The most anticipated concert is the Suntory 10,000 Joy Concert at Suntory Hall in Osaka, which usually attracts 10,000 amateur and professional singers. “The relationship between the Japanese and Beethoven’s Ninth is both a social and a musical connection,” says conductor Jeffrey Bernstein. “For them, singing the Ode to Joy is a way of communication. »
The strange story of this European-born melody, which has become the basic tune of Japanese holidays, begins several hundred years ago in Germany. With the coronavirus pandemic forcing authorities to suspend most performances, can we expect his reign to end?
Beethoven was born in December 1770 in Bonn, a German city on the Rhine. In 1792 he moved to Vienna, Austria to study music with the famous classical composer Franz Joseph Haydn. During his years in Vienna, the young Beethoven's career grew phenomenally with various appearances in the city's theaters and halls, including the Theater an der Wien opera house and the Palais Lobkowitz, a baroque building that has since been converted into a museum. Despite everything, the composer cannot find harmony in his private life.
“He had many health problems throughout his life. He wanted to find love but never found it. He wanted a family but never had one,” says writer and director Kerry Candaele, whose film “Following the Ninth” documents the global impact of Beethoven’s last symphony. “He was one of the greatest masters of music and lost his hearing. »
According to some historians, it took Beethoven a lifetime to write the Ninth Symphony, which was completed several years before his death in 1827. Inspiration came from the work of the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who wrote a poem called “Ode to Joy” in 1785, a universal message of brotherhood, joy and freedom. With Schiller's words in the fourth movement, the Ninth premiered at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna in 1824 and was the first symphony in the world to introduce sung sections.
Despite its popularity in Europe, the Ninth Symphony was not performed until almost a century later in Asia, and in the most unlikely places of all. During World War I, Japan was Britain's ally and captured enemy troops on the German-occupied Chinese island of Qingdao. About 1,000 German soldiers were transported to Naruto, a small town in Tokushima Prefecture more accustomed to welcoming Buddhist pilgrims than European prisoners of war.
At Bandō prison camp, the commander encouraged captured soldiers to participate in activities such as running a store, publishing a newspaper, or playing an instrument. On June 1, 1918, German prisoner Hermann Hansen led the 45 resident musicians of the Tokushima Orchestra, mostly equipped with makeshift instruments, and a choir of 80 male voices from other prisoners of war in a rendition of the Ninth Symphony. News of the concert reached the ears of wealthy politician and classical music patron Yorisada Tokugawa, who visited the camp several months later to see another performance. Japanese musicians from today's Tokyo University of the Arts did not perform Beethoven's Ninth until 1925.
During the Second World War, the on-again, off-again relationship between Japan and Germany was revived, as was their shared fascination with Beethoven. In December 1943, the “Ode to Joy” was performed at the University of Tokyo’s graduation ceremony for students mobilized for war. During the war, the Japanese imperialists used the symphony for nationalist propaganda purposes; The work also had the misfortune of being called Adolf Hitler's favorite symphony.