Beethoven’s Ninth and the Ode to Joy: Symphony and Psyche

Beethoven's timeless music reminds us of struggle and triumph.

Reviewed by Margaret Foley

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which includes the magnificent "Ode to Joy," premiered on May 7, 1824. We recently passed its bicentennial. The Ninth was greeted as a masterpiece from the outset and continues its vibrant life today. The timeless appeal of Beethoven’s Ninth is a wonderful reminder of what prevails in human life and aspiration, and what is at the very core of our psyches. It defines the best of us and is a touchstone and guiding light for our higher soul, the human journey, and transcendence itself. Beethoven’s joy is a component and near cousin of all-transforming awe, the feeling of being included in, yet dwarfed by, a magnificent larger reality. We can lose ourselves in Beethoven’s joy at the possibilities of the human condition as surely as we lose ourselves in awe looking at a photograph of the whole Earth from space. Both speak to our fundamental unity and equality as human beings.

WETA classical music host James Jacobs says of it at the end of his YouTube podcast:

“For two centuries, we have turned to this work to remind ourselves what it is we really want from civilization, from art, from ourselves. It has outlasted any political use to which it has been put, but its hourlong journey from terrifying depths to euphoric heights is something that speaks to all of us, as we all struggle and strive towards joy.”

Jacobs also writes,

“[L]ike the Declaration of Independence and other Enlightenment relics, it’s a tribute to freedom and joy created by the only people allowed to have freedom and joy [in Western culture at the time—RC], privileged white men. ‘Alle Menschen Werden Brüder’ [‘all men are brothers’—RC] was meant to be taken literally in terms of its gender [and only white men were considered fully human beneficiaries of equality in America at the time—RC]. And yet Beethoven, as a deaf man who had a horrific childhood and multiple health issues who never experienced a true non-transactional relationship with anyone, was hardly the spokesperson for either privilege or joy. But he loved nature and understood his place in the cosmos.”

Just as Beethoven, the American Revolution, and the Enlightenment itself expanded their reach, the Ninth has expanded to include and inspire millions across the globe, broadening and building its synaptic symphonic reach like the world’s first neural network of sonic emotion. It quite literally marks the casting off of boundaries and reunion after antagonistic separation, as Leonard Bernstein conducted it in East and West Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, making it an ode to “freiheit” (freedom) instead of “freuden” (joy) in the lyric. The moving, inspiring documentary Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony (2013, streaming on Kanopy) also showcases how the Ninth inspired protestors in the 1989 democracy movement in Tiananmen Square and against the dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 1980s.

If this is what the world’s "geocortex" looks like or can look like, we’re in pretty good shape, and perhaps we would even clear the cognitive and character tests of the cosmos.

Indeed, Teodor Currentzis, founder and conductor of musicAeterna and the Utopia Orchestra, says in the 2019 DW documentary Beethoven’s Ninth: Symphony for the World (streaming on YouTube): “It’s about defending humanity in front of God…. [Beethoven] is the lawyer and the advocate of humanity.”

Armand Diangienda, a former airline pilot and conductor of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, continues. It’s about “a world where people will live together without discrimination because of skin color or background. People will live in community. I think that’s the world that Beethoven is talking about. It’s no longer a religious idea. It’s a universal idea.”

Yutaka Sado, conductor of Japan’s Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra, says, “But that doesn’t mean everything in the piece is positive and happy. Looking at the first, second, and third movements, I believe Beethoven composed this work to try and get people to pull together and achieve something together. Precisely because it was so difficult to get people to do that.”

Leonard Bernstein reached back to one of King David’s psalms for resonance with Beethoven’s message: “Behold, how good and lovely for men to dwell together as brothers.”

Bernstein reminds us, “Beethoven is struggle. The struggle for peace, for fulfillment of spirit, for serenity and triumphal joy. He achieved it in his music.… Somehow it must be possible for us to learn from his music by hearing it—no, not by hearing it, but by listening to it, with all our power of attention and concentration. Then perhaps we can grow into something worthy of being called ‘the human race.’”

Perhaps Michael Tilson Thomas, Conductor Emeritus of the San Francisco Symphony, best summarizes Beethoven’s challenge to us:

“The scale of Beethoven’s Ninth is huge. You can’t play this music without coming to terms with yourself. And a lot of the twists and turns in the journey we take together are reactions to one another. How much confession can we actually make in this performance of the things we really feel comfortable in feeling together?”

To this point, discomfort with intimacy was the basis of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Sexual impulses were repressed in families, he wrote, and then found expression in authoritarian idealism as a means of social control and binding social anxieties. The Ninth was used by the Third Reich and the racist White Rhodesian government. Great art can be co-opted and subverted by oppression. The struggle is real.

Perhaps we are always struggling to come to terms with ourselves, through politics, psychology, music, sexuality, and all expressions of identity and culture, as we hear each other, react or respond, and add our notes to the symphony of life on Earth.

I dunno; maybe we should listen to more Ninth while we go about coming to terms—and make these terms of endearment rather than terms of abhorrence, devaluation, subordination, repression, oppression, and annihilation. Make love—and music—not war, with each other and within each of us as well.

As Jacobs says: “We have a new path when we dare to choose joy”: joy and love and healing over resentment, futility, despair, hostility, antagonism, and anguish.

Perhaps I should just let Ludwig (and Friedrich Schiller, the author of the poem “Ode to Joy”) speak for themselves and note that you can’t have freude (joy) without freunde (friends).

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen,
Und freudenvollere.
Freude!
Freude!
O friends, not these tones!
But let’s strike up more agreeable ones,
And more joyful.
Joy!
Joy!

May we work together toward a nation and world made up of friends rather than bitter enemies bent on the very destruction of friendship and joy themselves.

A longer, more detailed version of this post is at East Wind eZine: MOSF 19.17: Beethoven’s Ninth and the Ode to Joy – Symphony, Psyche, and the Brotherhood of Man.

(C) 2024 Ravi Chandra, M.D., D.F.A.P.A.