BATTLING TOWARDS UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD Beethoven wrote his first eight symphonies within the space of a dozen or so years, between 1799 and 1812. Another twelve would elapse before he completed his next, and last, symphony, and yet Beethoven had first aimed to set Schiller s Ode to Joy which was to become the kernel of the Ninth Symphony s last movement as far back as 1793. The notion was put aside, but then born again in December 1808, when in an impulsive decision to provide a rousing finale to a monster concert of his own works including the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Fourth Piano Concerto Beethoven composed his Choral Fantasy within a matter of days, leaving the solo piano introduction blank, for him to improvise on the night. The Fantasy sets a sub-Schillerian text that was probably written by Christoph Kuffner, and to a melody that Beethoven later took as a starting-point when crafting the main theme of the Ninth Symphony s choral finale. His sketchbooks show how he worked it over and over again to find the right idiom of stepwise simplicity that would not so much answer the fearful complexities of the sym-phony s first three movements, as dismiss them: O friends, no more these sounds! How much more vividly does the Ninth Symphony emerge not as a harbinger of what Beethoven could not know, but as a distillation of what he had learnt and experienced when it is played at or near the composer s requested speeds. Senza vibrato, the Ninth s opening oscillation between A and E becomes no more or less quixotic than Beethoven s refusal to confirm a key-centre at the opening of the First and Fourth Symphonies. This is not the work of a dreamer lost in his own visions, as romantic and modern readings of the late piano sonatas and quartets would have us picture him, but one with powerfully direct and still controversial ideas to communicate. Very often in Beethoven s late music those ideas seem to embody impatience with integration and instead set a premium on the energy generated by conflicting opposites. For all the grand designs of the Ninth s outer movements, there are more strictly musical messages of revolution to be heard in the welding of seemingly irreconcilable elements of scherzo rhythm and fugue subject within the second movement, and in the similarly unlikely marriage of contrasting ideas to make a slow movement that generates tension through their juxtaposition rather than the gradual intensification prescribed by Classical best practice a tension quite transmuted if the Adagio is performed as if it were by Bruckner rather than by Beethoven. Sir John Eliot Gardiner s recording appears to echo the conviction articulated by another adherent of Beethoven s metronome markings, Michael Gielen: to attack traditions of listening armed with nothing more than what is immanent in the piece, with the beginning of recognition, with the violence of the performance . Little is more violent in music than the horror fanfare (as Wagner called it) that opens the Ninth Symphony s finale, and perhaps no thinker was so modern at the time as Beethoven, when he demolished the fourth wall and prefaced the poet s voice with the composer s: O friends, no more these sounds! Is it a plea or a command? I recall a BBC Prom staged a couple of years after this recording, in which Gardiner and his forces dispensed with chairs and performed a Ninth charged with fierce urgency like the Passover, that Jewish festival of freedom: standing together, celebrating the ritual in haste, as if ready to flee or to fight. And for all that, thanks initially to Wagner s catalytic energy as conductor and advocate, we are always and everywhere to give thanks for the Ninth as a reinforcement of brotherhood, what kind of universal celebration can it be in which he w