At the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven couldn't hear the applause.
On 7 May 1824, Vienna heard Beethoven's Ninth for the first time. The almost completely deaf composer stood on stage beating time, while the players had been told to follow the real conductor. By one account a young singer had to turn him round to see the audience cheering.
London's Philharmonic Society commissioned the symphony in 1817, but Beethoven did most of the work between late 1822 and February 1824. It broke new ground: it was the first time a major composer had brought singers into a symphony. Its finale sets Friedrich Schiller's poem 'Ode to Joy' for four soloists and chorus.
Beethoven had thought of premiering it in Berlin, feeling that Viennese taste had turned to Rossini, but a petition from admirers kept it in Vienna. The premiere at the Theater am Kärntnertor was his first stage appearance in a decade, and the packed audience included Franz Schubert and the chancellor Metternich. The orchestra was almost twice the usual size, drawn from several ensembles, and had just two complete rehearsals.
The official conductor was the theatre's Kapellmeister, Michael Umlauf. Two years earlier he had watched Beethoven's attempt to conduct a rehearsal of his opera Fidelio collapse, so he told the performers to ignore the composer. Beethoven sat by the stage giving tempos, turning pages and beating time for an orchestra he could not hear. Testimonies differ over when, but at one point he was still conducting several bars after the music had stopped, and the 20-year-old contralto Caroline Unger gently turned him to face the applause. The performance may have been rough, but it was a triumph.
The Ninth now belongs to the world. An instrumental version of the 'Ode to Joy' became the Anthem of Europe; Leonard Bernstein conducted it in Berlin at Christmas 1989 to celebrate the fall of the Wall, singing 'Freedom' instead of 'Joy'; and in 2001 the manuscript became the first musical score on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. There is also a legend that the compact disc's 74-minute length was chosen to fit it. The CD's co-developer at Philips recalls that the size came from a commercial compromise with Sony, with a 1951 Furtwängler recording of the Ninth brought forward as a convenient justification.
Source: Wikipedia — Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven) · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
