Beethoven's Ninth

BEETHOVEN'S NINTH CLASSICAL
are, in Runestad’s words, “filtered through a hazy,
frustrated, and defeated state of being.”
In wrestling with Beethoven, with legacy, and with
loss, Runestad has done what he does best—written
a score where the poetry creates the form, where the
text drives the rhythm, where the melody supports
the emotional content, and where the natural sounding
vocal lines, arresting harmony, and idiomatic
accompaniment — in this case, piano in honor of
Beethoven — come together to offer the audience an
original, engaging, thoughtful, and passionate work
of choral art.
Program note by Dr. Jonathan Talberg
About the Text
This loose adaptation of Ludwig van Beethoven’s
famous “Heiligenstadt Testament” was unusually
difficult to write. Jake suggested the subject matter
in a phone call while I was traveling Europe, and it
literally haunted me for days afterward, waking me
in the middle of the night. I wrote the words “Hear
me” and “A silence comes for me” in London between
the hours of 2am and 4am. A few days later, I spent
the entire 7-hour span of a transatlantic flight writing
and rewriting, developing the poem’s unusual shape
and format. I finished it several weeks later while in
Vienna, and a visit to Heiligenstadt became part of
my journey with the piece. I was often in tears during
the process. I myself was traveling alone, and so the
process was uniquely intense. I was six years into the
loss of everything I held most dear, and so I swear I
inhabited Beethoven’s state of mind bodily, muscles
quaking, unsettled for hours after each of the poem’s
twelve major revisions.
I invented many things that don’t appear in
Beethoven’s letter. The plea “Take my feeling, take
my sight, etc.,” occurred to me as a way of declaiming
the terrible irony of Beethoven’s loss, a momentary
bargaining as happens as a stage of grief.
Comparisons of his plight to that of the accursed
Prometheus, Jake’s idea, are in reference to The
Creatures of Prometheus, the ballet Beethoven
finished a year prior to his sojourn at Heiligenstadt. “A
bell” tolls at the end of the letter, and it might be he
suddenly hears one, it might be his tinnitus, or it might
be a figurative acknowledgement of a newfound
hope.
The poem is set in italics to mimic handwriting and
arranged against ragged margins to look like a letter.
I’ve isolated the letter i wherever it appears, and
further isolated nouns that refer to people (I, You,
me, brothers, etc.) with nine spaces on either side to
isolate them, in recognition of Beethoven’s isolation
from himself and others, and in honor of his nine
completed symphonies. No punctuation is utilized.
All these odd typographical choices force the reader
to read the poem with a halting brokenness, just as
one might read very old handwriting, but they also
attempt to relay the halting and broken frame of mind
Beethoven must have been in when he wrote his very
sad letter to his brothers.
Note on the text by poet Todd Boss.
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 25 “Choral”
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Ludwig van Beethoven’s final symphony needs little
introduction. As one of classical music’s most iconic
pieces, it has escaped the bounds of the concert hall
and permeates popular culture at large. Beethoven’s
Ninth is among the most frequently performed
symphonies worldwide and the melody set to
Friedrich Schiller’s poem Ode an die Freude (“Ode
to Joy”) in the final movement has all but embedded
itself within our collective human consciousness.
Moreover, the work holds a hallowed place in
symphonic history with its addition of vocal soloists
and a chorus, the first time a major composer not only
included human voices in a symphony but assigned
them the same importance as the instruments. Each
performance of this masterwork is a monumental
collaboration that speaks to the themes of ceaseless
striving and universal kinship its music seeks to relate.
After completing his Eighth Symphony in the summer
of 1812, Beethoven entered a prolonged period of
relatively stagnant output compared with the fevered
productivity of his earlier career. These years were
ones of continuous personal crises for the
composer, including a disappointed love affair,
various protracted illnesses, the death of his brother
Kaspar and a subsequent custody battle over
Kaspar’s young son, and, of course, the ever-present
specter of his worsening hearing loss and its
accompanying isolation. It wasn’t until 1820 that the
composer truly returned to cementing his musical
legacy, intent on completing the work he affirmed
was his destiny in the “Heiligenstadt Testament”
some eighteen years earlier. By 1822, though now
completely deaf and often in emotional upheaval,
Beethoven was once again writing at a frenzied pace
and developing what would ultimately become the
Ninth Symphony. He worked steadily through the
following year, setting his final marks upon the score
in February 1824.
The Ninth’s premiere performance was given in
Vienna on May 7, 1824 by the largest orchestra
Beethoven had yet assembled. The deaf composer
could not conduct but stood upon the stage flipping
through his score and beating time (the performers
having been instructed beforehand to disregard his
gesticulations and follow the official conductor). Upon
the work’s conclusion, Beethoven remained staring
down at his score with his back to the audience until
the mezzo-soprano soloist gently turned him around
to be met with the sight of the uproariously cheering
crowd he could no longer hear.
The Ninth Symphony’s basic arc is that of darkness
to light, chaos to clarity, conflict to joy. The first
movement begins in a state of quiet anticipation, the
strings playing a sequence of open fifths that gradual
builds in intensity before erupting into a potently
dynamic theme.