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In 1824, when Beethoven paid for his own Ninth Symphony to be put on, he looked carefully at the bottom line. He considered taking it away from Vienna where he worked. It was only the emperor's flattery that meant the music stayed in the immortal city. But in those days, Vienna possessed only a motley of orchestras. This was before music was basically professionalised. For the vast vocal and technical overreach of the Ninth, he had to assemble a curious mixture of amateurs and professionals. There were even two conductors.
Beethoven was, of course, breaking sensationally new ground. Sachs sets the picture clearly, painting a picture of a Europe exhausted by the blood-soaked dramatics of Napoleon and haunted by the horror of the collapse of Napolean's pan-European dream.
All the old monarchies came back, and as Napoleon himself said, they had "learnt nothing and remembered everything". All was suspense, sourness and washed-up faith
It was as if everything was awaiting the great universalist trumpet blast of Beethoven's Ninth. Beethoven, like so many artists, loved mankind in the grand abstract while he disliked most humans on an individual basis. This book is strongest when Sachs, who ghost wrote the biography of Placido Domingo, concentrates on the musical realities of the time. He explains that at the premiere, the third movement would have had a significant pause before the fourth movement (unlike many renditions today where the conductor launches off almost immediately into the final part of the symphony for dramatic effect).
But in its own time, horns and trumpets did not have valves. In order to alter the pitch, a player had to physically remove a piece of tubing and then place another piece in, blowing on it to warm it so it reached the right pitch.
This of itself necessitated a pause of at least 30 seconds - a length of time which would have seemed exaggerated in such an adrenalised piece.
It takes us into another world when we realise that the Ninth was also not played in Paris for several years. News moved at the speed of an old hackney coach in 1824.
At times, this book feels slightly coddled together. But as a primer into the background of a stifled, sullen Europe, Sachs paints a clear picture of the conditions which brought forth a deaf man's cry to the very heavens. Sachs is good on giving you an insight into the Ninth as a piece of music, too. However Beethoven's "universalist" spirit did not infuse Sachs with enough concern for him to consider the "world" beyond Europe. There is not a skerrick of information of what was happening in China, America or, for that matter, in tribal New Zealand in 1824. Yet the fact is today Beethoven's Ninth probably plays more frequently in Chinese concert halls than it does in a hard-up, anxious and somehow superannuated Europe ...
- Peter Wells is a writer based in Hawkes Bay.
