Barenboim on Beethoven: Nine Symphonies That Changed the World

Over the last three summers, conductor Daniel Barenboim

and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra have been performing

all nine Beethoven symphonies across the world.

Formed in 1999, this is no ordinary orchestra.

Its members include Israelis and Arabs.

The idealism of Beethoven's music

makes it the perfect choice of repertoire.

Everybody can get into it, no matter what your culture may be.

So, I think definitely it's very appropriate

for this orchestra to play, to play specifically Beethoven.

I think he wanted to change something inside people

with this music, he wanted them to wake up and not to make war.

You know, purely as a musician,

you can find more in Beethoven than in most other composers.

Actually, that's why he's endured.

The three-year tour, called Beethoven For All,

will finish at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall.

The first time in 70 years that all nine symphonies

have been played there.

Two centuries after they were written,

Beethoven's nine symphonies are a landmark in western music,

each sets a new challenge to conductor, orchestra and audience.

Beethoven represents music to the world,

in the way that Shakespeare represents theatre.

In the summer of 2011, the orchestra toured China and South Korea,

where all nine symphonies were performed together

for the first time.

We joined the tour to discover why they are regarded

as one of the pinnacles of classical music.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra 2001 Asia Tour

culminates in South Korea, with a performance of the Ninth Symphony,

which ends with Beethoven's call for all men to be brothers.

It takes place half a mile from the Demilitarized Zone

that separates North and South Korea,

it's the most heavily fortified border in the world,

but Beethoven's music transcends all barriers.

Beethoven was born in Bonn, Mozart was born in Salzburg,

but the minute they finished writing their composition,

they finished being European music, they become universal music.

They are not any more their private property

and they are not the property of their nation.

Everybody who is sensitive is able to take this message

and make it part of his own biography.

Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942.

When he was ten, his family moved to Israel.

Like Beethoven, Barenboim was a child prodigy,

giving his first concert at the age of seven.

He has conducted the work of composers from Mozart to Brahms,

Boulez to Bertwhistle,

but Beethoven has always been at the centre of his musical world,

not that everyone approved of his career choice.

I remember my first personal encounter with Beethoven,

because we were living in Buenos Aires, together with my grandparents.

And my grandmother heard me practice one day,

from the kitchen I suppose,

and then she said to me, she said, "What are you playing?"

"Beethoven." "Foy!"

Undeterred, Daniel Barenboim became not only one of the world's

foremost interpreters of Beethoven's piano works,

but also one of the leading conductors of his music.

The first Beethoven symphony I conducted

was in the conductor's class in Salzburg,

at the rather tender age of 11.

This is something that has accompanied me

throughout my life and it was part of my very existence.

There's probably no musician alive who has Beethoven really

in their absolute being as much as Daniel Barenboim,

in the sense that this is someone who has been playing

and who has known, for example, the 32 piano sonatas, for example,

the five piano concertos and pretty well all the piano chamber music

as well, in addition to imbibing all the symphonies as a conductor.

So he...it's one of those strange things where you feel,

often when you see a conductor or musician perform,

you feel that they are performing the music somehow,

that there's a difference between the performer and the music.

But I think with Barenboim, because this music has been part of him

for so long, for 40, 50 years,

there is no difference between him and the music.

I am not one who believes in, the importance of the connection

between the biography of a composer and what he writes.

I think the real biography he writes in his music.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was formed 13 years ago

by Barenboim and the Palestinian author, Edward Said.

Since 2002, it has been based in Seville, in Andalucia, Spain.

It's a symbolic choice.

Here, from the 8th to the 15th centuries,

Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together,

for the most part, in tolerant and civilised ways.

The Beethoven For All tour began in summer 2010.

The orchestra is now assembling again to rehearse

the South East Asian season.

Well, this is the first rehearsal this year.

I will smell them.

The West-Eastern Divan is an orchestra made up of Israelis

and also, people from various Arab countries,

including Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian territories.

We also have Turkish people in the orchestra,

people from Iran, and we also have Spaniards in the orchestra.

And basically what it is, is they'll form for dialogue

between Israelis and people from other countries,

who normally wouldn't have a way to communicate,

or a safe place to communicate.

And that's kind of what this orchestra provides,

a way for them to communicate with each other

and to make music with each other.

When I play even one moment of the Fifth Symphony,

it's the end you are finishing in symphony,

beautiful music, with friends, enemies, all together,

with such a big conductor in front of you, it's...

Everything is opening and coming up

and all the emotions are just appearing from somewhere,

and you don't know even where from.

So it's a very special moment.

With each performance, the Divan musicians,

led by Barenboim's son Michael, need to rediscover the music afresh.

Good afternoon.

I'm very happy to see everybody, some new faces,

a special welcome to this project of the Beethoven Symphonies.

It's very important that we all think the same

about how we are going to progress.

We have to remember one thing and forget the other one,

we have to remember all the things we were not happy with last year

and to know why and to try and do them better, and we have to forget

all the things that we were happy with, otherwise we run the risk

of just trying to do them again in the same way, as this is not good.

This is, for me, as the years go on,

the most extraordinary thing about music is that every day

you know a little bit more, but you still start from zero.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770.

When he was 22, he moved to Vienna,

the musical powerhouse of Europe.

He arrived as a virtuoso pianist, the year after Mozart died,

and studied for a time with Haydn.

A new middle class audience was changing the way music was written

and with it, the social status of the composer.

Beethoven made money from his publications,

from getting his music published, from getting it disseminated.

and that was a big thing for a composer to be able to do,

it meant people were playing your music,

it meant people were buying your music and it meant that

he didn't always have to rely on gifts from his friends,

his aristocratic friends, because he did have aristocratic friends

who did support him, without whom he couldn't really have lived.

But Beethoven is on the cusp of being a composer

who can make their whole life, their whole living

from being a professional composer.

In 1800, Beethoven himself put on a concert in Vienna,

where he improvised brilliantly, played a piano concerto,

and conducted the first performance of his First Symphony.

While its shape owed much to Haydn and Mozart,

already Beethoven was beginning to push the boundaries of the form.

Just think, just think for a minute, what is the note in the first chord

that gives the sort of the personality of the chord?

-B-flat.

-The B-flat, OK?

In Beethoven's time is was usual to start

and end a piece of music in the home key.

But Beethoven, from the beginning, was a radical.

In his very first symphony in C-major,

he confirms the expectation of what musicians call tonality

and starts with a chord that suggests a different key altogether.

Always, in a classical style,

the feeling of tonality is very important, OK?

This is why this symphony was so revolutionary,

because the first chord already is not a normal chord.

I mean, when people heard his diminished seventh chord,

with the B-flat in the first chord of the piece,

they must have thought that this was Tahrir Square.

Really play the...

HE HUMS THE NOTE

and then stay for the whole of the length of the half note.

That's it.

The first symphony starts with a dominant seven chord,

it's quite an unusual chord to start a C-major symphony.

And today, because of where music has gone since then,

we wouldn't approach that as such a strange thing.

But when one really thinks about how strange it was at the time,

and one performs it as a strange chord, as a shocking chord,

the way our conductor does, it's still shocking.

To think of a composer composing his first symphony and starting

-his symphony that way, the audience in the hall must have gone...

-HE GASPS

While some critics hailed it as a stroke of genius,

others thought that the opening, in the wrong key,

was unsuitable for a grand symphony.

I think he had a very clear sense of order and disorder...

..but disorder fascinated him.

The great secret of this symphony is what happens in the first bar,

in a quiet chord,

Beethoven has actually opened a window to a new musical universe.

There's something about it being in 1800, it's a,

you know, it's a new symphony for a new century and beyond.

The second quarter in the fourth bar comes too soon.

One, two...

You know the great thing about classical music,

as opposed to let's say, popular music today, is that popular music

is very repetitive and it's actually designed to give us comfort

by repetitive elements that repeat again and again and again.

There's something very comforting about that.

Go flute.

He'll start from simple and build on that, so that you, you know,

we hear a musical element and the next time it comes,

the ear can already recognise it and focus on another voice

that comes on top of it.

What does this show us?

This shows us, first of all,

that the human ear is the most intelligent organ that we have,

because it really remembers vividly,

it remembers time, cos when you hear...

HE HUMS TUNE

..it must be so well thought out

that it transmits a recollection of the first chord.

Can you play the beginning of the symphony?

Now play one, shhh, 188,

and see what you remember.

OK?

It must be so clear in your mind that this is going back to

the beginning that you get the connection,

and music really gives us the possibility to connect

over long spans of times, which we cannot really do outside the music.

H.

Beethoven must have been an extraordinarily interesting human being.

He understood independence of thought was the greatest gift

one could ever have,

more than fame, material gains,

the ability to really think

this is right and this is wrong,

and this is a way I think I want to live.

Enough for today. Huh?

INDISTINCT CHATTER

How did they smell?

HE LAUGHS

Fresh.

For the last century or so, improvisation has been more

associated with jazz than classical music.

But Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were all famous for their ability

to extemporise musical pyrotechnics at the keyboard in public concerts.

So accounts of him improvising aren't just about,

how good he was at the piano,

they're about the ferocity with which he played the piano,

and about the ferocity with which he communicated,

the bounds that he was trying to break,

the fact that the piano would break strings,

the fact that the piano didn't seem big enough

to contain Beethoven's ideas or musicianship.

This was new, that was what was different.

There is a fantastic anecdote about Beethoven writing in a fervour

in this incredible outburst of creativity and ideas,

and writing so quickly that his body temperature went up

and he decided he needed to cool down and he took a bucket of water

and just poured it over himself, soiling the music in front of him,

the water going down through the floorboards.

I'm sure his downstairs neighbours were not too happy about that.

As he was working on his Second Symphony,

Beethoven made a terrifying discovery.

He'd suffered from ringing and buzzing in the ears

since he was in his late 20s.

In 1802, he realised the condition was progressive and irreversible.

Beethoven's deafness was just a gigantic trauma for him,

in his late 20s, early 30s,

when he knew he was getting progressively more deaf

and there was going to be no cure, I mean, terrifying.

And that terror is reflected in a letter he wrote

to his brothers, Carl and Johann, but didn't actually send them.

Parts of it read sort of like a suicide note, never posted,

and it was only discovered after Beethoven's death.

It's significant, though, that he kept it at all,

perhaps he kept it as a reminder that, this is how bad things were

and that actually towards the end of the life, his attitude

and the way he lived with his deafness, had changed.

The Second Symphony, while a critical success,

was still in the sound world Beethoven had inherited

from Haydn and Mozart.

But in his Third Symphony, the Eroica, finished in 1804,

he left their style behind

and single-handedly reinvented the symphony.

Beethoven, as a composer, never stays still.

And if the First Symphony opens a new universe in some ways,

the Second Symphony is the biggest orchestral piece ever written

up to that point, and the third symphony, the Eroica, is...

I mean, it's music that still sounds as if it comes, in a way,

from another planet or something.

He is absolutely finding something

that had never been found before, in this piece.

Many composers wrote nine symphonies,

we're not going to talk about Haydn who wrote 104,

or Mozart who wrote 41.

But Beethoven found a different idiom,

a different musical idiom, for want of a better word, for each symphony.

The Eroica required him to find a much larger form.

It's the first cosmic piece.

THEY ALL CHEER

Today, at the Seville rehearsals, there's a guest conductor.

It's Mina, one of the violinists

who's training to become a conductor.

I think my favourite bit on symphony is the Third, um,

because it's, for me kind of, a very revolutionary kind of music

which just kind of destroys everything that happened before

and starts a whole new, something completely new

in the history of music and the history of the orchestra.

Excuse me. Thank you. At A can you play...

HE HUMS

The size of the symphony is already much larger than anything

that had been written until then,

and the method of composition,

the complexity, is much greater.

Hey, wait!

This is A, no?

Play once, slowly, two bars before A, and see how much you can hear.

One, two, three.

You have to hear that, you have to hear that, you have to hear

the clash of the G-flat with the A-natural and the B-flat.

You have all this tension, and you know, don't push...

The complexity is, is quite extraordinary

and it is this complexity and this element of contrast

and of permanent juxtaposition of conflicting,

sometimes subversive elements,

is the very nature of the Beethoven symphonies.

There's an energy driving you through,

but the places he takes you makes almost no sense relative

to conventional ideas about where you're supposed to be

at any point in the structure of this thing.

You have to go on this journey with the players.

If you don't feel that you're being carried along

on some absolutely unstoppable tide of musical momentum,

then there's something wrong with the performance,

or you aren't engaged enough as a listener,

because that's what the music has to do, that's its reason for being.

Good, OK.

Now it's much better, it's much, bravo, Mina, very good, very good.

The form of the symphony is almost perfect, perfect.

There is some feeling of inevitability in this symphony,

you feel like every...the note that is going to be played is a must,

it could not have been any other note.

OK, let's take a break now, take a break and then do...

Very expected, but it was a very visionary,

both at the same time and I don't know how,

that's why Beethoven is Beethoven,

he's the one who could marry these elements together

without conflict, I guess, it's like the Arabs and the Israelis

play music together with no arguments, the same thing.

HE COUGHS

THEY LAUGH

Still, I am conducting.

THEY LAUGH

As Beethoven was writing his heroic symphony,

in France, Napoleon was abolishing laws of privilege.

Beethoven, 19 at the time of the French Revolution,

was inspired by these ideals.

The Third Symphony, with its vast scale

and sense of a heroic human figure at its centre

was at first dedicated to Napoleon.

Beethoven always had aristocratic patrons, but he always knew

that his imagination made his better than any of them.

Well, we know that Mozart knew that too,

he just didn't quite have the guts to tell them all the time.

Beethoven made that pretty obvious in his dealings with them,

and wanted really to be an independent artist.

So it's no coincidence, in a way, that he admired

the person who was ripping up Europe and getting rid of aristocracy

in the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon.

The crisis comes when he's writing the Eroica Symphony

and on the dedication page, he leaves, there's a huge gap,

but he...a friend comes round and he can see that

he's dedicated the symphony to Bonaparte, to Napoleon.

But on hearing that Napoleon has styled himself emperor,

he scratches out the dedication, and says,

"He's just a power-hungry aristo like the rest of them,

"just wearing different clothes."

Beethoven is quite revolutionary, in the sense that,

in the time before him,

the aesthetic of music was abstract,

the themes were quite distant, the individual was not in the picture.

Then comes Beethoven and he puts himself and his music,

his emotions, his philosophy,

and how it relates to something bigger than himself,

and this is why this music is very relevant to us still today,

maybe the themes that he's talking about are the themes of his time,

but they can be transmitted to our time as well and to our feelings.

The Third Symphony divided both critics and audience.

A reviewer wrote, "There is no lack of striking and beautiful passages,

"but the work seems often to lose itself in utter confusion.

"The public may not have been ready for this radical new work,

"but Beethoven had set a benchmark, not least for himself."

The problem with writing the Eroica Symphony is that,

what on earth do you do next as a composer?

Because if you keep doing that,

your later symphonies would probably be three hours long,

you'd have to play them in the Himalayas

and the whole world would end.

That probably wasn't going to happen,

even Beethoven couldn't quite do that.

For the Fourth Symphony,

under its apparently more conservative skin,

it's on a smaller scale,

is actually doing really strangely destabilising things.

If the Third Symphony was notable for its scale,

the opening of the Fourth took a radical new approach to harmony,

deliberately avoiding obvious resolutions

to create a sense of tension.

Now, it's won...it's really wonderful, absolutely,

it's absolutely wonderful.

Now I think we have to really, or, think as I look at you

and I hear, and not everybody's on the same thinking wavelength,

as far as the harmony's concerned.

Can you play the first bar, the first bar?

We know we are in B-flat, or we assume we are,

and look what happens on the next note.

Ah-ha, we're already, we're already somewhere else.

We could be in G-flat-major, we could be in E-flat-minor,

we could be in all sorts of things,

and it is this feeling of harmonic instability,

with an ever-regular movement of the rhythm

that creates this feeling of total chaos, I would say,

it's absolutely not, we don't know where we are.

You could easily argue that it's more daring than the Eroica

because the very, the very introduction,

Symphony in B-flat-major, starts absolutely in B-flat-minor,

and not just in a kind of jokey way,

so that the major key sounds nice when you get there,

you know, a place of sort of abject stasis and timelessness.

Let's play it once more.

Try to, really, as you play, think where the music is going,

how he makes the whole thing as unstable as possible.

So, that then when you get, can you play the beginning of the allegro.

OK? You understand what I'm saying?

All this introduction is totally unnecessary if you want,

but this sounds completely different, the symphony could start like this,

but all this introduction is precisely in order

to create this feeling of total chaos,

and then, of search more than chaos,

of search, and then when you find it, the light is there.

But for this, everybody has to be conscious

and not play even one 16th of a note mechanically. Please.

I think we are in E-flat-minor.

No, we're in B-flat-minor, huh?

Maybe G-flat-major?

'The Fourth Symphony of Beethoven is in B-flat-major.

'This is the aural home.

'So, when you start moving into tonalities'

that are not in the B-flat-major scale, like G-flat,

or F-sharp, or things which are from other keys,

maybe from G-major, maybe from A-flat, which,

all sorts of keys are in tune with it,

with it, there you get a feeling of instability.

It's going to be a repeat of the whole thing,

and now we will go into F-major, like before.

Ya, of course.

But no, no resolution.

F-sharp-major, in B-flat-major please.

You understand what I'm saying?

What Beethoven does is he shares with us

the instability of not knowing where he is,

like somebody that is lost, but somehow, at the back of his head,

he remembers his home was B-flat and he's lost in the woods, or wherever,

and then he takes every possible turn he can and doesn't find it.

And Beethoven guides us through all this, what I call search,

the search for the tonality

and he goes into all sorts of extreme regions,

that are so far away you feel you almost need a visa to go into G-flat.

And then suddenly you find yourself in dominant and you say,

here we are, you have been lost for three hours

looking in the woods and suddenly you see the house.

Now we have to ask ourselves, where is this going?

A-major.

A.

And comes the change.

See what...you understand what I'm trying to say?

When the music finally sort of blazes into that very, very fast

first movement in B-flat-major,

it's that transition from dark to light,

it's all the more thrilling because of what's happened before.

But these really dangerously dark, expressive things

he's exploring in the Fourth Symphony.

I think that Beethoven must have felt that music

had the capacity to make so many things clear.

I get the feeling from his music that he felt that music,

the music, and therefore what he was writing too,

was able to make people understand

what is a sin and what are the morals,

and what are the obligations of the human being.

Their ability and the never ending will to go on fighting

to better things, that's how he worked,

his sketch books show you what painful, tormented processes

he went through, until he found really the solution of that.

See, if you get that, if you get that, then time stands still.

If you don't get that, time doesn't stand still

and creates all sorts of tensions.

We don't need that. Two before F, two before F...

This rigour makes the music stronger than anything else I know.

And now it stops.

With rehearsals in Spain over, the orchestra prepares to perform

the Beethoven Symphonies across China.

For many of the musicians, it's their first trip to China,

and their first taste of Chinese culture.

Some of the musicians are invited to a night at the opera, Peking Opera.

It's a timely reminder that the orchestra is taking Beethoven

to a country with its own rich, cultural heritage,

and one with a very different musical tradition.

SHE SINGS

Despite the musical differences,

Barenboim's conviction is that Beethoven can speak

to the Chinese as immediately as to any Western audience.

Not so long ago, the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra from Africa,

somebody asked one of the musicians, "Wouldn't it be more to the

"point that you played your music, rather than playing our Beethoven?"

To which this African musician says,

"And what gives you to the right to say OUR Beethoven?

"He's for everybody."

Beethoven was first played by a student orchestra

in Beijing in the 1920s.

Chinese scholars responded to the idealism of Beethoven's music,

and he became known as the Holy Musician.

One phonetic translation of his name means "many fragrant treasures."

But his music was banned in the Cultural Revolution

of the '60s and '70s.

Since 1979, he's made a comeback.

I think because I'm a big fan of Barenboim,

I mean, he's a great pianist and he is also a really good conductor,

and I really like his interpretation of the Beethoven 33 sonatas,

so I came here for his interpretation of the Beethoven symphonies.

One, two, three, four.

HUMS OPENING BARS OF FIFTH SYMPHONY

Sorry.

The most famous two, or three, or four, or five, six, seven bars,

the most famous opening of a piece of music of all time.

The really important thing about it is the journey

that the whole symphony goes on,

a trajectory of minor key darkness to major key light.

Beethoven's Fifth, not surprisingly,

is the hot ticket in Shanghai tonight.

If the Eroica was the longest and loudest symphony

Beethoven had written, the Fourth, the most harmonically subtle,

in the Fifth, he went further and in the famous first movement,

stripped music down to its essentials.

In the sketches of Beethoven, you see that the process

is from complex to simplicity, not the other way round.

In other words, he would not say pa-pa-pa-paa,

how can I make it more interesting?

And then add and subtract and multiply and all this.

Not at all.

It took him a long time to come to the idea was ta-ta-ta-taa,

and if you ask most people, who never look at the score,

who don't read his score, they get such a shock from the opening

of the Beethoven Fifth and they think the whole orchestra is blazing.

Absolutely not at all, it's only strings and the clarinet.

In other words, there is a combination

of extraordinary strength and tension,

with just an extraordinary economy of means.

I love Beethoven.

The ability to take the simplest, most pure, tiny idea

and make cathedrals, structurally, out of it,

and put meaning and thoughtfulness,

the imagination, the insight,

the things you can do with two notes are just mind-blowing.

That's when you're thinking about something intellectually,

but it has also a very deep way of touching people, I believe.

The fact that Beethoven composed a work of such optimism,

despite his worsening deafness,

has led many to believe that he was writing music

that directly expressed his own struggle against adversity.

It is more accessible than the Eroica,

I would not claim that it is a better piece,

or more interesting than Eroica, but it's certainly more accessible.

And I think that when you are lucky enough

to find a way of saying something

that is very important, in a very accessible way,

then the strength of the message has no limits.

It's starting very tragic and you can maybe relate it to his...

He couldn't hear, and you can really hear in the Fifth Symphony,

the first movement, how tragic it is for him.

But then at the end, the fourth movement, is really the light,

and that he was dealing with this problem and, whatever happens,

he's going through it and he's keeping composing

and, whatever happens, there is a light there.

The thing that audiences in the 19th century

found so appealing about the Fifth Symphony, was the fact that it does

a very obvious emotional journey that we can all identify with.

We all want things to get better and we, ideally,

we want to be able to feel that we've had something to do that.

This symphony allows you to do that, it gives you that

experience in fact, you're, you're responsible for a journey

which is changing the world from

a place of storm, tension and darkness,

and transforming it into a utopia of lightness and joy.

Who doesn't want a part of that?

There's nothing, or very little, ornamental in Beethoven's music,

it's really about the substance.

You have the feeling you really get to the substance of human existence.

The Fifth Symphony was premiered in 1808, along with the Sixth.

The concert lasted four hours.

The shock people would've felt when they first heard it,

well, they would have been too knackered to experience the shock

as the concert it was first done in included the Pastoral Symphony,

the Fifth Symphony, the Choral Fantasia

and the Fourth Piano Concerto.

It was a tough night for everyone, the orchestra was under-rehearsed

and the hall was freezing, but some musicians quickly realised

that something monumental had taken place.

In his Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral,

Beethoven strode out in another new direction.

Subtitled the first movement,

Awakening Of Cheerful Feelings Upon Arrival In The Country,

he began a tradition of compositions

that were a description of something, not just pure music,

we hear a storm, preceded by a nightingale, quail and cuckoo.

What's radically new is that Beethoven strives to convey

his own deep feelings about the world around him.

With the Pastoral Symphony, it's not about nature.

What is it about?

It's about the human being, it is about the human being,

in the sense that music was in Bach's time

about the human being in relation to God,

now Beethoven has left God alone and he's now with the human being.

If you want an oversimplified statement

of Beethoven's moment in history, it is that.

Religion is gone, God is gone and now,

we are faced with own responsibility,

our own sense of morality, our own sense of justice,

and all these things that Beethoven stands for.

I think we are still living in Beethoven's world in a lot of ways.

If you think about our society today,

so much of our political society

is based on the ideals that came into being during this time,

you know, the Enlightenment,

the whole basically modern Western idea of government.

I think we're living in a time

when there are really big social upheavals.

I think Beethoven's time was quite similar,

and I think his music reflects that.

There weren't that many people who got him.

I mean, he was a very difficult person to get,

so this accounts for all the descriptions, especially in his later life,

that he would go out and take his clothes off

when he went in the woods, when he went for a walk, when he got hot.

It's a natural thing to do.

Unencumbered by having to relate to people and street urchins

getting in his way and taking the mickey out of him,

he could probably be as fully himself

when immersed in the natural world,

as he was when he was at his composing desk.

Those two environments were probably...

were ones that he could know that he could be completely himself in.

It's how man is related to nature, how the man is, is feeling,

in the face of nature.

And, yeah, the, just, depiction actually of, of those feelings

of beauty and of fear, and this is what makes this music so exciting.

Beethoven used more instruments than any previous composer of symphonies,

and he developed a thrilling dramatic charge in his music,

by the use of dynamics

and the sudden juxtaposition of loud and soft passages.

There are very more difficult parts in music out there,

I mean Mahler, Schumann etc,

but what makes Beethoven special is the fact that you have to

constantly shift gears, and you have to do it smoothly, because, I mean,

there is many different new ideas coming at you at the same time.

Also, even more importantly, the dynamic shifts in Beethoven

are very abrupt, so you can, for example,

be going along with a fortissimo and then suddenly, BOOM,

you're at piano, right.

And if you're the one violinist, you know, who is still playing forte

after the beat, you feel like a complete idiot.

It's like you're walking into a minefield,

because you never know when you're going to just hit this

dynamic moment where you have to just suddenly stop and shift gears.

In a sense, it's like you're turning on a dime the whole time.

Beethoven has an ability to deliver these kinds of radical changes

in feeling and emotions and in experiences that are unexpected.

You can be at your highest point,

you can be ten minutes later at your lowest point.

Even ten seconds later.

Yeah, it's very condensed, it's very intense.

And you have to be able to, to make those changes

and to connect with them emotionally, really quickly.

I have tried to really understand

the connection between all the indications that he'd use,

in other words,

not just to read this is a bilateral, it is piano.

What is the relationship within that, and what came about before?

How did I get here and where am I going?

I think that every text has a subtext

and it is the duty of the performer

to find for himself that subtext.

The subtext of Beethoven's music has been a moving target.

His idealism in the past has been subverted

and turned into a narrow conception of nationalism.

Beethoven was used and abused for political purposes

by all sorts of political regimes.

No other composer was used as that,

because he deals with the human condition.

Beethoven's music is human in the deepest sense of the word.

It deals in sound,

with everything that exists in the human condition,

the condition of life.

Therefore, it has to do with the human spirit.

When Beethoven completed his Seventh Symphony in 1812,

he was the most famous composer in the world.

But his personal life was a torment, not least because

of his habit of falling for aristocratic women.

Beethoven's in his early 40s, he's involved, we know,

emotionally with someone he calls the Immortal Beloved,

probably the Countess of Brentano.

Beethoven was clearly infatuated with this woman,

"Your love makes me the happiest and unhappiest man on earth."

They're very touching love letters in a way.

What that actually means about, his capacity for

consolidating that relationship, he says,

"Can we actually make this relationship work in the real world?

"Can we actually make this happen really?"

Obviously it didn't.

That obviously caused him great sadness,

but I think the question is then,

do you hear that kind of sadness in the music?

And the answer to that has to be no, you would hear any passage

of the Seventh Symphony, even that slow movement is filled with this...

It's got this sort of luminous joy about it, the Seventh Symphony.

Beethoven didn't just expand the form of the symphony.

In the Seventh, rhythm becomes ever more important,

he weaves rhythmic patterns around different sections of the orchestra,

allowing him to build a sense of unbridled musical energy.

It's too fast.

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

The 16th is too short.

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

And....

He manages out of a very small unit, for example, just a rhythm,

that lasts half a bar out of this small motif

to create a whole movement based on developing this tiny entity

into bigger parts.

For example, in the first movement of the Seventh,

it's basically just this one rhythm

and the way this movement develops, with all the varieties,

but the rhythm is always there,

he was probably the first one to do that.

See, we'll play...

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

Once more, please, once more.

The Seventh, Wagner called it the apotheosis of dance,

it is absolutely THE rhythm symphony.

Rhythm is so important.

The important thing, of course, is then when you play sustained music,

to have an iron rhythm and silky sound, if you want.

It's awfully difficult to do and it's awfully difficult

for everybody to concentrate all the time on doing it,

and the technical difficulties of doing it softly

and then loudly, are so different.

Most times you hear it wrong, it would be...

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

String six.

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

You play...

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

How he rehearses is, is also his personality.

He's rationalistic and rigorous, yet emotional

and has feeling and shows feelings and it's both of these things,

very strongly, that's what makes him who he is, I would say.

Six.

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

No, no! You played...

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

What is this?

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

You don't want him to be angry with you.

It's not, it's not a nice feeling, no, no.

But that's who he is, you know, it's,

it's like, I think he loves this orchestra and it feels like

that's his baby and he's treating us like his own kids.

And he wants it to be the best.

No, no, no.

No, impossible, impossible, we're...

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

You don't get to show, please try and concentrate,

I can't say that every two bars.

Four bars before H, four bars before H.

If he sees a musician in the orchestra who is not 100% engaged

on his own to give everything that he has,

he'll be extremely upset and that person...

-And you don't want to see him upset.

-You do not want.

SHE LAUGHS

You do not want to be the person

when he shows you the door, you know?

Is there a special reason why you don't vibrate on the long note?

I mean, if it is, if you're tired, this is fine,

but if it's a conception, it's wrong, OK? And...

With this orchestra,

do you behave differently than you would of a...?

No, I'm harsh with everybody.

HE LAUGHS

Uncouth is the word.

I mean, we've played also Schoenberg,

and we've played Tchaikovsky, we've played many things.

But when you play Beethoven there's a discipline that's required,

which is also required in the others,

but here you can't ever afford to lose 1% of it,

because once you lose it, the whole rigour of the pieces are gone

and then it just sounds like nice music, which it shouldn't.

There should always be a rationality behind it in Beethoven,

it's always also the head.

In the slow movement of the Seventh,

you feel the art of orchestration more obviously than in others,

because you feel the music walking through the orchestra.

It starts with the violas and the cellos and then

comes in the melody and then it goes to the winds etc,

and you feel as if the music

is almost taking the shape of the orchestra.

This is probably the first time where one feels

the art of orchestration, I wouldn't say as an end in itself,

but it's a very obvious means that he uses.

Building a movement and having one high point, there is something

else in the human experience that's sort of parallel to that,

the sort of build up of tension and the great release of tension.

And I think that, I think there is a very strong parallel

and I remember concerts where we did that especially well

and there is a real orgasmic element in that.

And, you know, music is a... we really do touch the audience

when we play, music actually touches us physically,

the sound waves actually touch and I think,

if you really look at it from a different perspective, you know,

playing a great bit of a symphony

can be quite tantalising in that way.

People talk about getting goosebumps in a performance,

that's surreal,

the real butterfly feeling in your stomach is the greatest,

when you have this fully crafted, fully skilled way of writing

that Beethoven possesses.

There are things like this in life that do not age,

they don't belong to a dimension of time in any way,

and I think Beethoven is one of them.

It just lives everywhere all the time, it's a monument,

it's a wonder.

There is inner strength within the music itself,

and when you play, you transmit to the audience, a certain kind of,

of energy, which they can't only hear, but they feel it too.

It's...I mean, you can hear it in a recording, yes,

but in a live performance, where you see people moving and sweating,

that also adds to the, it's the creation of the...

Of a piece of music at the moment.

Think of Beethoven's image in popular culture

and the word serious or even tormented comes to mind,

rather than humorous.

But Beethoven was far from being the misery guts some people imagine.

Beethoven, he looks kind of existentially grumpy.

This guy does not look like somebody who had a laugh.

Well, that is absolutely not the case,

he was a funny person, Beethoven,

and there are lots of descriptions of Beethoven's smile.

That, to me, is just one of the most wonderful ideas.

If you imagine one of those wild-haired, wild-eyed,

staring old portraits of Beethoven, and just imagine him smiling,

and the description of perfectly white teeth that he had

and when he smiled he said, you know,

there were accounts where the whole room would sort of light up.

He gets a greeting card from his brother, Johann,

on the card it says, "Johann Beethoven, Land Owner,"

and Beethoven signs it on the other side,

"Ludwig van Beethoven, Brain Owner."

That should change your idea of who Beethoven is,

there is wit in him and wit in his music too.

The Eighth Symphony, completed in 1812,

was smaller in scale than the five that preceded it.

It was written at a time when Beethoven's relationship with

his land-owning brother had reached a low ebb, as had his health.

He could no longer hear well enough to perform or conduct,

and yet the Eighth is full of jaunty musical humour.

One of the greatest pleasures for me and treasures for me

to find in his music is that he has an amazing sense of humour,

he's actually much more of an optimist,

if you look at his music, one by one, than Mozart.

Beethoven had written eight symphonies in 12 years,

but it was another 12 years before his monumental

Ninth Symphony was premiered.

To many, it's his towering musical achievement.

Good morning.

The orchestra Beethoven called for in the Ninth Symphony

was double the size of that used in his First,

written 25 years earlier.

Beethoven had created the modern symphony orchestra,

and vastly expanded the range of emotions

that a symphony was capable of expressing.

OK, beginning of the second movement, please.

The last fermata before the trio.

HE HUMS THE RHYTHM

Are we clear?

For the first time in the history of the symphony,

Beethoven added a choir for the last movement, the famous Ode To Joy.

It is as if, in the end, the music was not enough for him

and he needed the text and the words.

My individual feeling is that he used the text and the chorus

and the singers in order to make his human idea more accessible,

because the associations, of course, are much easier when you have a text.

Go! Go!

THE CHORISTER SINGS

The choir at the end of the Ninth Symphony

isn't just a symbol of universal brotherhood,

it has to actually enact that, it has to be that.

I mean, the choir is the choir of humanity,

there should be no difference.

It's an unbelievably musically ambitious thing,

but humanly, what it's doing is just cosmically ambitious as well.

The tour culminates in a performance of the Ninth,

which has attained almost mystical status,

ever since its premiere in 1824, three years before Beethoven died.

The stated aim of the concert is to promote peace

between North and South Korea, divided since 1950.

The choice of music is symbolic.

The Ninth Symphony was played at the fall of the Berlin Wall

and by the student protestors in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989.

This is Beethoven's legacy, he wrote symphonies

not just for entertainment, but to try to change the world,

not that his music's idealism has always been taken

in the spirit he intended.

You can see the barbed wire.

The idea that Beethoven's Ninth is one of the most abused ideas ever.

If you take German politics alone, was used by Bismarck,

was used by Hitler, it was used Ulbricht in the East German Republic,

it gives the message all people will be brothers, with some exceptions.

For the Ninth,

the orchestra is joined by the National Choir of South Korea.

Don't wait for the politicians, be ahead of them.

No matter what cynical purposes his music may have been put to,

its humanitarian spirit is hard to suppress.

Beethoven continued to, admire the French Revolution,

the ideas is represents, he was a very political person.

I think Beethoven had these great ideas of universal values

and the universal brotherhood of man.

And it's quite extraordinary that, that the people who came up

with these philosophies, basically were thinking

about the difference between Vienna and Munich, and whereas today,

we grapple with these values as, you know, with the difference between

Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Beijing and New York, which,

the differences are much larger,

and it's much more challenging to find universal values

and universal truths, that we can all agree on.

And that is something in the Divan that we live this issue

when we work together, the periods we spend together.

It's very easy to, to see the differences,

and it's often much harder to develop the common elements

and the common interests, and the common values.

Because he was too deaf by that stage to conduct the piece,

he set the speeds and Michael Umlauf conducted,

did the real conducting.

And there is a...there's, one of those

supremely touching anecdotes about Beethoven's life,

which is that, at the end the symphony,

his head was still in the score, and he had to be turned round,

by one of the singers to accept the applause of the audience.

Beethoven starts the Ninth by destabilising the home key,

creating a feeling of insecurity.

In an early draft of the first movement,

he wrote on the score the single word, despair.

We know it's in D, but we don't know if it's major or minor.

And Beethoven, he's really holding our attention on a string,

we don't know what we're hearing,

there's a certain ambiguity about the way it starts

and the way he constructs the whole movement

out of that place of uncertainty is just extraordinary.

The Ninth Symphony begins, you don't know where you are,

it's an open chord in the horns and then trembling strings.

Beethoven sometimes looked for the way...

..to make you feel unstable,

because it is from the unstableness

that you come to the great sense of stability.

This is what I mean

when I say that Beethoven had a great sense of moral responsibility.

He knew that everything that was dark, negative, unstable,

had to be solved.

It is a very positive use of music.

Usually, in every aspect of culture,

you have people who summarise everything that's been said until then

and summarise it so completely that it is...

That the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Or you have those who show the way into something new.

But Beethoven was able to do both,

like very few people in the history of music.

And in comes a slow movement,

which is just this, kind of, moment of humanity

with this beautifully lyrical lines, long lines

and the pulse of the music is slow and sort of very broad.

And then the harmonic changes

where all of a sudden the violas come in

with a sort of B section and how Beethoven creates

the expectation for this harmonic modulation,

where the music peters out

and kind of, the audience, we don't know where we are,

and he creates this completely ambiguous and foggy atmosphere.

And all of a sudden out of that comes this theme,

if we would have played this theme by itself,

it would never have the same quality as the preparation for it.

And Beethoven is really the master of that.

Sometimes he needs ten minutes of music to make a point,

but he needs to set it up and he does that so beautifully,

and it's so beautifully notated

and the directions for the performer are so meticulous

and when one follows them, something extraordinary happens.

I believe very, very strongly in the universality of music,

where the music belongs to everybody in this sense,

but everybody who is sensitive is able to take this message

and make it part of his thinking,

or emotional baggage.

It's part of you, part of your possessions,

this is also part of your inner possessions,

and I strongly believe that this is the case everywhere.

Written by the German poet, Friedrich Schiller in 1785,

the Ode to Joy is a paean to universal brotherhood.

I think it speaks to everyone on a very, very personal level,

because we all have our own struggles.

The Ode To Joy, that triumph of the human spirit over all,

you know, human struggles, basically,

and so how much more appropriate would the struggle between,

in the politics, between the Arab and Israeli's conflict?

It gives me hope to play Beethoven, you know,

and especially in the end, with the triumphant Ninth Symphony,

that maybe in the end there's hope.

It's such a build up that you then wonder,

the Ode To Joy actually begins,

you have the feeling that you've gone through a journey

of so many emotions that this then gets a really deep meaning.

You know, you can't really put it into words,

because if you could put it into words,

he would have written a book, he wouldn't have written a symphony.

It's just, it's just miraculous, it's really...

I think it's one of these things that you listen to and really

feel like this is one of, if not the high point of human creation,

and it really sums up how amazing what we can do as a species is.

I think there are few other examples

of human creation that are that engulfing.

There is something about the courage,

he went for what he felt was impossible,

and he looked for the opposite, as it were,

almost looked for them in order to overcome them.

And I think this is something that has spoken

to the hearts of millions of people for centuries.

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