Never before have I experienced #Beethoven’s 9th symphony as on this New Year’s Eve 2020 on #WQXR. The first movement starts powerfully but, as so often in late Beethoven, gets disrupted by disharmony, only to reassert itself. This back and forth is more pronounced in the rustic dance of the second movement. There is joy in the dance, but the storm clouds soon stifle it. As this repeats itself, you wonder whether moments of storminess, anger and anxiety even, invariably get replaced by the happy dance or whether those moments of happiness, which in their speed sound a bit hectic anyway, continually get vanquished, sucking the life out of dance and dancers.
Then comes the third movement, heavenly in its almost uninterrupted melodic harmonies. We feel rescued from turmoil in a world of beauty and iridescent polyphony. We want to remain there, motionless, just listening and dreaming. But the drum beats of the fourth movement shake us awake. It is not the storminess we heard previously but rather a stern admonition, a call to action. We must not get lost in the beauty we just enjoyed, we must rouse ourselves to action. This appeal continues when the orchestra takes up the Joy theme and it crescendos when the singers take it over. In this performance, which I found out at the end was made up of orchestras and singers from many countries to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the first sung words were not the usual “Freude,” Joy, but Freiheit, Freedom. This ending was rousing in a way I had not appreciated before, when I happily sang along with the Joy theme, and also a little intimidating. Will we be able to rise to the challenge Beethoven has set us? “Seid umschlungen Millionen, diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt.”