More on Beethoven's Ninth

I got an interesting comment on my post about my serendipitous hearing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on my car radio. It was from the director of a documentary film called Following the Ninth. Based on the clip, it looks likes it could be interesting.

The Seattle Symphony performs the Ninth every year at the end of December, right before the New Year. For us, this performance is a year-end ritual. This year, I was sick, running a fever of a 101. Drake had no problem selling my ticket outside the hall as the Ninth is always a sell-out for the symphony. So we missed our ritual of hearing it together live.

Sometimes, when listening to it, I try to image what it must of been like to hear it at its premiere.

From Wikipedia:

When the audience applauded, testimonies differ over whether at the end of the scherzo or the whole symphony, Beethoven was several measures off and still conducting. Because of that, the contralto Caroline Unger walked over and forcibly turned Beethoven around to accept the audience's cheers and applause. According to one witness, "the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause, often during sections, and repeatedly at the end of them." The whole audience acclaimed him through standing ovations five times; there were handkerchiefs in the air, hats, raised hands, so that Beethoven, who could not hear the applause, could at least see the ovation gestures. The theatre house had never seen such enthusiasm in applause.

At that time, it was customary that the imperial couple be greeted with three ovations at their entrance in the hall. The fact that a private person, who wasn’t even employed by the state, and all the more, was a musician (class of people who had been perceived as lackeys at court), received five ovations, was in itself inadmissible, almost indecent. Police agents present at the concert had to break off this spontaneous explosion of ovations. Beethoven left the concert deeply moved.

A couple of Christmases ago, Drake gave me this book, which gave me a much greater appreciation for Beethoven the man (warts - big warts - and all) and the artist.

Beethoven (Revised Edition)

Maynard Solomon