the main theme. Rather than relying on the dialectical contrast between different “objects”, the sonata form of the initial Allegro ma non troppo section is a majestic narrative innervated by a flood of secondary themes, which keep the ball rolling until we realize that we have arrived at a second tonal region, that of B flat major, and one that is also enriched with appendages of all kinds. The traditional hierarchy of themes here is not denied, but acts as a secondary aspect with respect to their continuous evolution; nor is it so important to establish the traditional boundaries of exposition-development-recapitulation, the movement being precisely a sort of permanent flow, although evoking different contents. In this sense, the initial movement is by far the most modern, the one that will influence architecture of the romantic symphony to come, which is no longer “logical” but rather discursive.
ENGLISH ESSAYS
THE SYMPHONY OF THE UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES IN WHICH THE SUBJECT IS NOT THE INNER SELF BUT THE MAN by Enrico Girardi
Meanwhile the Scherzo is much more “sculpted” and occupies the second position for the first and only time in the Beethoven symphony. Behind the contrast between the powerful Molto vivace section and the candid and popular Trio, and behind an architectural framework that still takes into account the sonata principle, you can also note here the imitative attitude of the third style, thus the themes are pulled to pieces and reconstructed during the work through a direct, progressive introduction of the various “voices” coming into play, as if it were a Fugue.
Beethoven’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies are light-years away from one another in regard to organic, sonority, form, structure, and artistic aims. However, they share a non-secondary aspect. Even though they do so in the opposite way, they both move away from the idea of the Symphony as a container of emotions and moods, which are subjective but bent to the objectivity of classical architecture: an idea instead embodied in the seven previous sister congeners. They are “meta-symphonic” operas, so to say; musical reflections on the music itself - or, if you prefer, on its highest expression, which for Beethoven was the Symphony -, conducted in accordance with the opposing stylistic registers.
If the Fugue underlies the Scherzo, the Variation underlies the Adagio molto e cantabile section, a movement born from the ashes of Cantique Eclesiastique that Beethoven had foreseen in the early stages of the project. An abstract, “hot” piece, but one that originates from those intangible realities of which the last Quartets bear traces, this sublime Adagio section lies in two very different themes, which therefore give life to the Baroque form par excellence of double variation.
The Eighth is an enchanting divertissement, a look at the past full of good humour and the joy of life. However, its aesthetic aspect, which anticipates the wisest formulations of Neoclassicism decades ahead of its time, is terribly ironic: while reintroducing elements of the Minuet and the formal principles of the Haydn and Mozart era, the work denies them the possibility of returning in full. Precisely because it is an amused, admired and retrospective look, it announces that the auroral age, charged of natural positivity, has now definitively passed. The Ninth, even though in some ways it reintroduces the remote and formal principles such as imitation and variation, it is a step beyond the present time; it is undoubtedly a look to the future, containing just enough of visionary and abstract elements that always mark the horizon of those who look ahead.
The entrance of the soloists’ voices of the choir in the last movement inevitably disarranges the cards laid on the table. On the one hand, it implies the creation of a special, formal container, unpublished in the symphonic field; on the other, the enigma is solved in such a way so as not to deny the symphonic nature of the work, which remains a movement of a Symphony and does not become a segment of a Cantata. Referred to as a “Fanfare of Terror” by Wagner, it introduces a wide section of connection with a volcanic tone where the famous Freuenmelodie, heart of the movement, is introduced by the string instruments (and only then by the soloists and the choir); no sooner than the orchestra has retraced the steps of the long journey that it has undergone up until now, with each step being preceded by a recitative performed by severe strings, the flow of speech is sustained.
This does not detract from the fact that at the same time the Ninth is the end point, the haven, one of the greatest successful, most universally known, performed and loved musical compositions in the world, and an unprecedented piece that clearly stands out from the other Beethovenian works, not only for linguistic and poetic reasons, but also for aesthetic reasons. And this ambivalence, this sense of being an object and its counterpart “at the same time”, as well as being the origin of the tonnes of critical literature that have been dedicated to it in every time and place, is at the base of the hermetic, complicated, and enigmatic condition of the piece: on the one hand, the condition of an iconic work; on the other, the condition of a work that perhaps is even more important than it is beautiful, if “beautiful” means an organism that in every fold has the sense of perfect completeness, within the framework of the aesthetic and formal values of the time.
The main themes of the three movements are in fact retraced one by one as if to give space to the new protagonist of speech: a simple, regular song where the singers don’t follow the rhythm, which has a lot to do with the traditional hymnology of French folk songs belonging to the revolutionary age (such as the ones of Gossec and Méhul), which Beethoven knew well, and with the flat and affirmative style of national anthems (think of the British God save the Queen or the Haydn’s imperial anthem, today the German national anthem).
As Paul Bekker wrote: “No more drama, no more narrative, the Ninth Symphony is therefore a sort of philosophical essay; it no longer draws on the “full humanity” of the “heroic” Beethoven, but on the universal principles underlying it. The subject is no longer the ego, but the man. The brother the Ode to joy speaks of is no longer the friend, the companion or, say, the enemy, but rather the whole of humanity.”
The grandiose Hymn is the fundamental element throughout the ten verses of the Schillerian Ode, the chorus of a colossal rondo form that embraces different contrasting episodes, from the luminous and sublime one intoned by the solos, to the surprising “Turkish” episode, which we can appreciate when Schiller speaks of a square invaded by crowds: a temporary return to earth that marks the immeasurable distance between the real world and the celestial spheres to which all humanity belongs.
Moreover, it is the divine beginning of the work, the fifth chord in A and E pianissimo, from which then comes the exposition of
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