment when the scherzo suddenly turns up again, injecting a touch of ambiguity. Beethoven knew that triumph is never complete. The demon can always come back.

From this climactic work of Beethoven’s Heroic Period his heroic voice would recede, most strikingly in the next symphony.

Symphony No. 6 in F, Opus 68, "Pastoral" (1808)

(Program of January 18 & 21, 2025)

First performance: December 22, 1808, Theater an der Wien, Vienna, Beethoven conducting (in the same concert as the premiere of the Fifth Symphony)

First American performance: November 26, 1829, Musical Fund Society, Musical Fund Hall, Philadelphia, Charles Hupfeld conducting (“Selection from Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony”); January 15, 1842, Academy of Music, Odeon, Boston, Henry Schmidt conducting

First BSO performance: January 6/7, 1882, Georg Henschel conducting. Most recent BSO performance: Tanglewood, August 11, 2019, Thomas Adès conducting. Most recent subscription performances: March 2017, François-Xavier Roth conducting. The BSO has performed the Pastoral Symphony about 252 times.

Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, and strings. (Just as in the Fifth Symphony, piccolo and trombones were unusual additions to the concert orchestra of the era.)

The Sixth Symphony is the anti-Fifth, answering the storms and ecstasies of the earlier work with a summer vacation in the country: no shadows, no drama except for a passing thunderstorm that gives way to a rosy sunset. Beethoven’s God was the primal creator of the Enlightenment, nature his scripture and cathedral. He shaped the Pastoral Symphony on the story of a country sojourn, but implicitly it is a sacred work.

First movement: “Awakening of happy feelings on arrival in the country.” It starts with a lilting tune unmistakably pastoral. A simple themelet chugs along unchanging like a donkey-cart for bar after bar. A later age would call this sort of music Minimalism. Themes like folktunes spin out effortlessly, the mood timeless, never departing from warm good cheer. There are no minor keys and few minor chords. No shadows, no griefs: bliss. 

Second movement: “Scene by the Brook.” Where the first movement lilts, this one babbles and flows. Then “Merry Gathering of Peasants.” Late afternoon after the day’s work. This is the third-movement scherzo expected in a symphony. It begins cheerfully, its second theme introducing a parody of a village wind band where a drowsy bassoonist wakes up now and then to blat out a few notes. A driving, stamping peasant dance serves as the Trio. The repeat of the opening arrives as expected, but it is cut short by a distant rumble: “thunder bass,” Beethoven called it in a sketch. A moment of quiet, a smattering of rain, then with a crash a storm is on us: dissonant, roaring, harmonically ambiguous. This is not just a violent movement; it shatters the form itself. 

The title of the fifth movement is “Joyful and Grateful Feelings After the Storm.” It is a partly hymnlike, partly folk-like song of thanks, most of it based on the distant alpenhorn call of the opening. Beethoven jotted in a sketchbook: “Arrival in the country. Effect on the soul.” For all its lovely tableaus, the Pastoral is as much interior monologue as illustration, a play of placid light and shade and storm across the souls of composer and listener.

Symphony No. 7 in A, Opus 92 (1811-12)

(Program of January 18 & 21, 2025)

First performance: December 8, 1813, in the auditorium of the University of Vienna, Beethoven conducting

First American performance: November 18, 1843, Philharmonic Society, Apollo Rooms, New York, Ureli Corelli Hill conducting

First BSO performance: February 3/4, 1882, Georg Henschel conducting. Most recent BSO performance: Tanglewood, August 18, 2024, Earl Lee conducting. Most recent subscription performances: February 2023, Andris Nelsons conducting. The BSO has performed the Seventh Symphony about 498 times (the most of any Beethoven symphony).

Instrumentation: 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

An enduring paradigm of Beethoven scholarship is the division of his work into three periods: the Early, when he was polishing his craft and finding his voice; the Middle, aka Heroic; the sublime Late, when he was isolated by illness and deafness and his music became inward and spiritual. This lends particular significance to works lying between the last two periods, among them the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. 

In these works we see the turn toward the Late Period taking shape. In the Seventh Beethoven put aside the heroic model of the Third and Fifth, but he had not yet arrived at the inward music of the late works. If not heroic or sublime, then what for the Seventh? A kind of Bacchic trance, dance music from beginning to end. 

The symphony’s grand and expansive introduction foreshadows everything melodically and harmonically significant for the symphony. With a coy transition we’re off into the first movement Vivace, quietly at first (via solo flute) but with mounting intensity. The movement is a titanic gigue, its dominant dotted rhythmic figure as relentless as the Fifth Symphony’s famous tattoo, but the effect is mesmerizing rather than fateful. Rhythm plays a more central role than melody here, though there is a pretty folk tune in residence. From the first time you hear the symphony’s outer movements, meanwhile, you never forget the lusty and rollicking horns.

Nor are you likely to forget the first time you hear the stately and mournful dance of the second movement. It has been an abiding hit since its first performances. The idea is a process of intensification, adding layer on layer to the inexorably marching chords, with their poignant chromaticism that Germans call moll-Dur, minor-major. The scherzo is racing, eruptive, giddy, its main theme beginning in F major and ending in A, from one flat to three sharps in a flash. The Trio, heard twice, slows to a kind of majestic dance tableau, as frozen in harmony and gesture as a painting of a ball. 

The finale manages to ratchet the energy higher than it has yet been. If earlier we have had exuberance, brilliance, poignancy, those moods of dance, now we have something on the verge of delirium: stamping and whirling two-beat fiddling, with the horns in high spirits again.

The Seventh premiered to loud acclaim in 1813 as part of the ceremonies around the Congress of Vienna. This was one of the triumphant moments of Beethoven’s life. True, another piece he premiered on the program, his trashy Wellington’s Victory, got more applause. But for the moment he was not too proud to bask a little, pocket the handsome proceeds, maybe even to enjoy with a sardonic laugh the splendid success of the bad piece and the merely bright prospects of the good one. The Seventh after all celebrates the dance, which lives in the ecstatic and heedless moment.

Symphony No. 8 in F, Opus 93 (1812)

(Program of January 23-25, 2025)

First performance: February 27, 1814, Vienna, Beethoven conducting

First American performance: November 16, 1844, Philharmonic Society, Apollo Rooms, New York, George Loder conducting

First BSO performance: February 17/18, 1882, Georg Henschel conducting. Most recent BSO performances: January 2018, Thomas Adès conducting. The BSO has performed the Symphony No. 8 about 210 times.

Instrumentation: 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings

If the Sixth Symphony was a largely gentle vacation in the country, call the Eighth a vacation into nostalgia: a beautiful, ironical looking back, complete with 18th-century minuet. There are no great matters here, rather a jovial and jokey atmosphere that, like the Second and Fourth, fondly recalls Mozart’s operas. 

It begins with a dancing theme that sets up a movement relaxed and good-humored on a grand scale, the orchestral sound big and rich. The second movement begins with a striding tread and a nonchalant, whistling tune recalling one of Mozart’s comic characters—say, Don Giovanni’s Leporello in a jaunty mood. For the third movement, a look back at the old courtly minuet but freed of frills, still in the trance of nostalgia that marks this symphony. 

The lighthearted atmosphere carries into the scurrying, capering finale that sustains a particular joke throughout—though it is a joke for musicians. In this lively music in F major an out-of-key C-sharp keeps barging in like an unwelcome uncle at a wedding. As with the C-sharp at the beginning of the Eroica, this must have consequences. The joke is that the note has no consequences, just keeps inexplicably barging in. Here Beethoven is making fun of his own craftsmanship. He gets credit for many things, but rarely for his gift at comedy. 

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125 (1822-4)

(Program of January 23-25, 2025)

First performance: May 7, 1824, Kärntnerthor Theater, Vienna, with Beethoven (now totally deaf) on stage beating time and turning the pages of his score, but with Michael Umlauf actually conducting

First American performance: May 20, 1846, Philharmonic Society, Castle Garden, New York, George Loder conducting, with Mmes. Otto, Korzinsky, Messrs. Munson, Meyer, Brittlekofer as soloists

First BSO performance: March 10/11, 1882, Georg Henschel conducting, with Mrs. Humphrey-Allen, Mary H. How, Charles R. Adams, and V. Cirillo, soloists; chorus unidentified in the printed program. Most recent BSO performance: Tanglewood, August 25, 2024, Ludovic Morlot conducting, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and vocal soloists Ambur Braid, Jess Dandy, Elgan Llŷr Thomas, and Davóne Tines. Most recent subscription series performances: May 2012, Bernard Haitink conducting, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and vocal soloists Jessica Rivera, Meredith Arwady, Roberto Sacca, and Günther Groissböck. The BSO has performed the complete Ninth Symphony about 253 times. (On several occasions—under Wilhelm Gericke, Emil Paur, and Pierre Monteux—the BSO has performed the piece without the choral finale; Paur also led two subscription series performances of just the second and third movements.)

Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, and strings, plus soprano, alto, tenor, and bass soloists and four-part mixed chorus. (The inclusion of piccolo, contrabassoon, and trombones, the addition of two “extra” horns, and of course the presence of vocal soloists and chorus were innovations.)

There is a train of thought that spans the whole of Beethoven’s mature work. The Eroica was the story of a world-transforming hero; his only opera Fidelio about an individual hero, a woman who saves her husband and brings down a tyrant; the Fifth Symphony a story of internal heroism triumphing over the blows of fate. The Ninth Symphony, one of the climactic works of the Third Period, returns to the formal complexities and humanistic concerns of the Eroica, this time with an unprecedented choral finale setting Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” Beethoven surely intended the Ninth to be a lasting reminder of the great dream of human liberty and happiness proclaimed by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Writing in a period of reaction and repression, Beethoven wanted to keep that dream alive. 

The symphony begins with whispering string tremolos, as if coalescing out of chaos. Soon the music bursts into figures monumental and declamatory, at the same time gnarled and searching. The gestures are heroic, but the harmony is a restless flux that rarely finds resolution. As coda there’s a funeral march over a moaning bass line. Beethoven had written funeral marches before, one in the second movement of the Eroica. It can be argued that here Beethoven buried the heroic ideal for the last time. On a sketch his word for the movement was “despair.” 

After that tragic coda comes the Dionysian whirlwind of the scherzo, one of his most electrifying movements, with its manic counterpoint punctuated by timpani blasts. In the Trio we hear a little wisp of folksong like you’d whistle on a summer day, growing through mounting repetitions into something hypnotic and monumental. Next comes one of those singing, time-stopping adagios that also mark his last period. It is alternating variations on two long-breathed themes, everything unfolding in an atmosphere of uncanny beauty. 

The choral finale involves a series of variations on the “Joy” theme, though this celebration of joy opens with a dissonant shriek that Richard Wagner called the “terror fanfare” that shatters the tranquility of the slow movement. The bass section enters in a wordless quasi-recitative. We hear recollections of the previous movements, each rebuffed by the basses: opening of the first movement...no, not that despair; second movement…no, too frivolous; third movement...lovely, the basses sigh, but no, too sweet. 

This, then: the ingenuous Joy theme is played by the basses unaccompanied, like somebody humming to himself. The theme picks up lovely flowing accompaniments. Then, out of nowhere, back to the terror fanfare. In response a real singer steps up to sing a recitative as if to comrades, with glass raised: “Oh friends, not these tones! Rather let’s strike up something more agreeable and joyful.”

Soon the chorus is crying Freude! “Joy!” exalting joy as the god-engendered daughter of Elysium, under whose influence love can flourish, humanity unite. The variations unfold with startling contrasts: choral proclamations of the theme; a lurching military march satiric in tone, in a style called “Turkish”; an exalted double fugue. We hear a kind of Credo reminiscent of Gregorian chant (“Be embraced, you millions! Here’s a kiss for all the world!”). In a spine-tingling interlude we are exhorted to fall on our knees and contemplate the Godhead. The coda is unbridled joy. 

With Schiller’s ecstatic words, Beethoven proclaims that the gods have given us joy so we can find Elysium on earth, as comrades, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. And only through freedom can we find joy and peace. God can’t do that for us. Heroes like Napoleon have failed to do it. We must do it for ourselves. 

“Be embraced, you millions! This kiss for all the world!” run the telling lines in the finale, in which Beethoven erected a movement of transcendent scope on a humble little tune that anybody can sing, and probably half the world knows. The Joy theme is in the form of a national anthem, but it is an anthem for humanity, and an enduring testament to simple but eternal truths. 

The Ninth Symphony, forming and dissolving before our ears in its beauty and terror and simplicity and complexity, is itself Beethoven’s embrace for the millions, from East to West, high to low, naive to sophisticated. When the bass soloist speaks the first words in the finale, an invitation to sing for joy, the words come from Beethoven, not Schiller. It’s the composer talking to everybody, to history, There’s something singularly moving about that moment when Beethoven greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.

Jan Swafford

Jan Swafford is a prizewinning composer and writer whose most recent book, published in December 2020, is Mozart: The Reign of Love. His other acclaimed books include Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, and Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music. He is an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied composition.