SYMPHONY FOR THE WORLD

Wednesday, July 15

Cinema Boka, 9 p.m. / maximum number of people: 27

 

Film screening: Beethoven’s Ninth: Symphony for the World

Directed by Christian Berger

Production: Deutsche Welle, 2020 Duration: 90 minutes

Language: English

Partners of the concert: Deutsche Welle, Kulturni Centar Nikola Đurković

The documentary Beethoven’s Ninth – Symphony for the World, directed by Christian Berger, is dedicated to one of the most performed works of all time, last symphony. The film follows the life of the Ninth Symphony in eight countries on four continents, encompassing the history and contemporary performances of this piece alike. The great names of classical music, as well as the amateur musicians who take part in the film, testify to how this work “touches” people today. The protagonist of one of the stories is the Chinese composer and Oscar winner Tan Dun, who was commissioned by London’s Royal Philharmonic Society to write a piece for choir and orchestra based on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In 1817, it was this same society who commissioned Beethoven himself to write his ninth symphony. In addition to Tan Dun, the film features British composer and DJ Gabriel Prokofiev, who presented a remix of the Symphony at Beethovenfest in Bonn, as well as the celebrated Greek conductor Theodore Kurentzis. The story of performing the Symphony in Japan with as many as ten thousand singers is remarkable, as is a performance by hearing-impaired children and youth who, with Paul Whittaker, a deaf musician and Sky News Australia chief executive, feel the music in a uniquely moving way.

 

The Ninth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, a composer at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries in one of history’s great artistic epochs, represents the crowning achievement of the author’s oeuvre, and stands before all humanity as a masterpiece of timeless value, a symbol of brotherhood among people. The composer used Friedrich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy to write the monumentaln finale of the Symphony, including a quartet of vocal soloists and a choir, thus revolutionizing classical symphony and marking novel paths in a new era of romanticism. The Symphony has served as a model for many later composers, while the theme of the finale, Ode to Joy, became the anthem of the Council of Europe in 1972, and then the official anthem of the European Union in 1986.