Joy

In spite of myself, I wept yesterday afternoon at Carnegie Hall as all the instruments and voices of the final movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony came together in one grand swell of sound and exaltation. You probably know what I'm talking about. After Beethoven has toyed with us, offering bits and pieces of the Ode to Joy theme, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes just the orchestra, other times just the chorus of 100 voices that he insisted be incorporated into this final movement, after we have heard this ode in a dozen different variations and volumes, we finally get the entire company of musicians and singers joining together in a giant tsunami of glorious harmony. It is the very essence of joy and it took me by surprise to feel the tears rolling down my cheeks so voluminously.

This Ode to Joy that comes from the Schiller poem is for Beethoven no ordinary joy. It is so much more than a feeling of gladness or happiness. It is so much more than the sense of individual rapture that some of us are lucky enough to experience with delightful regularity. This joy is about the sense of solidarity we feel when people come together for some great cause. This joy is more than eros (romantic love) or philia (familial love). It is the joy of agape, the celebration of universal sisterhood and brotherhood, of the sense that all of us are united by similar needs for affection and safety and freedom and growth and sustenance and well being. And that when we acknowledge these needs in one another and do what we can as a collective to make sure these needs are, in fact, met for all, we all end up better off.

Beethoven understood this about joy and meant for his final symphony - with all the different voices joining together in a final crescendo of harmony - to be a metaphor for active, universal, unconditional love. It is a work that is designed to bind people together. In many ways, it is more than a great work of music. It is a call to us to become our best selves and in so doing to help all others realize their full potential as well. From the pen of the completely deaf Beethoven comes this titanic plea for us to hear each other's inner cries for connection. It is at our peril, Beethoven seems to say, that we fail to listen.