MUSIC REVIEWS -
ARTISTS STARTING WITH "B"

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What always struck me with Beethoven's Ninth was this obnoxious, stubborn and somehow naïve and even child-like insistence on a happy ending, which may be perceived as ridiculous, even plainly stupid and anti-aesthetic, pleasing to the dull obsession with the fetish of plain beauty. That's the result of the equally obnoxious popularization of this rip-off version that consists only of the choir parts of the fourth movement. Of course, singled out, the entire thing is annoying from beginning to end. But once you take the time and effort to sit through the symphony as a whole, it becomes an utterly drastic and magnificent experience, only after taking into account the reality of what went on before - the turmoil, the tragedy, the immensely painful truth of the composer himself looming over the symphony, a man, old, sick, alone, probably close to desperation and insanity, definitely remote from society herself, out of this quagmire not only pulling himself out, but also the entire world, hopefully, a true Don Quixote, a true Sisyphus, never losing hope, insisting on it, making it real, making it tangible.

Beethoven remains the great innovator, the great successor and negator of feudal music, the first modern composer, having shed the habitus of the old order, of the way things are done, doing for music what only few would be able to do. This music transcends the pains of reality, personal and societal, constantly striving for an always greater, always truer catharsis - till it finally reveals itself in the final movement of the symphony itself, the sublime, the divine within the human finally transcending the strict form of the fugue, perhaps the most sublime form of music that could ever be, thriving from contrasts between the agony of the first movement, the erraticness of the second, the tranquillity of the third with what is woven around Schiller's text in the fourth, reaching back to the roots of humanism and classicism.

There are moments deliberately misleading the audience, playing with expectations, retarding the result at some times, quickening assumed traditions elsewhere, showing an awareness of the conventions which are always in necessity of being overcome. The choir itself, a stranger to the symphonic world at that time, is used as an instrument, the text becomes interwoven with the music, creating a greater synthesis, and supporting not only a greater unity for humanity but also for human expressions in the arts. (You have to be careful though in deriving a judgement for the choir parts as it proves astonishingly hard to find a decent performance. Not just any will do, lots of recordings are tremendously overdone and push singing performance over the edge and rather pain the listener than serve the symphonic message.)

The symphony has been used as a treasure trove for other composers, from the television theme for Batman, which can be heard through the final moments of the first movement, to the shameless but brilliant rip-off of the second movement by Dvorak in his ninth symphony's third movement, and the inspiration the third movement must have been for the slow movements of Bruckner's works, till finally the use of the choir must have been instrumental for Mahler's re-introduction of the choir into symphonic works.

Sometimes, there are things that are pushed towards shameless publicity for no obvious reason. But sometimes, things indeed belong up there just because they deserve to be there. Beethoven's Ninth is such an incidence.

January 12th/26th, 2003