Beethoven Premieres Ninth Symphony to Standing Ovation

Ludwig van Beethoven sat on stage facing the orchestra, turning pages of a score he could not hear performed. By May 1824, the composer was almost completely deaf, relying on conversation books and vibrations felt through the floor to communicate with the world. When his Ninth Symphony premiered at the Karntnertortheater in Vienna on May 7, contralto Caroline Unger had to turn him around to see the audience's thunderous applause. He had been conducting from memory, several bars behind the actual performance. The symphony had been in development for over a decade. Beethoven had contemplated setting Friedrich Schiller's poem "An die Freude" (Ode to Joy) to music since 1793, and sketches for the choral finale appeared in his notebooks as early as 1812. The complete work took shape between 1822 and 1824, composed during a period of worsening health, financial anxiety, and legal battles over custody of his nephew Karl. The premiere was an organizational nightmare. Michael Umlauf conducted the orchestra while Beethoven set the tempo from beside him, though the musicians had been instructed to ignore the composer and follow Umlauf. The concert also included the overture The Consecration of the House and three movements from the Missa Solemnis. Rehearsal time had been inadequate, and the performers struggled with music that pushed every section of the orchestra beyond existing technical limits. The fourth movement's innovation was radical. No major symphony had ever incorporated vocal soloists and a full chorus. Beethoven's decision to introduce the human voice into the symphonic form, with a baritone soloist singing "O friends, not these tones!" before launching into Schiller's text, broke the boundaries of what a symphony could be. Contemporary critics were divided, but audiences were overwhelmed. The Ninth Symphony's influence extends far beyond concert halls. The "Ode to Joy" melody was adopted as the anthem of the European Union in 1985. Leonard Bernstein conducted it at the Berlin Wall's fall in 1989, substituting "Freiheit" (freedom) for "Freude" (joy). The standard length of a compact disc, 74 minutes, was reportedly chosen to accommodate the Ninth's longest common recording. A deaf man's final symphony became the most universal piece of music ever written.