"Ode to Joy" (German: "An die Freude" [an diː ˈfʁɔʏdə]) is an ode written in the summer of 1785 by the German poet, playwright, and historian Friedrich Schiller. It was published the following year in the German magazine Thalia. In 1808, a slightly revised version changed two lines of the first stanza and omitted the last stanza.
"Ode to Joy" is best known for its use by Ludwig van Beethoven in the final (fourth) movement of his Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824. Beethoven's text is not based entirely on Schiller's poem, and it introduces a few new sections. Beethoven's melody, but not Schiller's text, was adopted as the "Anthem of Europe" by the Council of Europe in 1972 and later by the European Union. Rhodesia's national anthem from 1974 until 1979, "Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia", also used Beethoven's melody.
Contents
The poem
Schiller wrote the first version of the poem when he was staying in Gohlis, Leipzig. In 1785, from the beginning of May until mid-September, he stayed with his publisher, Georg Joachim Göschen, in Leipzig and wrote "An die Freude" along with his play Don Carlos.
Schiller later made some revisions to the poem, which was then republished posthumously in 1808, and it was this latter version that forms the basis for Beethoven's setting. Despite the lasting popularity of the ode, Schiller himself regarded it as a failure later in his life, going so far as to call it "detached from reality" and "of value maybe for us two, but not for the world, nor for the art of poetry" in an 1800 letter to his longtime friend and patron Christian Gottfried Körner (whose friendship had originally inspired him to write the ode).
Lyrics
The lines marked with * were revised in the posthumous 1808 edition as follows:
The original, later eliminated last stanza reads
Academic speculation remains as to whether Schiller originally wrote an "Ode to Freedom" (An die Freiheit) and changed it to "To Joy". The American journalist Alexander Wheelock Thayer wrote in his biography of Beethoven, "the thought lies near that it was the early form of the poem, when it was still an 'Ode to Freedom' (not 'to Joy'), which first aroused enthusiastic admiration for it in Beethoven's mind". The musicologist Alexander Rehding points out that even Bernstein, who used "Freiheit" in two performances in 1989, called it conjecture whether Schiller used "joy" as code for "freedom" and that scholarly consensus holds that there is no factual basis for this myth.
Use of Beethoven's setting
Over the years, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" has been used both as a protest song/melody, national anthem and a piece of remembrance.
Known as the Anthem of Europe, it has been the anthem of the Council of Europe since 1972, and the anthem of the European Union since 1985.
In 1957, the blacklisted American opera singer Paul Robeson sang “Ode to Joy” at a festival for 5,000 miners in Wales, but as his passport had been revoked, he couldn't leave the USA, so he sang it via a transatlantic telephone line.
The melody was used for the national anthem of Ian Smith's Rhodesia between 1974 and 1979, called Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia.
During the Military dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990), female protesters gathered outside prisons to sing “Himno a la Alegría,” a Spanish version of “Ode to Joy,” to bring hope to those being held inside.
Chinese students broadcast it at 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
It was performed in Berlin on Christmas Day 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the choir and orchestra members from both East and West Germany, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
“Ode to Joy” is performed at Daiku (Number Nine) concerts in Japan every December after the 2011 tsunami.
It has inspired impromptu performances at public spaces by musicians in many countries worldwide, including Choir Without Borders' 2009 performance at a railway station in Leipzig, to mark the 20th and 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hong Kong Festival Orchestra's 2013 performance at a Hong Kong mall, and performance in Sabadell, Spain.
A 2013 documentary, Following the Ninth, directed by Kerry Candaele, follows its continuing popularity.
Other musical settings
Other musical settings of the poem include:
Christian Gottfried Körner (1786)
Carl Friedrich Zelter (1792), for choir and accompaniment, later rewritten for different instrumentations.
Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1796)
Ludwig-Wilhelm Tepper de Ferguson (1796)
Johann Friedrich Hugo von Dalberg (1799)
Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg (1803)
Franz Schubert's song "An die Freude", D 189, for voice, unison choir and piano. Composed in May 1815, Schubert's setting was first published in 1829 as Op. post. 111 No. 1. The 19th century Gesamt-Ausgabe included it as a lied in Series XX, Volume 2 (No. 66). The New Schubert Edition groups it with the part songs in Series III (Volume 3).
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1865), for solo singers, choir and orchestra in a Russian translation
Pietro Mascagni cantata "Alla gioia" (1882), Italian text by Andrea Maffei
"Seid umschlungen, Millionen!" (1892), waltz by Johann Strauss II
Z. Randall Stroope (2002), for choir and four-hand piano
Victoria Poleva (2009), for soprano, mixed choir and symphony orchestra