“Aller Menschen werden Brüder” – “All men shall become brothers”. These are the words sung out by full chorus every time Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony reaches its ecstatic conclusion – and at a time of global conflict and domestic strife, it’s surely a sentiment that we can all embrace. At its Royal Albert Hall performance last night, the Proms audience did just that.
This is a work now seen as a pinnacle of Western civilisation, but it has a singularly troubled and divisive history, which begins – as so often with musical matters – with politics.
Was Beethoven a lefty? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest he was a natural-born champion of the underdog. On the other hand, he fantasised for years that he was of noble birth, and his tone was obsequious to the aristocrats on whose patronage he depended in the years before his anointing as the musical voice of his nation.
But the popular success in 1824 of his last great work – the Ninth Symphony in D minor which he doggedly conducted despite being deaf – should allay any doubts about Beethoven’s political leanings. This towering work is a musical journey from darkness and chaos to serene enlightenment, and its libretto – a poem by Friedrich Schiller entitled Ode to Joy – is dedicated to the brotherhood of Man.
Joseph Karl Stieler’s portrait of Beethoven, 1820 (Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)This was at a time when Europe was recovering from the Napoleonic wars, and Beethoven’s Ninth was cheered as a patriotic gesture on behalf of the new European order; the work’s French supporters re-named it “the Marseillaise of Mankind”. “Joy, lovely divine spark,” ran the lyric in translation, “All men will become brothers, at the gentle touch of your wing! Let me embrace you, you millions! This kiss is for the whole world!” So yes, at that point in time, Beethoven was a passionate pro-European.
When Beethoven died in 1827, it was his music which accompanied him to his grave; this marked the birth of a cult which grew unstoppably throughout Europe. In Germany, Beethoven was worshipped as a Christ-like symbol of heroism, nobility, and generosity. Beethoven may not have been a natural Aryan pin-up, but the Nazis did their best with his image. He was sometimes even grotesquely hailed with the title which would later decorate Hitler: der Führer, the leader.
And when Hitler’s turn came to worship Beethoven, he and his fellow Nazis did so with gusto. At the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games, the entire stadium sang the Ode to Joy to accompany the choreographed movements of thousands of gymnasts. When war broke out, Hitler made a beer-hall speech proclaiming: “One single German, Beethoven, has done more for music than all the English put together.”
Yet the Nazis’ grand cultural theft was not complete. Angry musical émigrés broadcasted their opposition from London, while liberals in Italy were enraged by Mussolini’s leap onto the Beethoven bandwagon.
Abel Selaocoe last night, for whom Jesse Montgomery’s new cello concerto was written (Photo : BBC/Chris Christodoulou)Communist composer Hanns Eisler’s comment was waspishly accurate, and has a startling resonance for today: “All men become brothers, with the exception of all the peoples whose lands we want to annex, with the exception of the Jews, the Blacks, and a great many others”. Or as an exasperated Nazi musicologist put it, sniffy and without irony: that kiss in the Ode, he said, was “not for every Tom, Dick, and Harry”. Non-Aryans need not apply.
The Ode has long enjoyed a busy afterlife. It was sung as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it was sung under Yehudi Menuhin’s direction on the bridge of Sarajevo in 1996, and under Simon Rattle’s direction in the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp, in memory of its victims.
But the story doesn’t end there, because the Ode has been accepted as the anthem of the European Community, with “Freedom” often substituted for “Joy”.
And that brings us bang up to date, as Brexit threatens to ruin our lives yet again: the rise of Reform UK is a reminder that the Brexit creed is in some quarters still alive and well. Memories of a particularly stupid piece of behaviour by Nigel Farage and his MEPs have just been reawakened. When the Ode was played live at the opening of the European Parliament in 2019, Farage and co stood up – and turned their backs, thus missing the supreme irony that, in their boorish ignorance, they were actually mirroring what had happened at the work’s 1824 premiere.
The audience responded to the ‘Ode to Joy’ in ecstatic style (Photo: BBC/Chris Christodoulou)Because on that occasion, the deaf composer, almost unaware that the music had even ended, needed to be physically turned round by one of the soloists, so that he could see, if not hear, the thunderous applause.
All good performances of Beethoven’s Ninth culminate in an orgy of excitement, and so did this work in Prom No 4, where the Philharmonic Chorus and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra – plus four fine soloists – played and sang their hearts out under the direction of Gianandrea Noseda. And the context in which the work was set this time was a fascinating journey in itself.
First came Andrew Davis’s serene arrangement of Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, then – very gently at first – we were led out of London and taken on a trip to Africa, courtesy of a cello concerto by Jesse Montgomery which showcased the talents – as both singer and instrumentalist – of the South African composer Abel Selaocoe.
Montgomery’s sound-world was soft and irresistibly seductive, and at the end we all found ourselves joining Selaocoe in a rocking, trance-like African chant. After which, Beethoven was free to spread his gospel of the brotherhood of Man, and the audience responded in ecstatic time-honoured style.
Was it significant that this visionary work was (by chance) scheduled on a day when we got a soi-disant visionary new Prime Minister? Ah, that’s too early to tell.
The BBC Proms continues to 12 September. Schedule and tickets here
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