Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and specifically its choral finale with the famed “Ode to Joy,” has always come to us through the German poetry of Friedrich Schiller. It makes sense, too — that was the text around which Beethoven, after long searching, shaped his music.
But what if we kept the music intact and recast the words into 21st century English?
That seems to have been the motivation behind a commission from Carnegie Hall for Tracy K. Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. poet laureate, to create an English version of Schiller’s poem that could be performed with the symphony. The idea was slated for a 2020 performance as part of the Beethoven 250th anniversary celebrations, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic it only got its live premiere last year.
Smith’s new poem got its first local hearing on Sunday, June 12, as part of the final concert of the Berkeley Symphony’s 50th season. Like every arts organization, the orchestra has weathered some challenging terrain over the past couple years, and Sunday’s matinee concert in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall under Music Director Joseph Young— which also featured the world premiere of an exuberant curtain-raiser by Berkeley composer Jimmy López Bellido — felt like an aptly exultant shout of triumph.
Smith’s poem emerged as an intricate dance between faithfulness to the original and bold new directions. You could recognize, just by looking at the words on the page, the competing constraints under which she was working. So, for example, the opening couplet of the ode could hardly have been anything but a straightforward rendering of Schiller’s celebration of joy.
“Joy, bright God-spark born ofEver/ Daughter of fresh paradise,” Smith writes, capturing the rapturous, transcendent flair of the German.
At other points she updates the reference points — most intriguingly when she replaces Schiller’s all-encompassing embrace of the world’s millions with a hymn to the planet itself, damaged and degraded by that same population, which now numbers in the billions.
In performance, unfortunately, only some of Smith’s text registered clearly, because the chorus — whose members, directed by Lynne Morrow, were drawn from an array of Bay Area organizations — sang semi-audibly through masks. This served as a reminder that the pandemic, sad to say, is very far from over, and continues to wreak harm in countless ways on the performing arts.
另一方面，这四个独奏歌手不受面具的束缚，并以Clarion Directness唱歌。低音-Baritone尼古拉斯·戴维斯（Nicholas Davis）受到了颂歌的抢先呼吁，使这条经文大大蓬勃发展。女高音Shawnette Sulker，Mezzo-Soprano Gabrielle Beteag和男高音Christopher Oglesby（对爱德华·格雷夫斯（Edward）生病的最后一分钟的替补）贡献了充满活力的，雄辩的唱歌。
In this context, the three purely instrumental movements of the symphony felt a bit like preamble, and Young tended to flatten the music’s contrasts, especially in the first two movements. In the slow movement, however, he shaped the music with a tender fluidity that was lovely to hear.
洛佩兹·贝里多（LópezBellido）的“崛起”是一个浮现的11分钟节奏和旋律烟花的节日，这是一个完美的开场（也是贝多芬（Beethoven）的第九名，短暂的开场作品，没有任何休息是音乐会计划，这是一项音乐会计划，更多的乐团应该探索）。整个音乐会都为一个持续超过重量的组织的创新和激动人心的音乐活动提供了五十年的创新和激动人心的音乐活动。