Nick Higgins Rohan Chitrikar
I am in Vienna, on the final trip for a documentary film I am making about the global impact of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, called Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony. I began the journey over three years ago and now, having traversed five continents, from China to Chile, from Japan to Great Britain, from Capetown to Manhattan, I sit in the Café Hawelka near Der Graben (“The Trench”), a once and still fashionable promenade where Beethoven enjoyed watching members of the haute monde present themselves to their fellow Viennese during the years when he retreated into deafness and isolation.
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In Tokyo, the New Japan Philharmonic was part of a 5,000-person performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Tokyo in 2008. Performing the work is an annual December ritual in Japan known as Daiku or “The Great Nine.”
A modern sketch of Beethoven by Charles Krenner, a violist with CityMusic Cleveland
americanorchestras.org
Filmmaker Kerry Candaele came across this sign while in Valparaiso, Chile, for his Beethoven documentary.
The day is cold and wet and, for a Californian, somewhat intimidating as I have not, sartorially speaking, been properly acclimated. But I have already made my morning pilgrimage to the Burggarten, a park near Vienna’s center where Beethoven enjoyed an occasional stroll. The trees are ablaze in tones of crimson, the yellow, orange, and red leaves brushed and pushed by shifting winds and rain in dramatic
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