Understanding Beethoven's Ninth
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- Опубликовано: 5 июл 2024
- A deep-dive into the choral of Beethoven's ninth...what it means...and how to make sense of it, life, the universe, and everything!
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:12 The Earthly
20:22 The Heavenly
29:24 The Conclusion
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Woah 35+ mins of ECM. Here with my cereal can’t wait!! What a treat!
your videos are among the best in the field for sure. always enjoy whenever i watch,thanks for the great content.
This is the kind of content that brings people together.
This is so much more informative than my old gcse music class ❤
(1st part of a two-part post)😮
Bravo! Well done. Your longer form work on the choral movement of the Ninth was well worth the wait. I learned some things, and I've been listening to that symphony for fifty years. Sent your video to my niece and nephew so they could learn a few things, too.
As ever, the mind you bring to the music is keenly appreciated. Perhaps only someone who has a broad familiarity with Beethoven's life and times, the Napoleonic era of European history, and the psychological/political aftermath of the upheaval could fully appreciate the startling, compressed, low-key erudition demonstrated in this very fine video you've made. Your ability to convey a great deal, vividly, and with elegant economy, continues to impress and delight.
Like most lifelong lovers of Beethoven's music, I early became fascinated by his life as well. One naturally seeks for clues to the artist's achievement and vision in the circumstances of his existence, especially when those creations have the potency to effect tremendous, life-altering changes in one's own existence, as they certainly have in mine. And the more one learns about Beethoven the man, the more a deep personal poignancy is added to all the other meanings, intellectual and emotional, offered by Beethoven the composer.
And I've often wondered, when I could step back from the glory of the choral finale's music itself, whether the overpowering invocation of universal brotherhood, and the ethereal declaration of faith in a loving heavenly father -- the two grand themes whose dialectic you so incisively delineate in your video -- were not, beneath the level of conscious musical credo, also, or even more so, expressions of deep longing for things the man himself never had in life, and knew, by the time this great work was composed, he never would have.
The exaltation of brotherhood -- so moving it still invariably brings tears to my eyes after hundreds of hearings -- is made even more moving by a certain sadness, a wistful longing that, while not present in this supremely joyous musical celebration of joy itself, deeply underscores what is heard with what is known:
For Beethoven was a man who'd known preciously little of brotherhood in his life -- neither with his own brothers, nor with his colleagues, patrons, or social circle. His deafness, his volcanic temperament, his ill health, and his stunning originality -- all of which grew more pronounced with age -- conspired to isolate and alienate the man ever more, even as he, like all those deprived of such from an early age, yearned for, with a unabated hunger, human connection, companionship, brotherhood.
And yet his life reads like the work of a malicious god, who fashioned an existence of exquisite loneliness for a man whose longing for human love was thwarted at every turn: from the alcoholic father who abused him and treated his gift as something to exploit; to the long-suffering, cherished mother who died too soon; to the brothers he was forced to play father to when scarcely more than a boy himself; to the loss of his idol Mozart and his ill-matched tutilage under Haydn --
---To the rivalries with his competitors, and the uneasy relations with both patrons and publishers in securing a livelihood where neither could be fully relied upon; to the relentless frustration of professional acclaim from an aristocracy who would never accept him as their social equal; to the adulation of the musical publc and the consequent envy of other composers -- neither f which offered fertile ground for any true and equal companionship; to the thirty years of disappointment in finding a woman to share his life with; the quarter-century of increasingly poor health, with symptoms not easily shared with, or endured by, other people; and the decade-long debacle over and with his nephew Karl, which destroyed all remaining hopes of a family life, and whose legal rancors sorely damaged his reputation ---
And, of course, pevasively exacerbating every successive tide of alienation, looming above them all with a pall of corrosive, self-reinforcing misogyny, were three decades of progressively worsening deafness, whose mortifying effects successively ruined his performing career, scotched his marital prospects, and poisoned his social life with withdrawal, misinderstanding, and suspicion.
That was a 'darn good' essay/presentation - thank you! 😀
Brother, what recording of the 9th is this? Great work!
Fantastic! More like this, please!
Beethoven doesn't do what Beethoven does for Beethoven. Beethoven does what Beethoven does because Beethoven is......... Beethoven!
Thank you veryuch for the hard work you put into these videos. I hope that appropriate appreciation in the form of views and subscribers follows soon!
Great analysis for the context and meaning of this marvelous symphonic movement!
I’ve been waiting for a video like this for years
I write from a member country: it makes me sick that the European Union uses the Ninth as its anthem. Politicians, now or before, righteous or evil, take your dirty hands off the highest expression of human genius. When the Turkish march makes my hair stand on end and makes my eyes water, I don't want the agriculture and fisheries commissar to come to mind. Nor regulations about plastic bottle caps
Splendid, perfect companion to the eralier video obout the double fugue
European Union: “So do you understand why we chose this music as our anthem?”
Probably why ammo prices are so high right now. Can they choose a different one?
Very obnoxious and arrogant. An insult to the great work. But it will survive.
(2nd part of two-part post)
Thus, the Beethoven who composed the Choral Symphony -- middle-aged, alcoholic, chronically ill, musically out of fashion, socially isolated, and half-mad with grief over his catastrophic failure as a surrogate father -- was a man who had known all-too-little of brotherhood -- whether it be the brotherhood of human warmth, intimacy, and companionship, or the brotherhood of social equality, commeraderie, and acceptance.
And, like all romantic idealists, Beethoven's ardently professed love of humanity and exaltation of universal brotherhood -- while undoubtedly genuine and deeply felt -- were also more of a devotion to the abstract ideal than to the concrete realities of everyday life. In the main, Beethoven found intercourse with his fellow man to be deeply unsatisfying, disappointing, and bothersome; his chronic irrascibility strongly suggests that even as he longed for communion with his bretheren, and dreamed of universal fraternity, from day to day, his chief preference was to be left alone, or at least, to have intercourse with humanity dictated by his own terms, which bore little tolerance for the mean and petty attributes of our kind any unreserved embrace of fellowship would require.
But this apparent contradiction was a mere consequence of one of Beethoven's most pronounced traits, doubly extraordinary in one so assailed by injury and disappointment, and a source of unsurpassed, undying inspiration for those who love his music and know his life; indeed, it signifies a spiritual triumph virtually unequalled in the annals of human experience: Beethoven was one of the most hopeful, optimistic men who ever lived.
Despite his disillusionments and disappointments, his misanthropy and alienation, his nearly incapacitating illnesses, and the terrible affliction that so strickened his abilities as a musican he was driven to near-suicidal dispair, Beethoven always hoped for better, and never relinquished that hope: he hoped for better from his fellow man, even after Bonaparte turned tyrant and twice bombarded his beloved Vienna; he hoped for love despite numerous heartbreaks; he hoped his health would recover, after long years of nothing but worsening misery and decline; he hoped his hearing would improve, or get no worse, even after, driven from the performance stage, he could no longer conduct, have a conversation, or even hear the sounds produced by a musical instrument, except as noise.
And he hoped his composition would break new ground, formally and expressively, and through a synthesis of the contrapuntal and homophonic traditions, transcend the formal and expressive limitations of both -- even as his music grew out of fashion in his own town, and commissions grew less frequent, and his old patrons died or moved away. In this hope, at least, Beethoven's optimism went not unrealized.
And we must remember, Beethoven was no fool, no starry-eyed dreamer, but an aging man who had endured more setbacks than most people could bear, and not merely adapted, not merely persevered, but triumphed beyond imagining, producing a body of artistic work so towering and transformative that it stands, if not unrivaled, then certainly unsurpassed in all of Western civilization.
And it is this monumental hope, this unshakable belief in the potential of himself, his art, his brethren, and the world that includes them all, to become better, to be better, that I believe makes Beethoven's life and music, and especially the Choral Symphony, such a transcendently powerful and inspirational work of art. Because Beethoven's hope transcended his own life, his own time and place; it extended to all and everything, not so much as a belief as an axiom of existence, as a fundamental principle of a certain possible way of being alive.
I think of Beethoven, his music and his life, as a beacon -- as a voice telling us that hope is more than a flimsy wish, more even than a devout belief: Hope -- hope in the world's potential for betterment -- is a possibility we dare not abandon; a possibility we have no right to forsake; that hope is a sacred duty worthy and demanding of our best; it is a goal to rejoice in, a direction to guide our steps, a dream to inspire and encourage, a cause to serve, and stern but exhilarating injunction to never, ever, give up and settle for less.
If this sounds a bit too much freight for a bit of music to bear, then I can only reply that, despite my life-long atheism and rational-empericàl scientific mindset, I've been to many religious ceremonies of different faiths, and witnessed worship in many great mosques and churches, temples and sanctuaries. And I've yet to encounter an occasion more evocative and expressive of the sacred, more sublimely uplifting for its participants, more enduringly elevating of heart and mind, than a performance of Ludwig Von Beethoven's Choral Symphony.
One could do a lot worse for a church service; a lot worse for a sacred text. I was impelled to write this, and to you, because its clear you grasp and feel the work deeply, with insights that at times surpass my own. I thought, as a kind of salute, if you will, that my own long-held but heretofore unarticulated grasp of the work you have so deftly explained, might be in order.
Thank you for the art and craft you invest in your labors. I look forward to more.
PS -- you may have noted I set up, but did not return to, the second theme, of a loving heavenly father. It's treatment would've been similar to brotherhood, and this missive is already overlong. But in considering the loving father theme, it should suffice to mention Beethoven's own very UNloving father, his lack of personal or musical mentor (Haydn notwithstanding), his disconnect with Goethe, a potential father-figure, his own abysmally botched job at attempted fatherhood, and his own lifelong thwarted desire to have a family and be a real father, to see that Beethoven's ardent espousal of an abstract, cosmically benign father-deity was, as with universal brotherhood, more, perhaps, an expression of his own god-like hope in the universe's potential for benign, all-encompassing betterment, than a reflection either of his own life experience, or of his doctrinal, as opposed to felt, convictions. --- all the best.
Thank you brother! I've liked and subscribed.
Great video!
Always love to hear interpretations of the 9th.
Underrated video
this and the ending of 2001 a space odyssey seem to really reach beyond all reason and touch on something hidden deep within ourselves
27:25-27:43 This could be easily considered the most universal passage of music ever created. It lefts me in deep awe every single time I listen to it. It's like if Beethoven took the segrets of franco-flemish polyphony and blended them with the source of the universe. The balance in the suspended voices is so perfect it's almost frightening. If there is a definitive example of a angelic choir this is it.
This is so damn good, and I had goosebumps the whole video. Thanks a lot ❤
Always a treat when your videos come on! If you haven't yet, I would really give a lot of your time to Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" as I feel like it touches on a lot of the same religious themes in the 9th, but from a more personal perspecitve. I feel like Beethoven is reckoning with God during it. And the fact that they both it and the 9th debuted at the same concert says a lot! (Well Missa Solemnis wasn't fully premiered because masses weren't allowed outside of a church? Oh well you get the point.)
2 minutes ago is crazy
what's the recording you used?
Yes, it's a fantastic recording!
This 'indepth analysis' is excellent, for those of you out there who want to watch some content more similar to this informative video, i recommend the beethoven symphony analysis series on '"Chairat Chongvattanakij" channel on youtube.
Great video! I posted a video on my RUclips channel explaining the science behind how the cut off of auditory input juices the amount of electrical activity in the section of the brain that processes sound. This phenomenom allowed Beethoven to have the highest capacity for processing variables which made him the greatest composer. Mystery solved.
Curious: Why do you pronounce his name as "bay-HO'ven'? (without a "T" sound)
Well, the first two parts were very well explained. My favorite , the third part, could be better explained
27:47 stop edging us man
Is that real art in the thumbnail? Or is it A.I?
Louis the 16th was guillotined not the 14th.I would also like to add that Napoleon is a very nuanced historical figure he was good in some ways and bad in others.Bonaparte often had war declared on him by others much more often than he declared on others.Napoleon of course was not perfect and by the time of the 6th coalition it became clear he was acting only to keep his power when really he should have accepted Austrias offer of peace.Napoleon was neither good nor evil and that’s why many see him as a fascinating historical figure.He was no Gandhi but certainly not Hitler.
Sweetie, vor Gott means “before God” not “towards God”
Actually it's "in front of God".
@@foo0815 both translations are legitimate