The River Green

As a special treat, and because we had such a great experience during our last trip, I bought Marieke and I tickets to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concert performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. We shared the June 6 Sunday afternoon with Lucy and Greg, who were also attending the concert. The Ninth has always been one of my favorites. I remember playing it when I studied violin in elementary and middle school. In recent years, I have acquired several performances of the piece from a wide variety of sources. My personal favorite is the Bernstein version played live across the world on Christmas, 1989. He replaced Freude (Joy) with Freiheit (Freedom), in celebration of the demise of the Berlin Wall. In the days before the concert, I posted a series of 9th trivia on my Facebook status. Here is the collection of them:

1. At the end of the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven had to be turned around to see the tumultuous applause of the audience; hearing nothing, he wept.
2. Seiji Ozawa conducted the Nagano Winter Orchestra as well as seven choirs in six countries on five continents, performing the Fourth Movement from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in its entirety, for the 1998 Winter Olympic Games during the finale of the Opening Ceremony. The chorus locations were New York City, Berlin, Cape Point, Sydney, and Beijing, with two in Nagano: the Tokyo Opera Singers and the audience at Nagano Olympic Stadium.
3. Philips, the company that had started the work on a new audio format, the compact disk, originally planned for a CD to have a diameter of 11.5 cm, the width of the then popular compact cassette, while Sony planned a 10 cm diameter, even more compact but enough for one hour of music. However, Norio Ohga, Sony's CEO in 1979, insisted that the CD be able to contain a complete performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The longest known performance lasted 74 minutes. This was a mono recording made during the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1951 and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. This therefore became the playing time of a CD. A diameter of 12 centimeters was required for this playing time.
4. For the final movement of his Ninth symphony, Beethoven set to music the "Ode to Joy" written in 1785 by Friedrich von Schiller. This poem expresses Schiller's idealistic vision of the human race becoming brothers- a vision Beethoven shared. In 1972, the Council of Europe adopted Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" theme as its own anthem. Herbert Von Karajan wrote an orchestral arrangement, without words, in the universal language of music, which became the official anthem of the European Union. The anthem expresses the ideals of freedom, peace and solidarity for which Europe stands.
5. During the 1989 student protests in Beijing, a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was played over a makeshift speaker system to drown out the voice of the government telling the people to end their protest. It was chosen specifically for the ubiquitous themes of freedom and brotherhood.
   Leonard Bernstein conducted a version of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with "Freiheit" ("Freedom") replacing "Freude" ("Joy"), to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall during Christmas 1989.

Manfred Honeck, the Music Director of the PSO, did a splendid job. The older gentleman seated next to me and I had a difficult time keeping our emotions contained and we both had damp cheeks by ovation time.

Labels: concerts , music