Surprisingly new even after 200 years

Beate Angelika Kraus, musicologist at the Beethoven Archive research centre at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, is the editor of the Ninth Symphony as part of the scholarly-critical New Complete Edition of Beethoven’s works. On 7 May 2024, the music world celebrated the 200th anniversary of the premiere of the Ninth Symphony. Our anniversary performance by the National Youth Orchestra reflects the latest state of research – this is also about the special story behind this performance.

Today, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is world-famous and is performed by all orchestras and choirs. This was not always the case, and it took a long time for it to find its way into musical life. Beethoven wrote the Ninth as a commission for the Philharmonic Society in London. Naturally, a purely instrumental work was expected there. When the score finally arrived in England in 1824, the surprise must have been great: the composition was twice as large as usual and had a final movement with chorus and vocal soloists. For the text, Beethoven used parts of a poem by Friedrich Schiller that was extremely popular in the German-speaking world: »An die Freude« had been reprinted many times since 1786 and there were already around 30 existing settings. Beethoven, however, turned it into something completely new – his selection from the poem alone gave his work a different meaning. His composition was certainly not ›customer-orientated‹ for a British audience, and so the Ninth was initially performed there with the text in Italian. Not exactly a sign of correct behaviour either: after Beethoven had received his fee from England, the premiere of the Ninth took place in Vienna on 7 May 1824 before the concert in London.

In the anniversary concert of the Ninth at the festival 2024, Tan Dun will conduct the National Youth Orchestra and the World Youth Choir in his new work »Choral Concerto: Nine«. This composition was also commissioned by four organisations: the German Music Council, the Beethoven Anniversary Society BTHVN2020, the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The Chinese composer and conductor, who lives in New York, is thus following in the tradition of Beethoven and arranging the Ninth Symphony, incidentally for the same patron (the Philharmonic Society, founded in London in 1813, was placed under the patronage of the British Royal Family with its 100th concert season in 1912 and renamed the Royal Philharmonic Society).

Beethoven’s Ninth and the Bundesjugendorchester have a special history together – and the BJO has always been at the forefront, so to speak. Ten years ago, the first research findings that emerged from my work on the edition of the Ninth for the New Complete Edition at the Beethoven-Haus were incorporated into a concert by the BJO in Bonn.  

In the score that Beethoven had sent to his publisher as an engraver’s model in January 1825, I discovered a handwritten note by the composer: »from here on See the ContraFag. in the supplement«. This is a reference by Beethoven to a supplement for a contrabassoon part which is not notated in any of the known scores. Unfortunately, the supplement has not survived, but of course I set out to track it down. The result: Beethoven developed the role of this instrument, which was still new to the orchestra at the time, in six stages, even after the premiere! In the end, the contrabassoon was much more than just an instrument for special effects; it was given its own independent voice in the wind section. I was able to reconstruct this part because we know a handwritten copy for it (see picture above) and the printed version from 1826 (see picture below). Now the contrabassoon can join in when the solo baritone sings the joyful melody for the first time. 

When the BJO performed the Ninth in Bonn on 30 July 2014, I gave the contrabassoonist the new part I had reconstructed – and he played it in public for the first time. The »new sounds in the Ninth« were immediately favourably received by the critics. When the Ninth Symphony was published as an anniversary volume of the Beethoven Complete Edition in February 2020, there was great interest: the German Music Council made it possible for me to present the new edition in an online seminar for the BJO and the World Youth Choir, and so we discussed the musical text, the sources and the history of its composition around the globe in the middle of the coronavirus lockdown. These young musicians will now perform the Ninth Symphony according to the new edition at the Beethovenfest Bonn 2024 – a particular pleasure for me!

Incidentally, the 18-year-old soprano Henriette Sontag and the 20-year-old contralto Caroline Unger were the soloists at the Viennese premiere in 1824; the Viennese audience already knew them from Rossini’s operas. The singers Anton Haizinger and Joseph Seipelt were only slightly older at 28 and 36. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was and is a work especially for young people (and those who are young at heart) who are always ready to be surprised – even by more recent developments in music history!