Today’s Music: Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”

I’ve read that, although Ludwig van Beethoven wasn’t particularly religious — it’s been speculated he was a Deist like contemporaries Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin — he liked the emphasis on universal brotherhood and the joy of life in the poem by Friedrich Schiller that he borrowed for the lyric. That said, he also wanted to experiment with adding the chorale style to one of his symphonies and, if you’ve ever heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performed live, you know it is as loud and powerful as any modern rock concert — it makes your hair tingle and smacks you back in your seat while it astounds you with innovation in tempo and tone from beginning to end. In the last movement, the “Ode to Joy,” Big B took a note structure that sounds like something from a kid’s song and turns it inside out, developing the theme and rhythm in myriad ways as he goes along. A cruel irony that he composed this piece after he went deaf and never heard his masterpiece performed live, but a testament to his incomparable genius that he no doubt knew just what it would sound like. Humanity should be proud that we occasionally offer up a diamond like Beethoven from the mortal compost heap, although we often mistreat them while among us and make their suffering at being encircled by ass-scratching idiots more acute. At any rate, here’s an excerpt from the Ninth, the “Ode to Joy.”