Czech Philharmonic • Semyon Bychkov

Ludwig van Beethoven’s last completed symphony holds a special place in the history of the genre. The work was radical for its day, and its finale with choir and vocal soloists provoked contradictory reactions, becoming a clear turning point in the history of symphonic music. One can scarcely find a European composer who did not try to come to terms with this legacy, and the number nine seems to have acquired fatalistic associations for future generations. Robert Schumann went so far as to say that with his nine symphonies, Beethoven had taken the form’s development to a definitive conclusion. That did not turn out to be true, but many later composers paid tribute to the “Ninth”. Examples from the 19th include the finale of Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Richard Wagner’s inclusion of the symphony at the festival of his operas in Bayreuth, and Anton Bruckner’s symphonic “cathedrals”. Antonín Dvořák also professed admiration for Beethoven, writing to his friend Emil Kozánek in 1886: “I have a portrait of papa Beethoven hanging above my desk, and whilst composing I often gaze at it so that he might put in a good word for me up in heaven.” Seven years later, Dvořák honoured his hero in his last symphony, also a ninth, called “From the New World”.

What Beethoven put into his “Ninth” has not faded since its premiere on 7 May 1824 at Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater. To the contrary, through the work the composer has been a presence at many extraordinary events. One famous example was the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when players from leading orchestras of former East and West Germany, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and the USA gathered to form a single ensemble for a performance of the work under Leonard Bernstein’s baton. For the event, Bernstein deliberately changed the word “Freude” (joy) in the text of the finale to “Freiheit” (freedom). In 1972, the melody of the “Ode to Joy” was approved by the Council of Europe as its anthem, and 13 years later, an instrumental version became the official anthem of the European Union. 

The history of the Bohemian lands’ relationship with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony begins less than three years after its premiere. The first Bohemian performance took place while the composer was still living, on 9 March 1827 in the ballroom of the building U Vusínů on Masná Street in Prague’s Old Town, with students from the Prague Conservatoire conducted by the school’s director Friedrich Dionys Weber. A second Prague performance occurred ten years later at a concert at the Waldstein Palace, and a third was presented in 1842 by the Sophien-Akademie. František Škroup, composer of the Czech national anthem and Kapellmeister of the Estates Theatre, gave several performances of the “Ninth”, the last coming in 1860 at the farewell concert before his departure for Rotterdam. In 1886 Gustav Mahler excelled in the “Ninth” when he conducted the entire symphony by heart at a benefit concert at the Royal German Theatre (now the Estates Theatre). Later, Mahler was said to have “ruined” the work by making changes to the orchestration that the critics called a “desecration”.

Over the years, the Czech Philharmonic has played this symphony at nearly 170 concerts including foreign tours. The orchestra first played it on 22 March 1903 with its chief conductor Vilém Zemánek (1875–1922) at the Commodity Exchange, and most recently at last year’s Prague Spring Festival under the baton of Christoph Eschenbach. For many years, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the work that traditionally closed the festival. The Czech Philharmonic played it at the festival for the first time in 1949 under the baton of Erich Kleiber, and since then it has played the work at 30 Prague Spring Festival performances, repeatedly with its music director Václav Neumann as well as with, for example, Karl Böhm, Zubin Mehta, Carlo Maria Giulini, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. Leonard Bernstein gave a legendary festival performance in June 1990, just a few months before the conductor’s death. Many listeners will certainly remember the emotionally charged Concert for Civic Forum with Václav Neumann in December 1989 in Smetana Hall at the Municipal House during the Velvet Revolution, which was recorded live by Supraphon. As the Ode to Joy was being played, the future President of Czechoslovakia and later President of the Czech Republic Václav Havel took the stage to introduce the new government. The symphony was one of Havel’s favourite compositions, and an arrangement of it was heard at his funeral on 23 December 2011. It would be a pity not to mention the 1930 performance of the “Ninth” with the Czech Philharmonic led by the composer Alexander Zemlinsky for the celebration of the 80th birthday of the first President of Czechoslovakia T. G. Masaryk at Prague’s Lucerne Palace. Five years later, during the era of the orchestra’s noted manager Jaromír Žid (1893–1981), the orchestra played the symphony under the baton of Bruno Walter, a composer and close associate of Mahler.

The Czech Philharmonic has recorded the symphony on the Supraphon label with Paul Kletzki (1964) and with its chief conductors Václav Neumann (1989) and Vladimir Ashkenazy (live recording of the performance on 17 November 1999 for the tenth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution). The work was recorded live in Tokyo in 1972 by Denon, and a recording was made in 2013 for Exton with Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi. A restored archival recording from the 1951 Prague Spring Festival with the conductor Herrmann Abendroth has been issued on the Radioservis label (2014).

Without exaggeration, we can call Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony his life’s work. He wrote it between 1822 and 1824, but the seminal idea for the composition dates back more than 30 years. Around that time, Beethoven became familiar with the poem An die Freude by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) and began to contemplate setting it to music. He wrote down ideas in his sketchbook and returned to the poem continually; he was simply fascinated by it… Meanwhile, he was discovering the possibilities of symphonic music, and at a benefit concert that he gave in December 1808 at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, he tried out the combination of vocal and orchestral elements in his Choral Fantasy for piano, vocal soloists, choir, and orchestra, Op. 80. Here one finds variations on a tune that strikingly resembles the famous melody of the Ode to Joy. Beethoven brings up this connection in a letter dated 1824: “…I am setting Schiller’s immortal ‘Lied an die Freude’ to music in the same way that I did in my piano fantasy with choir, but on a much larger scale.” In 1808 he finished his Fifth and Sixth, and he wrote two more symphonies four years later. Whilst composing his Eighth, he already had another symphony in mind, and he knew he wanted to write it in the dramatic key of D minor. And although he often composed several works at the same time, and we find comments in his sketchbook about a tenth symphony, that work remained only in the form of sketches. 

In 1817, the Philharmonic Society of London commissioned two new symphonies from Beethoven. At the time, the circumstances of the composer’s life were quite unfavourable. Besides suffering from total hearing loss, he was also dealing with complicated family disputes, including one with the widow of his deceased younger brother Kaspar over the guardianship of the nephew Karl. The lawsuit dragged on for five years. The composer descended into a deep creative crisis, compounded by fevers, rheumatism, and eventually jaundice. He was finally rallied by commissions for new works and the prospect of an improvement to his finances. Two major works appeared, the Missa solemnis, Op. 123, and the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, for piano solo. Then came the Ninth Symphony, which was dedicated to Friedrich Wilhelm III (1770–1840), King of Prussia, and which preoccupied Beethoven nearly until his last breath; on 18 March 1827, just a week before his death, he sent a letter to London with the metronome markings.

This symphony went beyond anything in the genre that had preceded it in terms of length, the size of the forces, and dynamism. The composer linked all the movements together with musical material heard at the outset, binding them together so tightly that one movement cannot exist without the others. The tempestuous second movement supplements and builds upon the first, and its middle section (Trio) prepares the atmosphere of the following movement (Adagio molto e cantabile), which calms listeners before the climactic conclusion. In the finale, the composer “borrows” from the previous movements not only thematic, but also structural elements, building something that must have sounded like a chaotic patchwork to many of his contemporaries. His incredibly daring treatment of content and form was crowned by the message of Schiller’s Ode to Joy about the steadfastness of the human spirit. To say the least, it must have been surprising when the score of enormous dimensions arrived in London from Vienna, with the additional requirement of a choir and soloists singing in German. The English performed the work with the conductor Sir George Smart (1776–1867) on 21 March 1825, after the Viennese premiere, but they had the words translated into Italian. A version in English came later.