While reporting on the Eurovision Song Contest, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane “asked a man named Seppo, from the seven-hundred-strong Eurovision Fan Club of Norway, what he loved about Eurovision. ‘Brotherhood of man,’ he said — a slightly ambiguous answer, because that was the name of a British group that entered, and won, the contest in 1976.” And the concept has a longer history in European music than that: Friedrich Schiller claimed to be celebrating it when he wrote his poem “An die Freude,” or “To Joy,” which Ludwig van Beethoven adapted a few decades thereafter into the final movement of his Symphony No. 9. Later still, in 1972, that piece of music was adopted by the Council of Europe as the continent’s anthem; in 1985, the European Union made it official as well.
In a sense, “Ode to Joy” is a natural choice for a musical representation of Europe, not just for its explicit themes, but also for the obvious ambition of the symphony that includes it to capture an entire civilization in musical form.
Its complexity and contradiction may be easier to appreciate through these videos, which constitute a visualization by Stephen Malinowski, creator of the Music Animation Machine, previously featured here on Open Culture for his animated scores of everything from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 to Debussy’s Clair de lune. As one of the most frequently performed symphonies in the world, Beethoven’s 9th comes to us laden with a fair amount of cultural baggage, but Malinowski’s sparely elegant rendering lets us listen while keeping our mind on the essentials of its structure.
That structure, as the viewing experience emphasizes, is not a particularly simple one. Though already deaf, Beethoven nevertheless composed this final complete symphony with layer after ever-changing yet interlocking layer, drawing from a variety of musical traditions as well as pieces he’d already written for other purposes. At its 1824 premiere in Vienna, Symphony No. 9 received no fewer than five standing ovations, though over the centuries since, even certain of its appreciators question whether the final movement really fits in with the rest. Indeed, some even regard “Ode to Joy” as kitschy, an exercise unbecoming of the symphony as a whole, to say nothing of the man who composed it. But then, it’s undeniable that European culture has since achieved heights of kitsch unimaginable in Beethoven’s day.
Related content:
Slavoj Žižek Examines the Perverse Ideology of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
The Story of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Minutes of Music
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Movingly Flashmobbed in Spain
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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