Freude

About

This kiss to the whole world With the Peaceful Revolution, the Wall fell at the end of 1989, separating Germany for more than 28years apart. On Christmas Day, Leonard Bernstein rushed to the German capital and conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The textual intervention he made in the finale of the symphony is legendary. Where it says in Schiller's ode "Joy, beautiful god sparks", he replaced joy with freedom and thus reflected the democratic zeitgeist of the intoxicating events. No work seems better suited to transporting the enthusiasm of a global sense of unity. Scottish MPs hummed and whistled against Brexit with Beethoven's ninth symphony, even though Beethoven composed it for the Philharmonic Society in London at the time.