A middle-schooler made his way over to Joseph Marchio, director of the Chatham Chorale, after a recent classical music performance. He said with all the enthusiasm of a soccer player whose team had just won the regional championship, “That was incredible! I had no idea that music like that even existed.” In a testament to the power of great music, Mozart and Schubert had reached across the centuries and touched a young heart surely and profoundly.
Alert all the middle-schoolers you know that they haven’t seen anything yet! Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony will be performed at Christ the King Church in Mashpee on Tuesday, May 10, at 8 pm. Rarely performed outside of major metropolitan areas, the Ninth will grace our outpost by the sea thanks to an unparalleled collaboration of musicians from virtually every town on the Cape.
The visionary who conceived the event is the internationally recognized director and conductor of the Simon Sinfonietta, Stephen Simon. Maestro Simon has engaged outstanding soloists, and joined forces with both Joseph Marchio and director John Yankee of the Falmouth Chorale, to create one of the largest choral events ever staged on Cape Cod — a production of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125, one of the greatest musical compositions ever written.
It is difficult to speak of Beethoven’s Ninth without superlatives. “Monumental” is the word musicians and music-lovers often use to describe the composition. The adjective suggests the composition’s scale, complexity, and sophistication, but there is more. Like all of Beethoven’s works, the Ninth takes the listener into an entire universe of sound that is found nowhere else. Once we hear the Ninth, we have visited a distant, yet strangely familiar place, and are never quite the same.
This is perhaps because Beethoven’s Ninth, in a mere 80 minutes, collects and transfuses into its audience a sense of the profound sufferings and immeasurable joys that make up the human experience. Beethoven, the man, makes a momentary appearance, eloquently abstracting and conveying the depths and heights of his own sufferings and joys. In doing so, Beethoven expresses the essence of the human experience, with which we can all, in our different ways, identify and feel to be our own.
Europe in the age of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) saw both the extraordinary rise of the spirit of freedom exemplified by the French Revolution and a reversion to brutal war and autocratic power. The latter was made personal to the composer when his ninth and last complete symphony was performed in Vienna to an audience made up primarily of army officers from the invading French army.
Beethoven’s professional career as a musician was also marked by deep conflict and irony. He was a musical genius, with prodigious talents both as a composer and as a pianist. In one of the noted cosmic cruelties of music history, Beethoven was afflicted with a progressive deafness that ultimately rendered him incapable of performing or even hearing his own creations. By the time Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony, he was completely deaf. He was able to hear neither the orchestra nor the thunderous applause at the premiere of the Ninth in Vienna in 1824.
Beethoven found the extremes of human sentiment also in his personal life, where recurring themes included profound, but unrequited, love and intense, never-satisfied yearnings to marry. Born into a family of musicians and composers in Bonn that was ultimately beset by personal tragedy and financial ruin, Beethoven fell in love with a succession of women in his adopted city of Vienna. Beethoven’s would-be loves were the highly cultivated women of the aristocratic class that employed and patronized him. In the still-rigid class structure of the early nineteenth century, such marriages were impossible, and Beethoven was left to express his passions through his music.
To the benefit of all who love music, Beethoven did not sink under the weight of the world as he intensely experienced it, though he contemplated now and then taking his own life. Instead, he created music that acknowledges and expresses intense pain, suffering, sadness, anxiety, and even despair, but that is ultimately hopeful. In all of Beethoven’s sublime music, there is no greater monument to the transcendence of the human spirit than the Ninth.
Maestro Stephen Simon’s distinguished career includes 26 years as music director of the Kennedy Center’s Washington (D.C.) Chamber Symphony with his wife Bonnie Ward Simon. Maestro Simon was touched and inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a young boy, and his desire for the upcoming concert is to “bring this work to life so that some young person in the audience will someday remember, take his or her own children to a performance, and continue the tradition.”
The conductor notes that Beethoven’s Ninth opens with “brooding, pulsing, opening triplets that set a high tone of expectation.” Referencing the upcoming Cape Cod venue, Maestro Simon observes that “the Scherzo brings its own elements of drama in the outbursts of solo timpani. These will create an unforgettable sound in the reverberant nave of Christ the King Church. The Adagio, in turn, sets a mood of mellow contemplation, before yielding to the brilliant Finale with its magnificent choral ‘Ode to Joy.’”
The great works that so touched the middle-schooler at the recent Chatham Chorale concert, and Maestro Stephen Simon as a young boy, express, through music, universal aspects of the human experience that cannot possibly be conveyed with mere words. Great composers reach down through the centuries and across thousands of miles to move people, young and old. In this same powerful way, Beethoven will enter Christ the King Church in Mashpee on May 10, bringing to our own challenging times a message of hope and love of life.
To hear and see a unique and "mad hot" interpretaion of what is in store for anyone fortunate enough to attend the concert on May 10, please click here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8lpPZdBYL0&feature=related
______________
Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor (“The Ode to Joy”)
Tuesday, May 10, 2011, 8 pm
Christ the King Church, Mashpee
Tickets: $45 each or $150 for two patron tickets with preferential seating.
To order: Call the Simon Sinfonietta at Falmouth Academy (508.457.9696, ext. 227) or visit www.simonsinfonietta.org.