Beethoven

Influences - Frederick Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”

Opus 125, Fourth Movement – Analysis

Like many geniuses, Ludwig van Beethoven was a man who fit Walt Whitman’s immortal lines in Song of Myself, “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large. I contain multitudes)” (Whitman 96). Indeed, Beethoven was a man of contradictions and certainly appears to have contained multitudes. He was one of the greatest composers of all time, one whose style and level of achievement have seldom been equaled, but he could also be petty, antisocial, and a man driven by fear and unrequited love. He was often rude to waiters, servants, and the general populace, many of whom he held in the utmost of contempt. One of Beethoven’s favorite insults was the word “ass”, of which, he was quite fond, “Beethoven liked the insult ‘ass.’ He used it quite often, intensifying the insult by singling people out as ‘the ass of all asses.’ (Esel allen Esel in German). Beethoven even wrote a short a capella fugue with ‘Esel allen Esel’ as the theme” (Beethoven 1). Nonetheless, Beethoven composed nine symphonies, 7 concertos, 17 string quartets, 32 piano sonatas, 10 sonatas for violin and piano,

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. Beethoven brought the use of voice into this symphony which paved the way for the great choral works that followed him, in particular, those of Mahler. The Enlightenment had affected Schiller and Beethoven in turn. It was Schiller’s love of life and man that Beethoven admired and catalyzed his inspiration to set Symphony No. 9 to Ode to Joy, “There grew up in Schiller’s will to live an element of the joy of life which found expression in the great Ode to Joy. In it, what had had its inception as a feeling of friendship and love for individuals assumed the dimensions of a rapturous love ‘embracing all mankind.’ It was this love of man that aroused in Beethoven a lifelong admiration for Schiller and inspired him to composed for the Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony” (Schiller 42). If we analyze the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony in D minor, opus 125, we see the influence of Schiller as well as the supreme craftsmanship of one of classical music’s greatest composers: Fourth Movement: 23 minutes, 22 seconds 0:00 – This fourth movement opens agitato while the orchestra plays pieces of the themes from the three movements before it, but all are picked up and discarded. It almost represents a search for expression, but
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Approximate Word count = 1832
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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