Inside Beethoven’s 9th Symphony wbur.org
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| "Ludwig van Beethoven," by Karl Joseph Stieler (Credit: Art Archive/Beethoven House) excerpt: |
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its “Ode to Joy” finale, has come down through the centuries as history’s great and towering hymn to freedom, joy, brotherhood.
We roll it out as a climax, a capstone, a high marker of moments of human profundity.
But the year of its premier, 1824, in Vienna, was a time of great repression, of ultra-conservative nationalism, as old dynasties pushed back against years of Enlightenment and revolution.