Symphony finishes year with an old favorite

It’s one of the most famous pieces of music, featuring one of the most recognizable closing movements in history. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the legendary composer’s final complete symphony, and it helped to shape the way symphonic music was written and performed in the years that followed.

“It’s one of the pivotal pieces in music history, and it’s bigger and grander than anything that came before,” said Spokane Symphony conductor Eckart Preu. “It foreshadowed the future of the symphony – the size of the orchestra and the length of the big, romantic symphony. … It changed the ball game.”

The Spokane Symphony has been performing Symphony No. 9 on New Year’s Eve for seven years now, and Preu says it’s become something of a welcome tradition for the orchestra.

“We’re always trying to do new pieces and new things, but there’s something to tradition, to repeating the same thing every year,” he said. “I think that’s something we all look forward to.”

When Symphony No. 9 premiered in 1824, Beethoven was completely deaf, and he hadn’t appeared on a stage in 12 years. It’s hard to believe, but the piece wasn’t immediately lauded: Despite the ecstatic reaction from the preview audience, some reports claim that the performance wasn’t impeccably rehearsed, and a handful of critics found the composition to be scattered.

But the Ninth is now unanimously adored, cited by many as Beethoven’s greatest accomplishment. Its final movement, often referred to as “Ode to Joy” after the Friedrich Schiller poem that inspired it, features one of the most recognized melodies in all of classical music. The symphony’s chorale provides the vocal harmonies, an arrangement that Preu says was unusual when Beethoven employed it.

“That had never been done before, and it’s still very rare,” he said. “It amplifies what the orchestra does. It makes it twice as big, in sheer numbers. It also gives a concrete text to it. A lot of symphonies are a little muddy – nobody’s really sure what they’re supposed to mean – but when you put lyrics to it, it becomes clear.”

Having performed it so often, Preu says Symphony No. 9 still sounds fresh, and he compares playing it every year to diving back into a favorite book for the hundredth time.

“It hasn’t gotten old yet, let’s put it that way,” Preu said. “The mastery of it, the architecture of it; you can never get tired of it. Every time it feels different.”