Religious Dimensions of Beethoven’s Ode “To Joy”

Abstract

Hearing a song, listeners can often pick up the syntactical relationships among its words only with great difficulty. The musical flow washes away most of the syntax, and the musical connections from one phrase to the next or one section to the next, sometimes even from one note to the next, are what connect the words to one another and give them meanings very different from their submerged syntactically fixed meanings. This article probes the musical relationships joining the phrases in Beethoven’s Freude theme and attempts to paraphrase “joy” and “brotherhood” as their meanings are qualified by the musically determined relation of each to the other. It pays particular attention to the music that sets texts with a religious dimension, and the way their musical connections change the meaning of joy and brotherhood.