THE NINTH: BEETHOVEN AND THE WORLD IN 1824 By Harvey Sachs, Faber, £9.10

For lovers of western classical music, there are very few experiences as uplifting, as moving and as poignant as listening to the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. The more knowledgeable about the technical aspects of the music making and the scoring would agree with Harvey Sachs that the Ninth was “probably the most courageous orchestral composition ever written’’. It was courageous because for the first time a composer had dared to introduce human voices in a symphony. The result is unforgettable. Many, including this reviewer, would argue that Beethoven’s Ninth is the greatest piece of music ever composed.

Sachs by devoting this book to that great work earns the gratitude of music lovers. He follows the standard procedure of the history of ideas by placing the author and the work in their particular context. He relates Beethoven’s personal condition around the time; he delineates the world that influenced the composer; and he offers an analysis of the kind of music Beethoven was writing around the time he embarked on the composition of the Ninth.

The premiere of the Ninth Symphony was in Vienna at the Kärntnertor Theatre on May 7, 1824. Around this time, Beethoven lived in squalid conditions on the top floor of an apartment house on Landstrasse (now Ungargasse). The room in which he lived was in perpetual disorder: clothes on the floor, bed linen in a heap, the bed unmade, the grand piano covered in dust, music and books all over the floor. Beethoven lived there, aware that he was going deaf.

Yet, it was here, in the period immediately preceding the Ninth that he wrote some of his greatest and complex works — Diabelli Variations, opus 120 and Missa Solemnis, opus 123. (In the catalogue of Beethoven’s compositions the Ninth is numbered opus 125.)

By March 1824, as the young Franz Schubert wrote to a friend, there was talk in Vienna about a new symphony that Beethoven was about to present. Beethoven was working hard and against time. When rehearsals began the performers were reading from handwritten copies and some of the choral parts had been lithographically duplicated making legibility even more difficult. At any time, the Ninth is not an easy work to play, for the first time performers it appeared an insurmountable proposition.

For those of us who are overwhelmed by the music today, we can only stretch our imagination to grasp the impact the piece had when it was first performed. Drawing on contemporary accounts, Sachs writes, “At the end (or after the second movement, according to some sources), the applause was tremendous, but the deaf Beethoven, still pouring over his manuscript, was unaware of the ovation until Fräulein Unger [one of the singers] tugged at his sleeve and made him turn to see the crowd’s clapping hands and waving hats and handkerchiefs. He bowed gratefully.’’

Sachs steps back from that moment of triumph to discuss the musical influences on Beethoven. Predominant of these were Haydn and Mozart and of course Handel, who Beethoven reportedly considered to be the greatest of all composers. In 1812, at the end of what musicologists call his “Middle Period’’, Beethoven wrote in a letter: “Do not rob Handel, Haydn and Mozart of their laurel wraths.’’ He added, as if to set out his own creed, “Only art and science can raise men to the level of gods…. The true artist has no pride. He sees unfortunately that art has no limits. He has a vague awareness of how far he is from reaching his goal; and while others may perhaps admire him, he laments that he has not yet reached the point to which his better genius only lights the way for him like a distant sun.’’

For Beethoven there was only the trying as he believed that only through aesthetic creativity would he be able to reach freedom. The question of freedom was of critical importance in the intellectual ambience of Beethoven. It informed the music, the poetry, the art and the philosophy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Freedom was necessary for human beings to fulfil their own potential and to live in harmony.

The Ninth embodied this striving in musical terms. The idea of using the poet Schiller’s “Ode to Joy’’ in a musical composition had occurred to Beethoven while he was sketching his Seventh and Eighth symphonies and the lilting tune which foreshadows its opening phrase appeared in works going back to 1794-95. But none of these quite prepare even the most devoted listener to what happens in the Ninth.

The richest part of Sachs’s work is a detailed analysis of the symphony. He sees the Ninth and Missa Solemnis as complementary works since both force “listeners to confront a brave new emotional, spiritual sound universe’’. Sachs shows by describing the instrumentation how the symphony moves from the apparent despair of the first movement to the protest against the despair in the second and to the serene lyricism of the third and the unbounded joy of the final movement.

Writing on music is always difficult since so much of music is ineffable. Through history and deep analysis simply expressed, Sach’s conveys the sheer magnificence of Beethoven’s great Choral Symphony.