Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is a near-universal Western cultural marker, a sweeping musical masterpiece marked by its glorious and irresistible “Ode to Joy” choral section. Even people who have no contact with classical music recognize it. It is a symbol, in many ways, of classical music itself.
“If we think of the handful of the most important works in the classical music canon, Beethoven’s 9th is on everyone’s list,” says Maestro Gerard Schwarz, orchestral studies and conducting professor and musical director of the Frost Symphony Orchestra. “On a purely musical plane, it is magnificent - emotionally charged, elegant, beautiful, melodic, imaginative. In terms of music history, it is a seminal work that has influenced music from 1824 to this day.”
Schwarz wanted Frost School students to master that magnificent composition. So, last April, he organized a performance of the Beethoven masterwork for its 200th anniversary, conducting the Frost Symphony Orchestra and combined Frost School choirs.
The concert was a major achievement for the Frost School’s classical music program that will have a national audience. Two hundred sixty-two public television stations across the country, more than three-quarters of the total, will air a broadcast of the FSO’s Gusman Concert Hall performance. That includes stations in the top 20 markets, including New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas-Ft. Worth. South Florida PBS, which produced the program, will be the first to broadcast Beethoven’s 9th program on local stations WXEL on Dec.19 and WPBT on Dec. 20th.
Both the concert and the broadcast are deeply rewarding for Schwarz as an educator and an artist. “For the students, the experience of playing this piece at such a high level with a great chorus and soloists is something they will never forget,” Schwarz says. “For them to be part of a televised show is extraordinary.”
“You’re hearing a great masterpiece by a master at the end of his life, a piece that influenced every composer in the 19th century and beyond, and these young musicians are playing it at an extremely high level,” he says. “It’s a thrill for me.”
This is the second time South Florida public television has brought a Schwarz-led program to a national audience. Last spring, over 200 PBS stations committed to airing the FSO’s multimedia version of “Pictures at an Exhibition,” conducted and organized by Schwarz in collaboration with the University of Miami Lowe Art Museum.
"South Florida PBS is proud to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the University of Miami Frost School of Music’s inspiring performance under the direction of Maestro Gerard Schwarz,” said Joyce Belloise, Sr. Vice President, Content and Station Manager for South Florida PBS. “This joyous and exuberant masterpiece, brought to life by the extraordinary talent and passion of Frost’s student musicians, captures the spirit of the holiday season and Beethoven’s timeless brilliance. South Florida PBS is honored to showcase the exceptional artistry of our local institutions and share the magic of live performance with audiences across the region and beyond."
Dean Shelton G. Berg called the broadcast a tribute to the students and their leader. “Under the baton of Gerard Schwarz, the brilliant students of the Frost School have cohered into a world-class orchestra, as demonstrated by two recent PBS specials,” Berg said. “Beethoven’s 9th also features the superb Frost Choir, which has a long history of elite performance. I’m thrilled that our students have opportunities like these, which are quite rare in university music schools. The experiences they gain are leading to enhanced career outcomes.”
Beethoven’s 9th keeps appearing in pop culture, from The Muppets to the film “Die Hard” to this viral flash mob video. The multi-GRAMMY winning, genre-straddling artist Jon Batiste riffs on “Ode to Joy” in his just-released “Beethoven Blues” album. A new documentary, “Beethoven’s Nine,” by Academy Award-nominated director Larry Weinstein, explores the symphony’s legacy.
It is a musical landmark for several reasons. At a little over an hour, Beethoven's last symphony is much longer than previous symphonic works. The orchestra is larger; Beethoven added contrabassoon, piccolo, cymbals, triangle, bass drum, and three trombones.
But the composer’s most radical change – and the key to the work’s impact - was adding an enormous choir (the first time a choir appears in an orchestral work) and four vocal soloists singing from German poet Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to that irresistible melody. (The New York Times once called it “an earworm for the ages.”) Schiller’s text is a call for hope, love, and unity. In performance, a bass-baritone responds to an ominous, dissonant section by defiantly calling (in lines written by Beethoven) to abandon “these ugly tones” for “Joy! Joy!”
“It’s about finding a new way, even though there’s anger and hostility in the world, let’s find joy, find peace and respect for each other,” Schwarz says.
In 1824 Europe, in the wake of the French Revolution in the late 1790s and the violent, years-long Napoleonic Wars that followed, that call for peace must have been particularly compelling. But “Ode to Joy” has remained a musical beacon of hope. In 1998, Seiji Ozawa conducted a performance for the opening of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan, joined by choirs around the world. Leonard Bernstein led a performance in Berlin shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, replacing “joy” with “freedom.” Last year, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra’s version in Ukrainian, responding to the Russian invasion, replaced “joy” with “glory,” as in “Slava Ukraine” or “Glory to Ukraine.”
With war continuing in Ukraine and the Middle East and political division everywhere, Beethoven’s musical aspirations for hope and joy are as meaningful as ever.
That was very much on Schwarz’s mind. “It’s about people uniting,” he says. “That is the message we want to put forth.”
The Frost Symphony Orchestra and Frost Choral Combined Choirs performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony airs on WXEL at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 19th, and on WPBT at 9 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 20th.
