It was like medicine. After all the horrible headlines and other political realities of our time, the symphony itself felt like something else: a message from a better world, a clue that there was hope after all. And if the entire symphony felt like this to a certain extent, the final choral movement, that amazing “Ode to Joy,” had an even more profound effect. You feel you have reached a high point—of listening, of appreciating—and then you are launched into something even higher, or at any rate deeper.
Or so I felt when the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus had completed their rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth at Davies Hall last Thursday night. The conductor was James Gaffigan, a guest conductor I’d never heard before, whose day job is Music Director of the Komische Oper (a high recommendation in my book). Gaffigan’s style on the podium was slightly antic for my taste, though it was well suited to the Michael Tilson Thomas piece, the 1998 Agnegram, that he conducted in the first half. The whole concert, which also included a snippet of Brahms’s German Requiem along with Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, was intended as a memorial to MTT, and it served that purpose nicely.
But by the time we reached the Beethoven, we had moved beyond individual deaths and even individual lives. The sound of those human voices at full strength, singing those miraculous melodies, is always enough to bring tears to my eyes, regardless of what is happening in the world outside. It doesn’t matter, really, whether things are going badly or well: in the latter case, the Ode to Joy is a vastly amplified echo of one’s current mood, and in the former it is an antidote of sorts. This is not escapism, I think, but true connection, true meaning, because what we are recognizing when we listen to the Beethoven is not just the genius of one composer, but the capacity of a collective group to preserve and transmit something eternally consoling. It is the chorus that matters in the Ninth, not the individual soloists, and that collectivity is one key source of the solace. And of course it matters tremendously that we are hearing them live—seeing those faces and listening to those voices in the same room with us, so that the force of their unified effort can be felt in our whole bodies and not just in our ears.