Beethoven NEUN

“O friends, not these notes! Let us instead sing more pleasant and joyful ones!” This is unheard of! After the first three movements of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, someone actually raises their voice and starts singing. In a symphony! That had never happened before. Already at the beginning of the final movement, the music had stalled; it seemed as if it could go no further. The themes of the three preceding movements were played once more and then discarded again. No progress. Instead, cascades of sound rush down, in which Richard Wagner claimed to recognize a “fanfare of terror.” And suddenly, out of nowhere, singing voices and a choir join in and lead us all – orchestra, soloists, choir, and audience – per aspera ad astra: out of the dead end and into the finale. Joy! Joy! Joy! It is unimaginable what effect this must have had at the symphony’s premiere in 1824. It is also unimaginable that the completely deaf composer conducted the performance – or rather, pretended to conduct – while the “real” musical director stood a few meters away from him. In many ways, the path to the theater is not far from there. In Ode to Silence, which Cordula Däuper and Bas Wiegers have developed through their exploration of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and other compositions, the focus is on the in-between, on the spaces in between. On the silence that separates the individual notes from one another and makes them distinguishable. It is also about the silence that separated and isolated the deaf composer from his fellow human beings. But of course, it is also about the sky-storming, the heroically triumphant. And about the utopia that all people become brothers and sisters. “This kiss to the whole world!”