Last weekend on the cavernous Zellerbach Hall stage we closed our Sweet Honey in the Rock collaboration singing "Joy in the Morning," repeating "Joy to the Lord" dozens of times as the wonderful women of Sweet Honey moved to the music in front of us, urging on and urged on by the enthusiastic crowd. This weekend we will invoke the same word--Freude this time, again and again--as we join the Napa Valley Symphony to sing Beethoven's Ninth up in Yountville. The last week has catalyzed many reflections about the piece, its political baggage, and my uneasy relationship to it. This process is especially poignant to me as I contemplate that the day I began writing this, April 8th, would have been my father's 93rd birthday, and it is his experience that so strongly affected my own.
This will be my third opportunity to sing the 9th Symphony, and the second time I've actually sung it. The first chance was at Pomona College back in 1978, when the great Robert Shaw came and conducted with the Atlanta Symphony, and all the local college choirs joined to provide the chorus; I would miss that one when I was accepted to do a Study Abroad that semester. My old roommate summed up the experience--"Shaw heard us struggling with these lines and said, 'Beethoven didn't write this for mortals, he wrote it for gods! You must become gods!'"--at least that's what I recall from an aerogram he scribbled to me at Oxford. The next opportunity was in 1994, the first year I sang with PME, a true baptism of fire: Jeffrey Thomas asked for people to beef up his American Bach Soloists chorus, having put together an authentic-instruments band for the Ninth as a capper to the Berkeley Early Music Festival [Recently released on CD]. Everyone else had sung the Ninth multiple times before, and though I enjoyed the steep learning curve with no note-bashing, I don't remember having much time to ponder subtleties before we were recording and performing at First Congregational Church with a world-class group and the World's Loudest Timpanist.
The Ninth has always occupied an odd, even disturbing place in my musical world: my father was born in Breslau (then part of Germany) during the first World War, part of a very musical academic family that played string quartets, with impromptu musical soirees a focus of the their social life. My grandfather and my father played violin and viola, his older brother Otto, a fine cellist, studied composition with Hindemith among others, and my grandmother was a talented pianist. But she was technically Jewish: thus, as the Nazis consolidated their power, everyone would either die or emigrate. My grandfather succumbed to an aneurysm in 1935, at about the age I am now, having lost his academic post to a Party functionary, already clearly seeing the inevitable destruction of German culture and the co-opting of the remaining artists and musicians. Because my grandfather had served with distinction in the first war, Otto was still allowed to join the German Army, under a special rule: as my father bitterly put it, "he could become cannon fodder" and be killed in the Ukraine in 1942. The three remaining siblings and my Grossmutter all ended up in California--a scholar, a professor, a social worker and an artist--and I still have a huge stash of musty piano scores and sheet music waiting to be sorted and given away. Even from my mother's side I got a negative attitude about the Ninth--I think from her small-town Indiana perspective it evoked too many newsreels of goose-stepping troops and waving flags, as well as an undefined resentment of how a supposedly civilized culture could fall so far so fast.
Thus my earliest memories of hearing the Ninth are tainted by a strange sense of shame and ambivalence, by the knowledge that this sublime music had been co-opted to set the mood for gigantic and bombastic Nazi party functions. More broadly and tragically, every quality that my father saw as German--diligence, respect for hard work, creativity, discipline, intellect--was turned to serve evil rather than good. He did not just blame the Party, he blamed his old country as well, for becoming what one scholar has termed "Hitler's willing executioners," though after joining the American Army he helped bring some of those leaders to a form of justice as a translator before the Nuremberg tribunals.
Even as the soaring lines and poetry moved some deep part of me, I felt the shadow of this history, and recently I have been researching the specific ways in which the SS and the SA bent the Ode to Joy to their purposes despite Beethoven's distinctly non-Aryan physiognomy and heritage. Of course, the Nazis' perversion of music mirrored their cynical manipulation of language, from KdF, "Kraft durch Freude" (Strength through Joy, the name of the Nazi recreational-cultural movement), through the bitterly ironic "Arbeit macht frei" (work makes you free) that adorned the entrances to the camps of no return, where many relatives died for their Jewishness, or killed themselves to avoid being killed. Anyone who has seen Leni Riefenstahl's films like "Triumph of the Will" or "Olympiade" knows how frighteningly beautiful the Nazis' choreographed multimedia spectacles truly were--and how seductive their combination of music, movement, and message must have been to susceptible participants.
Last Saturday as I watched Sweet Honey moving in front of me I could not help thinking that their dancing was "ecstatic" in the etymological sense of the word (from the Greek "extasis," meaning taken outside of themselves by this music). As I write this I realize that during the very semester I wasn't singing Beethoven with Shaw I was studying Renaissance Neoplatonism, and learning that this "ecstatic" potential was the very reason why Puritan religious leaders frowned on music: it opened a line to the soul that was beyond reason, too direct and therefore too dangerous to be deployed without careful constraints. With the suspension of reason, participants and listeners were susceptible to the infusion of ideas without conscious control--something we find laughable in the context of "Dirty Dancing" but menacing in the context of Nuremberg or Berlin.
Athletes sometimes know this feeling of "extasis" too, the "runner's high," the suffusion of feel-good chemicals produced by the body as it exercises at a sufficiently intense level: you are lifted up, you feel supernaturally strong, you sometimes get the sense that you are simultaneously outside of yourself looking in, and inhabiting your body in a way that doesn't happen in your everyday existence.
Rehearsing the Ninth this spring with Lynne has been an intensely athletic experience: more so than other choruses, we are trying to put across the words and the notes with greater clarity than audiences are used to getting in the customary wall-of-sound presentations. For the first time many of us are actually hearing some of the lines and words that otherwise get lost to poor diction. Even this aspect has brought its odd connections, as being "the German pronunciation guy" makes me self-conscious about my limits: thanks to a year in Germany when I was nine years old, and years of listening to my Dad and his relatives, my German is more by ear than by rule.
The rehearsals are a great workout for both the vocal apparatus and the mind: Start with the difficulty of spitting out lines like "Ihr / stürzt-nie / der-Mil / li-onen" (do you bow down, you millions?) without letting Germanic consonant-clusters tangle you up. Add the sopranos' sustained high A's, toss in the preposterous alto and tenor lines written by a deaf man whose inner soundtrack still resounded with unrealized ideas, and don't forget the bass lines that mix marching-song bravado and gravity-defying series of high E's and F's as we seek God "über'm Sternenzelt" (above the star-canopy). But it is not enough to get to the notes and sustain them: just as demanding are the changes of dynamic force (crescendos, decrescendos, and sforzandos) that Lynne has been pushing us to honor and perfect, not content to do the usual Beethovenian full-volume blast-away. Recognizing this aerobic demand, we've "run the program" straight through far more times than any of us has in previous performances. While some rehearsal sessions addressed only small chunks and technical problems, taking apart particular measures or sections, we've had time to execute the whole piece at different tempo markings, even as fatigue takes its toll, exactly as an athlete has to run repeat-intervals and train under game conditions. I think the results will be stunning.
The connection between the physical and the spiritual has always been strong for me--and again I honor my father the classics professor by recognizing the common root of "respiration" and "inspiration," to breathe, to be suffused with something. In multiple senses, then, we are bringing a "spiritual" dimension to this familiar work, singing it with the rhythmic conviction and technical commitment that we brought to the Negro Spirituals last season. There's a line from the old movie "Chariots of Fire" that captures it best for me: before the Olympics the devout Scottish middle-distance runner says, "God meant for me to run, and when I run fast, I feel His pleasure." Robert Shaw was right: singing the Ninth well can take you, even fleetingly, to a plane beyond the mortal, and can connect us to something or someone long gone, as it has for me.
Working on the Ninth this spring--and placing it in the context of the Joy we experienced with Sweet Honey--has redeemed this piece of music in ways I did not expect, from the resonance of the words themselves, to the unexpected rhythmic and dynamic complexities, to the underlying architecture of the layers of instruments and voices. When everything is clicking, whether in rehearsal or performance, when everyone from seasoned veteran to newest member is giving the music their all, a chorus of voices becomes a conduit for some bigger magic, we feel a Pleasure, a Joy, a transcendent Freude, that takes us beyond ourselves to a world of love without oppression or pretension, a celebration of the uplifting and healing power of music. If we can communicate something of this pleasure to the audience, pass along this schöne Götterfunken (beautiful divine spark), then all our hard work will have truly succeeded.
John Stenzel
April 2008