magnificence of the 9th

Often do I wish I were alive in Vienna when Beethoven strode this earth and heard heaven’s symphony. An imagination that could come up with the 9th Symphony, ‘An die Freude,’ must, in itself, have been magical. But to weave it all together as he did, to take in the complexity, to take the myriad instruments and performers and to blend all their individual notes, their thoughts, feelings and their individualities themselves, creating a magnificent melody – now that’s real magic. But that’s not all.

Not only does the thought behind it all come through, not only the emotions, not only the yearning for brotherhood of mankind and, if I may borrow from the French whom he admired, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, but also the sheer intensity of that desire, the energy of the mind that thought this up – it’s there in the creschendo and it hits you like nothing else.

Anyone who has had the privilege to hear the 9th in peace and quiet must have realised all these things. To think that a single man dreamt of all this and created it is to reaffirm faith in the infinite capacity for creation we humans have. I wish I could have listened to him talk, could have seen him work. There are no words magnificent enough to describe the 9th’s magnificence.