The Promise of Hope – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
Last week, the 7th of May 2024, marked the 200th anniversary of the premiere of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Today then, I want to talk with you about the hope which runs through that Ode to Joy.
Last time on the Wednesday Blog, I wrote to you in what I hoped would appear to be an optimistic tone that still acknowledged the troubles and trials I find before me, and to an extent I think that worked. While I did not intend to write a sequel to that post, this week’s topic is one which fits well enough, and which I feel quite fervent about as to warrant mention here in the Wednesday Blog.
I began to explore the world of classical music around the time I started high school. Quite honestly, my big introductions were the music of George Gershwin and the original cast album of Phantom of the Opera. Yet around that time I was introduced to an ensemble called the William Baker Summer Singers and joined them for the 2008 season when we performed Beethoven’s Ninth in Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral in Downtown Kansas City. I was not the best singer by a long shot, still very new to the whole experience, yet it was the start of my off-and-on tenure singing with choirs around Kansas City.
Beethoven’s Ninth thunders into life with the opening measures of its first movement, as though the hope and joy which makes this piece so famous is born from something elemental deep beneath the ground, rising out and toward the audience with the orchestra as its first voice. This then makes the chorus out to be some even deeper root of the spirit of this work, its power growing throughout the first three movements leading up to the tremendous clamoring second movement. I’ve always imagined the second movement told the story of a fast paced and clattering horse and rider making their way through fields and farms to pass on good news to some learned recipient.
The third movement is far softer than the first, yet again it speaks to something grand as yet only being revealed to the audience. There is a sense in the third movement of a fundamental truth as of yet untold, whose voice could raise both the living and the dead to new heights of human dignity and grace. Through music, Beethoven captured the full spectrum of human aspiration and expressed our innate confidence in our own abilities to improve our lives. It reminds me of the “Et incarnatus est” movement in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, which is written in the Dorian mode, giving it a distinct feeling of rising from a deep ether into the light of a new day. The Missa Solemnis was also written in 1824, premiering on the 7th of April of that year.
I hear something inherent in Beethoven’s optimism, that even with all the troubles of his life there near its end he could still dream that we might become better versions of ourselves. The tempo marker for the first movement Allegro ma non troppo e un poco maestoso (Quick but not too much and a little majestic) might well be a good motto for life; a good life ought to be taken at a fair pace, yet not too fast, and with some majesty for one’s nature. We can hope for something better because we are born with minds capable of dreaming of better tomorrows.
At the heart of the Ninth Symphony and in particular its choral fourth movement is a fairly simple melody, one that I learned quickly during my time rehearsing it. That melody has taken on a life of its own beyond Beethoven’s original composition and become something ubiquitous in many respects. There are two church hymns set to its tune in the hymnal we use in my current parish choir, “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” and the slightly more modern, yet traditionally formal, “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore You.” What I love about this melody is that it is easy to learn, easy to adapt, and so upbeat.
The words which Beethoven set to that tune were written by the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) in the summer of 1785. They are an outgrowth of the Enlightenment and the fervent calls for acknowledging our common humanity that grew from this reassessment of our relationship with Nature. Those words speak volumes to me, that joy makes brothers and sisters of us all, revealing our original state of nature to us amid all the nebulous fog of our lived expectations. It’s easy to forget that beneath all the mantles of identity we hoist upon ourselves that we are all the same in our life and yes in our mortality.
There is a deep promise here that with hope we can accomplish tremendous things. Hope alone will not solve our problems, we will always need to act to improve ourselves and our communities. True hope, pure and fulfilling hope, is such that it requires we all act together to our common benefit, that we think of each other more than of ourselves. I have such a hope in humanity, after all I’ve seen moments in my own life and in our history in which we’ve come together to work for a higher purpose than any one of us. Again, quoting from Schiller’s poem:
Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!”
“Be embraced, all ye millions!
With a kiss for all the world!”
This promise of hope is something that is sacred because it offers us a chance at redemption no matter how terrible the things we may have done. There is something truly divine about it, that we can become better versions of ourselves not in spite of who we’ve been but rather because we are willing to improve who we are and how we live with our neighbors.
That is a promise that I hope we can fulfill.
The recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony heard in this episode came from the 1956 album by the ProMusica Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under the direction of Jascha Horenstein and are free to use under the Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal label and can be found in full at archive.org.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 