Joy, beautiful spark of the gods

Beethoven's 9th Symphony celebrates its 200th anniversary! Students of Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences explored the symphony artistically in cooperation with the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn.

200 Years of the 9th Symphony: On 7 May 1824, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, featuring the musical setting of Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which was declared a World Heritage treasure and became the musical foundation of the European anthem, premiered in Vienna with the participation of the now deaf composer. Beethoven’s personality as well as his music continue to have an inspiring effect on artists from a wide variety of disciplines, including the visual arts.

Since the beginning of 2024, students at Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences from the class of Prof. Dr. Ulrika Eller-Rüter have been engaging, through a wide range of artistic media, with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in the broadest sense as part of the project “feuertrunken,” and with the thematic fields addressed here, such as freedom, democracy, equality, the future of humanity, but also the individual crises in the composer’s life, such as deafness and loneliness. From sound to silence.

 A joint excursion to Vienna included, among other things. the viewing of Gustav Klimt’s “Beethoven Frieze” in the Vienna Secession, a work of Viennese Art Nouveau stretching across three walls, in which, in the “final scene,” female figures arranged like heavenly hierarchies personify the arts in animated gestures. Framing an intimately embraced couple, they point to the song, the final chorus of the 9th, to the realm of ideas, the ideals of humankind, and eternal happiness.

“Feuertrunken” as  the motto of the project refers, on the one hand, to the euphoria with which the quotation from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” was set to music by Beethoven as the utopia of a future humanity. On the other hand, the coined term “feuer-trunken” can also be “heard” with darker undertones, in view of the tragedy in Beethoven’s biography, which seems to culminate in the fact that the composer was already completely deaf at the premiere of the 9th Symphony 200 years ago.

In the present day, the fire in “feuer-(trunken)” seems to acquire an ambivalent connotation in light of the “hot” issues of our time: current heated military conflicts, the feverish state of the planet due to global warming, and the burning social debates about the future of the democratic order.

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the 9th, the collaboration between the Beethoven Orchestra and the Department of Fine Arts, or rather the Eller-Rüter class, which had already been highly successful for three seasons as part of the “UM ELF” concert series before the coronavirus crisis, is once again being brought back to life. Digital and analogue presentation formats are in preparation, including posts on Instagram (@klasse_ulrika_eller_rueter) and, in the future, a publication (“Score”).

Ulrika Eller-Rüter  6/24
Essay for the Beethoven Orchestra programme booklet on the occasion of the anniversary concerts on 19.6.24 / 21.6.24 / 23.6.24)

Image gallery:
1. Title image: Sanaz Golshani
2. Julia Juengling
3. Can Maurizio Moretti
4. Emily Oehlert
5. Elisa Gabelli
6. Kuan-Yi Wu