Religious Dimensions of Beethoven’s Ode “To Joy”: What Happens When Music Rewrites the Text
Hearing a song, listeners can often pick up the syntactical relationships among its words only with great difficulty. The musical flow washes away most of the syntax, and the musical connections from one phrase to the next or one section to the next, sometimes even from one note to the next, are wha...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
2022
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| In: |
Religion and the arts
Year: 2022, Volume: 26, Issue: 5, Pages: 635-659 |
| Further subjects: | B
music and words
B Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony B Beethoven’s treatment of Schiller’s “To Joy” B religious dimensions of “joy” and “brotherhood” in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Hearing a song, listeners can often pick up the syntactical relationships among its words only with great difficulty. The musical flow washes away most of the syntax, and the musical connections from one phrase to the next or one section to the next, sometimes even from one note to the next, are what connect the words to one another and give them meanings very different from their submerged syntactically fixed meanings. This article probes the musical relationships joining the phrases in Beethoven’s Freude theme and attempts to paraphrase “joy” and “brotherhood” as their meanings are qualified by the musically determined relation of each to the other. It pays particular attention to the music that sets texts with a religious dimension, and the way their musical connections change the meaning of joy and brotherhood. |
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| ISSN: | 1568-5292 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion and the arts
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15685292-02605004 |