Ode to Joy

The story of the piece

Friedrich Schiller wrote his poem "To Joy" in 1785. Beethoven planned to set it to music very early: in January 1793 Bartholomäus Fischenich, a professor in Bonn, told Schiller's wife that the twenty-two-year-old composer meant to do so. He wrote the music to those lines more than thirty years later, in the finale of his Ninth Symphony in D minor, Op. 125. The symphony was first performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824, at the Kärntnertor Theatre. By then Beethoven was almost completely deaf.

In the finale the melody first appears without words. The first to play it right through are the cellos and double basses alone, quietly and without accompaniment. Then other instruments take up the theme, the orchestra grows, and only after that do the voices come in: the baritone's first few words are Beethoven's own, and from there the soloists and the choir sing Schiller's lines. The melody still lives without words today: since 1972 it has been the anthem of the Council of Europe, since 1985 the anthem of the European Union, and the anthem has no text.

Beethoven left no piano version, so the course plays our own arrangement: Beethoven's melody and our accompaniment. In lesson 01 you play the theme in C major. Almost all of it moves in steps, from one key to the next, and the right hand stays on five white keys for the whole lesson: C, D, E, F, G. The low note in bar 12 is taken by the left hand. In lesson 06 the theme is in D major, as the cellos play it in the symphony, and the left hand plays chords under it.