Danmarks Underholdningsorkester: Beethoven's 9th Symphony

We celebrate the arrival of the new year with the greatest festive firework display of them all: Beethoven's 9th Symphony is an unmistakable symbol of hope, peace and community the world over, and when a huge choir and soloists in the final movement rise and sing Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode an die Freude", you cannot help being filled with joy and hope for the future. Perhaps that is why it has also been the official EU anthem since 1971. The work is the culmination of the Enlightenment's ideals of freedom, and a major work by the idealistic and, at this point, completely deaf composer, who at the same time burst the bounds of the Viennese classical compositional tradition and led the world directly into Romanticism.