Ruth Leon recommends… Beethoven’s Ninth: An Ode To Humanity – Arte

Beethoven’s Ninth: An Ode To Humanity – Arte

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200 years ago today, on May 7, 1828, in Vienna, the first choral symphony, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, was played for the first time.

It had been commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society but it soon became clear that London didn’t have the musical resources it needed – a huge choir that could sing Schiller’s  poem Ode To Joy in German and an orchestra large enough to do it justice.  Beethoven grudgingly agreed to its first performance taking place in Vienna.

The hall was packed with an eager and curious audience including the Austrian Chancellor, Klemens von Metternich  for what would be the composer’s first onstage appearance in 12 years.

The orchestra, which included many important musicians, had only two rehearsals to learn this monumental work which they had never seen before. Beethoven was billed to conduct but the orchestra, soloists and singers were actually led by Michael Umlauf   while Beethoven stayed at the side of the stage, following the score and waving his hands, but unable to hear it as he was, by then, stone deaf.

The symphony was an immediate and outstanding success.

At the end, Beethoven, with his back to the audience, was unaware of the pandemonium of applause breaking out behind him, and the contralto soloist, young Constance Unger, gently turned him around so that he could see the joy his “Ode to Joy”had caused.

The audience acclaimed him through five standing ovations. Once they realised Beethoven could not hear the applause, they waved their handkerchiefs in the air, raised their hats and hands so he could at least see the ecstatic audience reaction.

This year, Beethoven fans (and is anybody NOT a Beethoven fan?) have been bombarded with 200th anniversary performances on stage, in concert halls, on television and in the streets, of this transcendent work and I have screened several new video productions only this week, nearly all of which are excellent.

But after all this fuss, in the end, I have no hesitation in recommending this one to you.  Larry Weinstein  is a top Canadian filmmaker who specialises in films about music and the depiction of the creative process, but his other subjects have ranged from the horrors of war to the pleasures of football. Garlanded with many  well-deserved and prestigious awards, he has never shirked from inserting politics into his films when called for, as with his brilliant film The War Symphonies: Shostakovich Against Stalin.

But unexpectedly, when he set out to make a film about Beethoven’s Ninthfor the 200th anniversary, it turned into something deeply personal. His sister, Judih,  and her husband Gadi, who lived on the Israeli Kibbutz closest to the Gaza border, though at first it was thought that they had survived as hostages, have now been confirmed to have been slaughtered by Hamas in their home on October 7.

Suddenly, Weinstein was making a film, not just about the difficult life of a transcendent genius composer and his greatest work, within the context of its geography, history and politics, and the ways in which it has been purloined in the conduct of war, but also about the personal cost of war through a family. His own family.

This film is a kind of masterpiece, with its objective narrative about Beethoven and his work, as well as the appropriation of the Ninth throughout its 200-year history, as it has been used and abused all over the world by dictators, politicians, and, yes, music lovers, as a symbol of both war and peace. Here are Nazi rallies, the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein, and the countless people for whom Beethoven’s Ninth is a beacon of hope.

But it is also the story of a family, the filmmaker’s family, as they live through the agony of waiting for news of their dearly loved relatives, cruelly butchered in the current war, and try to come to terms with the worst possible outcome.

Beethoven’s Ninth: An Ode To Humanity, a film by Larry Weinstein, is free to watch, and it is simply unmissable.

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