Suzy Klein introduces: Does Beethoven’s music
sound different 200 years later?
The 9th Symphony is Beethoven’s last and arguably his most groundbreaking symphonic work. Written almost 200 years ago, it’s gone on to be
one of the most popular pieces of classical music ever written, it’s performed
at the Proms Ode to Joy, every year. And the thing that Beethoven does
that’s so unusual in this piece is he introduces a choir, they sing words by the
poet Friedrich Schiller, his, a hymn to universal brotherhood, the standing
shoulder to shoulder of man. It’s that blaze of glory that’s made this piece ripe
for political use. In the ‘30s the Nazis loved to play this to Hitler, it was the
piece that the Berlin Philharmonic played on his birthday in 1937. Then in
1989 the conductor Leonard Bernstein chose the 9th Symphony with the fall
of the Berlin Wall, this was the music that would signify the reunified modern
Germany. But with every layer of cultural, social and political meaning, came
an added significance to the notes. Performances of this piece got wildly long,
grand, even you might say indulgent. And then about 30 years or so ago, the
new kids on the block arrived and they took ownership of Beethoven’s 9
Symphony. This was the historically informed performance movement and
these were musicians who took a scientific, rigorous approach to the way that
they performed this piece, they took every bit of documentation, they looked
at the original manuscripts and they tried to establish what audiences would
have heard in Beethoven’s day. So how far should you personalise this piece,
how much should we change it for our own times and what does an authentic
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performance of the 9th Symphony mean in the 21st century, those are just
some of the themes we’ll be exploring in this iWonder Guide.
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© Copyright 2014