THE 9TH

We must have got through more Beethoven 9ths than is civillised and proportionate in the average span of a human life.

CD jewel cases like empty chocolate bar wrappers piled up by the stereo system as week after week we continued our search for the ultimate recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. It wasn't long until our obsession went from being initially a private pursuit to a collective event, a "happening" where friends would join us on a Saturday night for the unveiling of yet another 9th with wine and food. Had we become a parody of ourselves? Were our guests simply amused by the sight of us like two snouty pigs scouting for truffles or did they share our same desire to find heaven on earth?

Judging by the fact that most of us haven't talked to each other for almost twenty years I would say it was probably the former. Unless there's some other reasoning for their fascination with our peculiar hobby. A human anthropological study perhaps?

What could those guests have possibly observed except for perhaps two men looking for something that didn't exist.  

That elusive notion of human perfection.

Sometimes we wondered if perhaps it was the symphony itself at fault, so desperate were we to find that Holy Grail in amongst the endless recordings we played night after night. With no real musical training to speak of, we were flying blind with our amateur musicial sleuthing and yet somehow managed to convince ourselves we knew what exactly it was we were attempting to elucidate through this Quixotic process of ours.

What we did definitively know above all our other criteria (sound, depth of feeling, orchestral execution) was that we still hadn't yet found what we were looking for.

To this day we still haven't and although the search has slowed down considerably, the possibility of discovering that definitive 9th continues to compel us.

But where did all this sublime madness begin? What was the first recording of the 9th that launched our voyage to the summit of Beethoven's symphonic universe?

Inspired by watching the BBC's Great Composers series narrated by Kenneth Branagh one January evening before I returned to university, my friend and I  quickly learnt about the various musical motifs that tunnel through the 9th symphony until they eventually explode into a very human cosmic proclamation of life affirming joy and celebration. Compelled to get our first ever recording after watching the programme, we consulted our dog eared copies of The Penguin Guide Guide To Classical Music to see what the old boys (Ivan March, Edward Greenfield & Robert Layton) had to say about the best versions of the piece on the market. Suspicious of their top choices, however, we soon diverged from their somewhat stultifying and Welton-esque selections and went to explore less traveled roads for ourselves. We'd learnt the hard way that following critics too devoutly can lead to expensive disappointments (especially with opera box sets featuring Joan Sutherland).

Freed from the schackles of the classical music orthodoxy we set the bar high early with Karajan's 1977 recording on Deutsche Gramophon and then subsequently discovered that perfection is seldom achieved, especially when it comes to the works of Ludwig Van.

Though Herbert Von Karajan and the Berlin Phil came pretty close with this near perfect version.

From a strong start we spent the next few years like the ball in a pin ball machine bouncing off various flippers.

We rebounded from the romantics (Furtwangler, Klemperer & Tennstedt) to the authenticists (Gardiner, Norrington & Zinman) finding ourselves in the middle of musically ideological warfare without realising the road to greatness was fraught with these tribal factions.

Looking to stablize ourselves toward centre ground, we kept returning to the middle way exponents of the 9th - Karajan, Friscay and Blomstedt.

And that is where we have mostly remained ever since.

But just as those innocent days of youth became altered with the burden of experience, so too did our relationship with the 9th change through time though not by any fault of Beethoven, I hasten to add.

I can remember only too well the insidious slow creep of Beethoven's 9th being used by the European Union for their collective national anthem as the overgrown political behemoth continued to march forward with its desire for total hegemony. It disturbed me how something so noble and magnificent as Beethoven's 9th could be weaponised by political bureacrats such as Macron and Frau Merkel and I soon found myself feeling similar to Alex in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange when he's programmed to vomit each time he hears the work of Ludwig Van.

But unlike Alex, I found a way to move past the exploitation of the 9th for political propaganda and found my way back to what it meant to me and my friend personally.

For us, I believe it represents the very human struggle to meet the miracle of existence on an equal footing.

And in our quest to find the ultimate version, we connected with that beautifully human struggle to find a perfection that is ultimately unobtainable.

Nevertheless, we continue to listen in hope of finding that elusive miracle.