The joy of freedom
From Mr Geoffrey Matthews Sir: To Mr Raymond Keene (Letters, 15 January); yes, yes and no, Yes, by 1785, when he wrote the 'Ode to Joy', the young Schiller had clearly voiced — especially in his first play, Die Rauber — a powerful protest against stifling convention and cor- ruption in high places; and, yes, his commit- ment to the cause of political freedom was firmly established. Yet the Ode is more a celebration of personal freedom and happi- ness than of political liberty: essentially it is a tribute to the friends who had extricated Schiller from an emotional and financial impasse by helping to arrange his move to Leipzig. The poem associates joy with friendship and marriage, and uses cosmic images to elevate it into a universal, even a divine, force for good. Anodyne? Surely not.
And no, there is no urgent need for a conductor with the courage to substitute Freiheit for Freude in Beethoven's Ninth: Leonard Bernstein recorded such a perfor- mance on Christmas Day, 1989, to cele- brate the fall of the Berlin Wall. The recording was subsequently issued by Deutsche Grammophon.
Geoffrey Matthews
g.matthews@virgin.net
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