Embracing the Millions

Joy – beautiful divine spark . . .

“. . . Your magical power reunites that which custom strictly divided. All mankind will become brothers wherever your gentle wings soar.”

What a concept!  The simplicity of the idea is what makes it so stunning. No massive diplomatic efforts by multi-national entities trained to their teeth in the art of parsing words to the nth degree. No years of counseling through whatever methods might be in vogue. Just “Joy”– Joy with a capital “J,” reflecting the divinity with which the concept of joy is treated in both the Schiller poem and in Beethoven’s final symphonic testament. Just that moment of irrational relief, the mirror to intense grief and weeping, the total surrender to something outside of the human mind’s relentless need to rationalize, to categorize, and to put everything – and every person – into some sort of box. Just “Joy.” Just that moment we’ve all experienced, perhaps at a wedding or a graduation or at a moment of birth, when we feel compelled in spite of ourselves to be civil to someone we haven’t spoken to for years. Perhaps to even smile together, to laugh, maybe even embrace. Not merely going through the motions of touching shoulders for a split second, but a real bear hug that resonates all the way down to the depths of the heart. The sort of embrace the soul remembers, even when the mind remembers the dislike, the hatred, and the rejection. That kind of “Joy.”

Beethoven surely never experienced such “Joy” in his life. The idea must have been a wildly intoxicating fantasy for him. His life was a catalog of tragedies that would have destroyed most people. Abused as a child by an alcoholic father, he was compelled in his early adulthood to return home and care for his younger brothers after his mother’s death, which happened right at the moment he was poised to break free and find his own life in Vienna. Mozart, with whom the young Beethoven had wished to study, only met him once and commented on his genius. But by the time the younger man could return to Vienna, his idol was dead. Beethoven was on his own. He started to enjoy significant success. But then he lost his hearing - unimaginable for a musician. He considered suicide, but rejected that option knowing there was music still within him. While trying to find comfort in Heiligenstadt, a quite country retreat, he wrote: “But what Mortification if someone stood beside me and heard a flute from afar and I heard nothing; or someone heard a Shepherd Singing, and I heard nothing. Such Happenings brought me close to Despair; I was not far from ending my own life – only Art, only art held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to me that I should leave the world before I had produced all that I felt I might, and so I spared this wretched life—truly wretched . . .” (quoted from Music in the Western World; A History in Documents, 2nd edition, Piero Weiss & Richard Taruskin, Thompson/Schirmer, 2008). He lived well into his 50’s,  but alone, never finding a soul mate with whom he could share his life and his dreams. His one hope for sharing his legacy with the younger generation, his nephew Karl, ended in disaster when the boy himself attempted suicide, largely because of the intolerable pressures of living with such a wildly eccentric uncle. It would be hard to find a more pathetic biography than Beethoven’s in terms of loneliness and despair – a life almost totally devoid of “Joy.”

And yet his final symphony is one of the greatest statements of complete ecstatic abandonment ever created. How is that possible? Perhaps because it was designed within a heart that could only dream what could never be realized, thereby intensifying the dream beyond all normal imagination.

The symphonic explosion we know as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony became a reality near the end of Beethoven’s life, but it was conceived in his youth. The poem, An die Freude, or “Ode to Joy,” by Friedrich Schiller, was not much more than a drinking song, an anthem to the sort of brotherhood found in pubs – but an anthem that asked the “why not” question concerning the lack of brotherhood elsewhere. Schiller, in his later life, was himself embarrassed by the youthful excess of this early work. He actually changed some of the words to make it less revolutionary years later. But Beethoven remained caught in a time warp of his youth when it came to this poem. For decades, he was obsessed with giving the poem a setting it deserved. When he finally found the voice he sought, he kept some of the most inflaming text and took the liberty to move sections around to suit his own dreams.

How did he finally find the way to give musical meaning to the Schiller poem? Well, he recognized that an expression this powerful would need symphonic proportions to realize its potential – but – how can one set a poem in a symphony? Symphonies don’t “sing.” They don’t do words. It simply wasn’t done. No problem, Beethoven realized. The poem is revolutionary at its heart. It calls for universal reconciliation. What better institution of reconciliation exists than a choir, especially a great big choir? And how could he possibility be more revolutionary than to inject a great big choir into a symphony? Conceiving of its very existence before even composing a note gave voice to the poem. Even more amazingly he actually found a way to have the orchestra “sing” before the words even start. How did he do that? Well, that’s a topic for another essay . . .
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