Review: Human stories shine in Beethoven’s Nine: Ode To Humanity | Canada Voices

Beethoven’s Nine: Ode To Humanity

Classification N/A; 90 minutes

Written and directed by Larry Weinstein

About a third of the way into his new documentary, Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity, director Larry Weinstein (Ravel’s Brain, Making Overtures) settles in front of the camera, and introduces himself as a filmmaker who makes movies “mostly about music, sometimes about war.” It’s a crucial point in Weinstein’s film, which was originally planned as an exploration of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, 200 years after its completion in 1824.

The camera is turned on Weinstein – “The idea was abhorrent to me,” he writes in his director’s notes, “but I acquiesced” – so he can talk about his sister and brother-in-law, who were among the first civilian casualties of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

The personal tragedy came in the middle of making Beethoven’s Nine. Weinstein and his team were filming interviews with the documentary’s nine subjects – yes, nine – capturing the unique intersections between their lives and Beethoven’s final symphony.

There is Gabriela Lena Frank, who was born deaf and is currently the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Composer-in-Residence; we meet conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, whose rage at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion spurred her founding of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, an ensemble of refugee musicians; there’s the venerable maestro Leonard Bernstein, who famously led a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth in Berlin, in 1989, shortly after the Berlin Wall fell; and of course, there is the legacy of Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, who paid homage to Beethoven with his character Schroeder – and his lovingly detailed transcriptions of the composer’s scores in his comic strip panels.

And in a flash of tragedy, Weinstein himself became one of the film’s subjects with a link to this huge masterpiece of art: Like Beethoven, Weinstein is now a sufferer of personal loss, a person who rages against injustice and someone who hopes – perhaps futilely – for a better humanity.

It’s an excellent way to tell the story of Beethoven and his Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125: to map it onto the stories of nine people who share the composer’s same crises, struggles and hopes for mankind. Historically a strictly instrumental genre, the Ninth was the first symphony to feature singing; for the text, Beethoven chose Friedrich Schiller’s poem, Ode to Joy (An die Freude), and set it to a tune that he considered singable by all people. Indeed, Ode to Joy has since become an international anthem for freedom, the soundtrack for history – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the protests in Tiananmen Square.

With all that’s big about the Ninth, Weinstein’s small, human-sized stories stand out. It’s unexpectedly moving to consider Frank as a composer (with perfect pitch, no less) who has deafness in common with Beethoven. It’s hard not to feel things when we hear the originally German Ode to Joy text sung in Ukrainian. “When you have the words sung in the language of this country that is suffering so much,” Wilson says, “it’s all the more powerful.”

Some of the film subjects have looser connections to Beethoven. Polish musician Monika Brodka “questions the status quo” just like the revered composer – and arguably most other artists with lasting impact. Experimental psychologist and author Steven Pinker argues for hope, progress and knowledge among all people, a bit like Schiller does in his Ode to Joy. And philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein draws a clean line from Enlightenment thinkers to Beethoven to “where we can find inspiration in the world today.”

Though it won’t unveil any new historical information about Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity is an impressively broad-reaching deep-dive for newcomers to classical music. To many, the Ninth Symphony no doubt seems to reek of all things white and Western European. But Weinstein does his part for Beethoven, painting him as a free thinker, curious about other cultures, truly trying with his art to reach out to all people.

Weinstein’s unexpected, acute need for hope after personal tragedy seems to prove – in case anyone had doubts – that Beethoven’s Ninth has a mysterious power to offer relief for all of humanity’s problems, no matter where, no matter when.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)