Ludwig van Beethoven. Symphony No. 9

TEATRO ALLA SCALA TOUR

Ludwig van Beethoven. Symphony No. 9

Teatro alla Scala Symphony Orchestra, Chorus and Soloists

Conductor – Zubin Mehta

The Teatro alla Scala is an opera house in Milan, founded in 1778. The theatre was destroyed during the Second World War. Engineer L. Secchi restored it, and the theatre was reopened in 1946.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ranks alongside such great works of art as Homer’s poems, Dante’s La divina commedia, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust and Bach’s High Mass... It expressed the aims of its age in an utterly perfect manner, and at the same time it gave a voice to human ideals to which we remain faithful to this very day. It concluded Beethoven the symphonist’s artistic path and it also paved the way for the future. By including poetic verse in the symphony, Beethoven took an incredibly innovative step, which initially staggered his contemporaries. For the composer himself, the writing of the Ninth Symphony was the result of many years’ work in an attempt to find a musical embodiment for Schiller’s Ode an die Freude.

For the first time, Beethoven took a text in order to express the philosophical concept of a symphony. But the most important thing, even starting with Beethoven himself, is that the symphony – as subtly expressed by German music historian Paul Bekker – performs the role of a “secular mass” that brings concert hall audiences together in the same way that a Sunday mass brings parishioners together at church. And it is not by chance that Beethoven’s brilliant rendering of Schiller’s Ode an die Freude is the official anthem of the European Union. It is not by chance that it is performed everywhere as an apotheosis of freedom and fraternity of all mankind.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was first performed on 7 May 1824 in Vienna under the baton of the composer. One of the most renowned and charismatic maestros of our time, Zubin Mehta will conduct the Teatro alla Scala Symphony Orchestra.

Zubin Mehta is a widely recognized master of large symphonic canvases and conductor of the most famous concerts in the history of music. Among them are the performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony by two orchestras near the former Buchenwald concentration camp, the concert of The Three Tenors – Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti on the eve of the 1990 FIFA World Cup Final, as well as deep symphonic canvases, such as the symphonies by Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and Strauss.

The audience will have a unique opportunity to see their great contemporary and listen to the true masterpiece – Symphony No. 9 performed by artists of the legendary Teatro all Scala.