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Friday, May 9, 2003, 8 p.m.
Saturday, May 10, 2003, 8 p.m.
VMA Arts and Culture Center
Providence R.I.

Critical comments:
Channing Gray of the Providence Journal wrote of “the crackling finale that almost blew off the roof of Veterans Memorial Auditorium ... there was punch to spare, along with joy, wit and grace. ...

“The surprise of the night, though, was the impressive showing from the Providence Singers. The group has made great strides in recent years, under Julian Wachner. On Friday, [it] proved a crack ensemble with a rich sound and enviable blend.”

Ludwig van Beethoven:
Symphony No. 9

The Providence Singers
in a guest performance with

The Rhode Island Philharmonic

Larry Rachleff, conductor

• Ludwig van Beethoven:
  Symphony No. 9

• Schiller wrote An die Freude in 1785 and made revisions as late as 1803.
• As a young man in his twenties, Beethoven knew and admired Schiller’s An die Freude so much that he said he intended to set it “verse by verse.”
• Words from An die Freude appear in sketches for the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, which also mention plans for a four-movement symphony using the text for the finale.
• Beethoven worked on the Ninth Symphony from 1817 to 1823. His text is a somewhat shortened version of Schiller’s original.
• See also an overview of how “Ode to Joy” was written.

Friedrich von Schiller
November 10, 1759 – May 9, 1805

Friedrich von Schiller, one of the giants of German letters, was a dramatist, essayist, philosopher and poet.

When he was 13, Schiller was placed in the Karlsschule, a military academy founded and personally supervised in despotic fashion by Duke Karl Eugen von Württemberg. His parents had hoped he would study for the ministry; the Duke decreed he would study law; he was permitted to study medicine. Young Schiller wanted to write, but was forbidden to do so – an ironic beginning for a writer who would be so passionate about the freedom of human will.

After eight years at the school, Schiller was assigned to a regiment in Stuttgart, but continued his writing. When he left his regiment without permission to attend the première of his first play, The Robbers, in 1782, the duke sentenced him to two weeks’ detention and ordered him to stop writing plays. Schiller fled to Mannheim.

For most of the 1780s, Schiller led an unsettled life – moving, staying for a time with the mother of some of his school friends, serving for a year as resident playwright at the Mannheim theater, sinking into debt, relying on friends, but always writing.

He spent two years in Leipzig under the patronage of Christian Gottfried Körner, during which time he completed work on his first blank verse drama, Don Carlos. The work was a turning point in his career, helped establish blank verse as the recognized medium of German drama, and ensured his place in German literary history. That success, coupled with the stability provided by Körner’s hospitality, inspired him to write what would eventually become his best-known verse, An die Freude.

In 1787 Schiller moved to Weimar, then the literary capital of Germany. He married Charlotte von Lengefeld in 1790. They would have two sons and two daughters, but Schiller’s own health broke within a few years, the result of habitual overwork, and he began a steady decline. He continued his prolific writing, however, delving into history and philosophy, and kept up a famous correspondence with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . He died in Weimar while he was working on Demetrius, a play with a Russian theme, which scholars have suggested may well have become a masterpiece. He was 45.