Aude a la joie beethoven biography

Ode (poem) by Schiller

This article is about Schiller's poem. For the "Ode to Joy" theme by Beethoven, see Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven). For other uses, see Ode to Joy (disambiguation).

"Song of Joy" redirects here. For the album by Captain & Tennille, see Song of Joy (album).

"Ode to Joy" (German: "An die Freude"[andiːˈfʁɔʏdə]) is an ode written in the summer of 1785 by German poet, playwright, and historian Friedrich Schiller. It was published the following year in the German magazine Thalia. In 1808, a slightly revised version changed two lines of the first stanza and omitted last stanza.

"Ode to Joy" is best known for its use by Ludwig van Beethoven in the final (fourth) movement of his Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824. Beethoven's text is not based entirely on Schiller's poem, and it introduces a few new sections. Beethoven's melody,^[1] but not Schiller's text, was adopted as the "Anthem of Europe" by the Council of Europe in 1972 and later by the European Union. Rhodesia's national anthem from 1974 until 1979, "Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia", also used Beethoven's melody.

The poem

Schiller wrote the first version of the poem when he was staying in Gohlis, Leipzig. In 1785, from the beginning of May till mid-September, he stayed with his publisher, Georg Joachim Göschen, in Leipzig and wrote "An die Freude" along with his play Don Carlos.^[2]

Schiller later made some revisions to the poem, which was then republished posthumously in 1808, and it was this latter version that forms the basis for Beethoven's setting. Despite the lasting popularity of the ode, Schiller himself regarded it as a failure later in his life, going so far as to call it "detached from reality" and "of value maybe for us two, but not for the world, nor for the art of poetry" in an 1800 letter to his longtime friend and patron Christian Gottfried Körner (whose friendship had originally inspired him to write the ode).^[3]

Lyrics

Revisions

The lines marked with * were revised in the posthumous 1808 edition as follows:

The original, later eliminated last stanza reads

Ode to Freedom

Academic speculation remains as to whether Schiller originally wrote an "Ode to Freedom" (An die Freiheit) and changed it to "To Joy".^[6][7]Thayer wrote in his biography of Beethoven, "the thought lies near that it was the early form of the poem, when it was still an 'Ode to Freedom' (not 'to Joy'), which first aroused enthusiastic admiration for it in Beethoven's mind".^[8] The musicologist Alexander Rehding points out that even Bernstein, who used "Freiheit" in two performances in 1989, called it conjecture whether Schiller used "joy" as code for "freedom" and that scholarly consensus holds that there is no factual basis for this myth.^[9]

Use of Beethoven's setting

Over the years, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" has remained a protest anthem and a celebration of music.

• A 2013 documentary, Following the Ninth, directed by Kerry Candaele, follows its continuing popularity.^[11][14]

Other musical settings

Other musical settings of the poem include:

• Franz Schubert's song "An die Freude", D 189, for voice, unison choir and piano. Composed in May 1815, Schubert's setting was first published in 1829 as Op. post. 111 No. 1. The 19th century Gesamt-Ausgabe included it as a lied in Series XX, Volume 2 (No. 66). The New Schubert Edition groups it with the part songs in Series III (Volume 3).^[19]
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1865), for solo singers, choir and orchestra in a Russian translation
• Pietro Mascagni cantata "Alla gioia" (1882), Italian text by Andrea Maffei
• "Seid umschlungen, Millionen!" (1892), waltz by Johann Strauss II
• Z. Randall Stroope (2002), for choir and four-hand piano
• Victoria Poleva (2009), for soprano, mixed choir and symphony orchestra

References

External links