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Beethoven's Ninth!

Category: Music

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Few — if any — works of the orchestral repertoire inspire such fervor, but then, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is no ordinary piece of music. It was revolutionary when it premiered, as it was the first symphony that included a chorus and vocal soloists, performing a slightly altered version of Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.”

And it endures because in this work Beethoven was grappling with some of the most fundamental aspects of humanity, with music that can evoke myriad ideas and emotions — tenderness to terror, sympathy to scorn, delight to despair, calm to chaos — culminating in an anthemic hymn to the possibility of universal brotherhood.