“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.
