one-hundred-eighty-seven years ago today.

I started the final term paper for my senior-year of high school advanced English lit class with a similar sentence that Harvey Sachs uses in his book The Ninth: Beethoven And The World In 1824 ~

Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125, is one of the most precedent-shattering and influential compositions in the history of music.

To be precise, mine went something like this ~

Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in D minor, the "Choral," his one hundred and twenty-fifth work, is and will always remain his greatest, most monumental gift to all mankind.

Before anyone draws any conclusions - or calls me out for possible plagiarism that garnered me a perfect 'A' for my rather scrutinous diatribe of Beethoven's Ninth (beating the to-be valedictorian's grade by nearly a full letter and prompting his mother to insinuate to mine that she must have also helped me on my paper, to which my mom could both honestly say she did not as well as report back to me it seemed his mom had apparently helped him) - keep in mind I handed in that term paper in 1994, and Sachs' book was published last year. Maybe Sachs got hold of my term paper somehow ...

Regardless, it was one-hundred-eighty-seven years ago today that - in a small Viennese theatre named the Kärntnertor - that what was indeed to become nearly-unilaterally-thought as the greatest achievement in Western music (and dare I say all of art) was performed for the first time by a hack-by-today's-standards smattering of musicians and vocalists.

Similarly, Beethoven is just-as-nearly-unilaterally considered of epitomizing and in fact being 'the quintessential genius of Western culture.' About his last symphony, the Russian revolutionary and at-times-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin whispered to conductor and composer Richard Wagner in 1849 (a mere twenty-five years after its premiere performance), that 'if all the music that has ever been written were lost in the expected world-wide conflagration, we must pledge ourselves to rescue this symphony, even at the peril of our lives.' The Ninth is considered 'both an extraordinary, living musical organism and a milestone in the history of civilization.' And so on.

The superlatives for this monumental work and achievement can continue ad infinitum. I certainly spared none in that term paper that I perhaps somewhat pompously but honestly and affectionately titled -

Uhh, yeah.

To continue in my pompous-even-at-eighteen-years-old vein, I then indicated on the second page of said paper that the complete (emphasis used for real back then) orchestral score and a sound recording of the symphony (I did though leave out the terse suggestion of how only Zubin Mehta's live performance with the New York Philharmonic from back in 1983 could be considered worthy of listening) should be used when studying my paper, as well as that 'a thorough understanding of introductory music theory is assumed of the reader.' I was fun even back then. And apparently also just a smidge opinionated.

I included an English translation of Freidrich Schiller's An Die Freude ('Ode To Joy') and then - over the course of eleven carefully-typed, double-spaced pages (with no help from my mother, by the way) proceeded to prove - through at times a bar-by-bar 'critical analysis' of each of the four movements along with historic snippets much like what, over the course of two hundred pages, Sachs tries also to accomplish - that indeed this was Beethoven's greatest gift to mankind.

It wasn't hard.

I didn't use the term 'unilaterally' above (twice even) for no reason or without just cause (or at least not to my over-opinionated-self). I wrote about how Beethoven was never certain about the use of a choral finale or - for that matter - the theme of the 'Ode' itself. It is widely-known that he was what Sachs called a 'write, rewrite, and re-rewrite man ... not a wholly-spontaneous creator.' He went on to say that 'Beethoven knew that perfection was impossible.'

But back to my paper ... I wrote of its 'gigantic proportions' (before I had discovered the gem 'ginormous') and how it more-or-less was responsible for effectively bridging the gap between the Classical and Romantic eras of music history. I quoted Donald Tovey - a notable musicologist among other things - who once wrote 'of all the single works of art, of all passages in a work of art, the first subject of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has had the deepest and widest influence on later music.' To which I responded in my own attempt to back up his statement ~

The opening pianissimo fifths, subdominant and dominant in the key of D minor, gradually quicken and pile up into a colossal wave of the descending D minor triad ...

and how Beethoven masterfully built the tension through the use of a gradual crescendo lasting for six bars.

And on and on. And on. And on.

How the timpani comes in playing the dominant F to the key of B-flat. How the second movement ends on the major parallel triad of how it began (parallel keys share the same tonic, in this case the D) and how Beethoven again does this modulation in the fourth movement at bar 230 while seven bars later the movement proceeds to its second section and the tempo ups to the marked 'Allegro assai.' And how - as the movement draws to a close - 'Beethoven is unrelentless in his quest for power, piling tension on top of tension' while 'the chorus is nearly shouting, doubled rhythmically by the entire orchestra.' Of how the orchestra tries to bring the symphony to an end in bar 936, 'but it takes three more powerful, fortissimo quarter notes, enforced with pairs of triplets by the entire woodwind section and the rumbling thunder of the timpani, to finally conclude the symphony.'

How it all ends on the triad it sought to build way back in the opening bars of the first movement with those pianissimo descending fifths ... the D minor.

It should come as no surprise then that I - as a rather self-described precocious teenager - did in fact own a copy of the complete score of this symphony, and would listen intently sitting alone in my room on my bed thumbing through it bar-by-bar, line-by-line, page-by-page as the music unfolded. Unaware of my surroundings. Completely drawn in. Absorbed.

Beethoven was well-known to be scornful. Conceitful (there was only one Beethoven after all!). Pompous. Even hostile - constantly lashing out at friends and acquaintances only to come crawling back quickly after seeking their forgiveness for his verbal brutalities. But at the same time, he portrayed a perfect juxtaposition of a love for humanity but contempt for human beings. A sense of his own musical superiority but physical frailty. An affection for others 'inextricably bound up with affliction.' So on May the sixth, at the final rehearsal for the following day's concert, the composer 'stood at the theater's stage door and embraced, one by one, each of the amateur orchestra and chorus members who were participating, gratis, in the proceedings.' He was grateful. And humble. His own humility had crept in for a moment and taken over.

I could go on of course. More than I already have. My own history admittedly quite tied up with Beethoven. Like of how there is a reason I strongly feel - like the second movement of the Piano Sonata in C minor, op. 111, shows in that Beethoven took us so profoundly into his heart and - as Sach's put it 'into the heart of the Universe' - that anything that followed would have been 'impossibly anticlimatic' - be it Beethoven's Fate or ours that there is no tenth symphony.

That there is not because similarly - in his Ninth - he took us further into his heart than ever possible from any other composer or any other musical work before or after - that he simply had to leave this Earth before he completed another. From those opening pianissimo fifths of the first movement to the blistering Scherzo to the strains of the most-eloquent and beautiful of all slow movements to the grandiose finale and crashing end.

'What must have run through his mind as the ink dried on the last notes?' Sachs asks.

It is hard for me to imagine the mind that can come up with the idea that 'all uniform motion is relative, and that there is no absolute and well-defined state of rest (as in, no privileged reference frames) from mechanics to all the laws of physics, including both the laws of mechanics and of electrodynamics, whatever they may be' - otherwise known as Special Relativity.

But even more difficult for me to imagine the mind that can come up with two-thousand-two-hundred-and-three bars of music that can bring the whole of humanity to its knees.

It has been often said in various but similar ways that if everyone on Earth could hear (insert composer's name, be it Bach or Beethoven or Mozart), there would never be another war. Beethoven had no idea his last symphony - with near-exponential vigor following the premiere performance - would take on a life of its own and come to epitomize more eloquently than any other musical work this particular sentiment.

The summer following that historic evening one-hundred-eighty-seven-years ago today he - disgruntled and grumpy with his affairs and those around him - ran off to the country to escape the throngs of Vienna and take up residence alone as was his custom. To put the symphony behind him and begin working on his final (and again - thought nearly-unilaterally to be the most extraordinary in the genre) string quartets.

And of course then - unknowing of the Fate of the Ninth - Beethoven died just shy of three years later.

I think of myself - that kid sitting on his bed in the dark my ears wrapped with headphones listening painfully loud to Mehta conducting the New York Philharmonic to click on a reading lamp so that I could trace the notes of the score with my finger as it poured itself - as indeed Beethoven poured himself - out to me. To be wowed. Intoxicated. Absorbed. I thought then as I do now that - indeed ... the Ninth Symphony is Beethoven's most monumental work, and his greatest gift to all mankind ...

... then ... now ... and for all eternity.