Crowning the concerts marking the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra’s 90th anniversary, on 9 December LNSO conductor Andris Poga will conduct Jānis Mediņš’s “By the Church” and one of the most widely known works in all classical music – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
This is one of Beethoven’s last major works, composed between 1822 and 1824 and first performed on 7 May 1824. After the Ninth Symphony Beethoven wrote only his six final string quartets (among them genuine masterpieces), a few piano miniatures and several canons.
It is often said that Beethoven’s Ninth is his testament to humanity, an affirmation of his artistic credo, a triumph of humanism and so on. Seen from a certain angle that may well be true, for in this symphony the message is set down not only in notes but also in an entirely concrete text. Beethoven took several stanzas from Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” (An Freude), written in 1785 at the suggestion of Christian Gottfried Körner, a member of the Dresden masonic lodge Zu den drei Schwertern (“At the Three Swords”), to grace one of the lodge’s festive banquets. In places the text of the ode is as solemn as a hymn, in others as playful as a toast. The stanzas Beethoven chose emphasise the brotherhood of all humanity – millions embrace one another, a heavenly father beyond the stars watches over us, joy binds together all that has come apart, and so on.
It is well known that at this period of his life Beethoven was almost completely deaf, and that he conducted the symphony’s premiere with virtually no sense of how the music was unfolding. One can clearly hear that, alongside joy and jubilation, the music carries a pathos strained to the utmost, almost to the edge of the impossible.
Paavo Järvi, a distinguished interpreter of Beethoven’s symphonies, says: “It is a mannequin of an idea. There are many moments that make me think we should abandon performing this movement of the symphony in a key of Wagnerian pathos. To my mind, for Beethoven it is in fact a struggle, a desperate longing, in the full knowledge that – whom am I trying to fool here, the world is not like that. I should like it to be, but it is not.”
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can thus be understood in many ways, and it is always interesting to see which interpretation a conductor chooses. For this performance Andris Poga has invited the State Choir Latvija and soloists Elīna Šimkus, Ieva Prudnikovaitė, Andris Ludvigs and Priit Volmer, thereby prompting thoughts, however unintentionally, of the unity of at least the Baltic states, if not of the whole world.
From Latvian music, meanwhile, the concert brings a wonderful miniature by Jānis Mediņš, a former chief conductor of the LNSO (1928–1944), “By the Church”. There have been attempts to link the music with Janis Rozentāls’s well-known painting “After Church”, but this theory, however beautiful, is probably not true. A more plausible version points to Jānis Poruks’s poem “With Mother by the Church”, which says, among other things:
“Why do you gaze up at the heavens,
You, pale church,
As though you were praying for many.
Pray for me as well!”
Elīna Šimkus – soprano
Ieva Prudnikovaitė – mezzo-soprano
Andris Ludvigs – tenor
State Choir “Latvija” – Choir