David Dalle
Thursday January 4th, 2024 with David Dalle
30 for 30. Celebrating my 30th year on CKCU with 30 of my most significant albums.

2024 marks three decades for me on-air here at CKCU! To mark the 30 years, over the course of 2024 I will be featuring 30 of the most significant albums in my life. Since these are albums which have been crucial to my musical development, they will be biased towards older albums. This week, we will hear from two of these albums. The first is from the Welsh electronic musician Brian Williams, who records under the name Lustmord. His 1992 album "The Monstrous Soul" was the 2nd album of his that I heard (the first being "Heresy" from 1990). I loved both albums, but, a sign that my show would be unusual, is that I used the entire 6 minute ominous, repeating opening track from "The Monstrous Soul" as my theme for the first six months of my show. It made more sense when the show began at 2am rather than now at 2pm, but we hear it today for nostalgia's sake! The main feature today will be one of my favourite works of music, arguably my favourite piece of music. I fell in love with Beethoven's 9th as a teenager. However, this is not that first, generic, recording of the 9th that I first heard, this recording is with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Herbert Von Karajan. This was the first great recording of the 9th I listened to, and is still one of my favourite performances. There have been oceans of ink spilled about Beethoven's 9th, and I certainly can't summarize everything here! But I will comment on one less discussed aspect of the 9th symphony. Beethoven was a revolutionary, radical composer, and his 9th symphony was his most radical work. It is, without doubt, the single most influential piece of music in the last 200 years, but the 9th was and remains divisive among many music lovers. It is the radical choral finale, the infamous "Ode to Joy", which has split many listeners. Ironically, since the text of Friedrich Schiller's poem calls for unity and the brotherhood of man (I apologize, Schiller was an 18th century poet, it was standard to refer to all humanity solely in male terms). From its legendary premiere in Vienna, 200 years ago in 1824, the choral finale has divided listeners. This split has continued to the current day. In general, more conservative music listeners had trouble with the choral finale, while more liberal listeners found the choral finale to be the greatest moment in music. But here is the unusual thing--for most of those listeners who dislike the finale, almost all of them will sing the highest praises of the first three, instrumental, movements. For example, when I was working on my music degree, I had a professor tell me the first movement was a supreme example of sonata form, but the finale was terrible voice writing. This was a common complaint, how unnatural and difficult the vocal writing is (perhaps why Verdi did not like the finale). But what a bizarre complaint! The world of great music is mostly very difficult to perform as well! This odd situation has led to another strange story. A persistent myth has arisen that Beethoven had been seriously thinking of an instrumental finale instead of the choral finale. This suited the listener who thought the first three movements were perfection, but could not grasp the finale. This idea was made popular around 1850, when a viral pamphlet was published stating that Beethoven had intended an instrumental finale. I believe this had significant, unexpected, repercussions. For example, Brahms' first symphony, composed only a few years later in 1854, had a large dramatic finale with a main melody very reminiscent of the "Ode To Joy". I cannot believe that was an accident, that, at least subconsciously, he was "fixing" Beethoven's 9th with this instrumental end. To the most bold, open, and radical composers in the 19th century, Beethoven's 9th, particularly the "Ode To Joy", was an overwhelming revelation which set them on a path, not to compose derivative copies of Beethoven (like too many of Brahms' attempts), but to try and envision where Beethoven was headed. This included composers such as Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Bruckner. Beethoven had dreamed of setting Schiller's poem to music since he was a young man, and the music had already been preordained in his Choral Fantasia from 1808 (rarely heard, but wonderful, piece which sounds like a draft for the "Ode To Joy"), so it was hardly a whim that Beethoven composed the "Ode To Joy". So sit back, and be thrilled by the journey from the violence and drama of the first movement, the relentless Totentanz of the scherzo, the impossible, escapist utopia of the adagio, to all be rejected in the finale with the irresistible call to seize Earthly, real joy in this life! Beethoven's 9th.