Column: Ode to Joy

On a recent visit to the city, we plunged back into one of New York’s quintessential cultural experiences: orchestral music at Carnegie Hall.

Not just any music, but Beethoven’s first and last symphonies (with a new modern piece in between). Not just any orchestra, but the Philadelphia Orchestra. And not just any conductor, but Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the hotshot Montreal-born music director who leads several orchestras (including the Metropolitan Opera) and is known for his flowing, energetic, mesmerizing style.

Twenty years ago, when we were new to the city, trips to Carnegie Hall were annual events, just as we saw all the top Broadway plays every season. That activity tapered off over the years as Broadway shows became expensive extravaganzas and the Carnegie visits seemed less mandatory.

Then came the plague and all bets were off. As the city has slowly opened up again, going to this venue for these performances fell into the mandatory category.

We weren’t the only ones circling this date on the calendar.

The stately hall, at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, was a benign mob scene. A sea of yellow cabs and hundreds of people in multiple lines snaking around the block. But the lines were moving steadily with ample staff checking tickets and denoting vaccine status with blue wristbands before herding us into the grand music mecca.

Our tickets were pretty high up and to the right, but there are no bad seats at the Isaac Stern Auditorium. The red-jacketed ushers were pros and the whole seating process was pain-free. The men’s room was within range and the lights went down about 10 minutes late.

All three pieces require large musical assemblies, and the black-clad Philadelphia Symphonic Choir filled the width of the stage behind the instrumentalists. It was a majestic musical army.

The two symphonies could not be more different. Symphony No. 1 (1799-1800) is from Beethoven’s early “Classical” period and in comparison to No. 9 (1822-1824) seems utterly lucid and filled with pleasant melodies.

No. 9 is a wild, almost sacramental explosion of sounds and themes. (I’m no music critic, but when it comes to Beethoven, I can at least claim a substantial familiarity; back in the day, I steadfastly purchased Time Life Books’ complete Beethoven works, on vinyl LPs of course, and methodically listened to each one, many repeatedly.)

For instance, I knew before I read the blurbs in the evening’s Playbill, that the Ninth had astonished and confused listeners from the outset. It is based on a long poem by Friedrich Schiller that Beethoven wanted to set to music: the “Ode to Joy” (1785). The poem states that in a new age the old ways will no longer divide people. This optimistic worldview has over the centuries been criticized as naïve, although it would take a cold heart not to be moved by the famous Ode to Joy tune late in a symphony.

The Ninth, given its sweep and power, has surfaced at an interesting variety of times and places. According to the Playbill notes, as the ultimate “feel good” piece, it has been used to open the Olympic Games and celebrate Hitler’s birth-day. Protesters played recordings of it in Tiananmen Square as did celebrants of the Berlin Wall coming down.

In between the symphonies was a mournful piece commissioned as a dialogue with No. 1 and No.9. It conjures a meeting between Beethoven and an artist painting his scenes in a Spanish church. (Huh?) With many exceptions, I suppose, I’d bet your life that most in the hall were looking at their watches.

As the Ninth came to its conclusion, you could feel the hall ready to burst, and burst barely conveys the explosive rapture of the crowd that seemed to shake the walls. I have read over the years that many have wondered whether another symphony should have been written after the Ninth. Amid the holy hollering in Carnegie Hall, it seemed like a most lucid question.

As always, getting a cab after Carnegie is not happening. But kitty-corner from the hall is the subway, and home is a four-stop, two-train journey. And we made it back safe, which in these crazy days is no longer a rock-solid proposition.

A few days later I spot a review in the Times of the concert. As I read my jaw literally drops. The reviewer (not a familiar name) is taking the orchestra and Nézet-Séguin to task for perceived lapses in interpretation and approach to the Beethoven. He showers adulation on the middle piece, as unappealing and distant a musical composition as I have heard in many moons.

Given the chance, I would drop a water balloon on this guy.