@michaelleary8694

1 year ago

I have seen this before, but it still brought tears to my eyes, and even though I know that this was not spontaneous, this had to all be staged, by the end I still have tears running down my cheeks. Ludwig van Beethoven would have loved to have known that two centuries later, his music still moves people to tears and inspires millions, filling our hearts with joy. Side note: Beethoven was the first major composer to use the human voice as an instrument within a symphony. Utilizing an orchestra bigger than any other at the time, and with a length of well over an hour, longer than any other symphonic work, Beethoven's 9th Symphony was a major turning point in the history of music. Beethoven inspired composers to begin breaking the "rules of composition", and to begin exploring the use of different instruments, unconventional orchestration, large assemblies, and to incorporate deep, extreme emotion in music that would soar to great heights. Music would never be the same. During World War I, German POWs introduced Beethoven to their Japanese captors, and Japanese orchestras began to perform his works. After World War II, Japanese orchestras began performing Beethoven's 9th symphony, hoping to bring in enough paying audience members to help fund rebuilding and reconstruction of the nation. Since then, it has become a Japanese tradition to perform Beethoven's 9th Symphony at the end of every year. On Christmas Day 1989, conductor Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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