Ode to Joy

"Ode to Joy" (German: ) is an ode written in the summer of 1785 by German poet, playwright, and historian Friedrich Schiller and published the following year in "Thalia". A slightly revised version appeared in 1808, changing two lines of the first and omitting the last stanza.
"Ode to Joy" is best known for its use by Ludwig van Beethoven in the final (fourth) movement of his Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824. Beethoven's text is not based entirely on Schiller's poem, and introduces a few new sections. His tune (but not Schiller's words) was adopted as the "Anthem of Europe" by the Council of Europe in 1972 and subsequently by the European Union. Rhodesia's national anthem from 1974 until 1979, "Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia", used the tune of "Ode to Joy".
The poem.
Schiller wrote the first version of the poem when he was staying in Gohlis, Leipzig. In the year 1785 from the beginning of May till mid September, he stayed with his publisher Georg Joachim Göschen in Leipzig and wrote "An die Freude" along with his play "Don Carlos".
Schiller later made some revisions to the poem which was then republished posthumously in 1808, and it was this latter version that forms the basis for Beethoven's setting. Despite the lasting popularity of the ode, Schiller himself regarded it as a failure later in his life, going so far as to call it "detached from reality" and "of value maybe for us two, but not for the world, nor for the art of poetry" in an 1800 letter to his long-time friend and patron Christian Gottfried Körner (whose friendship had originally inspired him to write the ode).
Lyrics.
Revisions.
The lines marked with * have been revised as follows:
Ode to freedom.
Academic speculation remains as to whether Schiller originally wrote an "Ode to Freedom" ("Ode an die Freiheit") and changed it to an "Ode to Joy". Thayer wrote in his biography of Beethoven, "the thought lies near that it was the early form of the poem, when it was still an 'Ode to Freedom' (not 'to Joy'), which first aroused enthusiastic admiration for it in Beethoven's mind". The musicologist Alexander Rehding points out that even Bernstein, who used "Freiheit" in one performance in 1989, called it conjecture whether Schiller used "joy" as code for "freedom" and that scholarly consensus holds that there is no factual basis for this myth.
Use of Beethoven's setting.
Over the years, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" has remained a protest anthem and a celebration of music. Demonstrators in Chile sang the piece during demonstration against the Pinochet dictatorship, and Chinese students broadcast it at Tiananmen Square. It was performed (conducted by Leonard Bernstein) on Christmas Day after the fall of the Berlin Wall replacing "Freude" (joy) with "Freiheit" (freedom), and at "Daiku" (Number Nine) concerts in Japan every December and after the 2011 tsunami. It has recently inspired impromptu performances at public spaces by musicians in many countries worldwide, including Choir Without Borders's 2009 performance at a railway station in Leipzig, to mark the 20th and 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hong Kong Festival Orchestra's 2013 performance at a Hong Kong mall, and performance in Sabadell, Spain. A 2013 documentary, "Following the Ninth", directed by Kerry Candaele, follows its continuing popularity. It was played after Emmanuel Macron's victory in the 2017 French Presidential elections, when Macron gave his victory speech at the Louvre. Pianist Igor Levit played the piece at the Royal Albert Hall during the 2017 Proms. The BBC Proms Youth Choir performed the piece alongside Georg Solti's UNESCO World Orchestra for Peace at the Royal Albert Hall during the 2018 Proms at Prom 9, titled "War & Peace" as a commemoration to the centenary of the end of World War One.
The supposed Christian context of the song was one of the main justifications expressed by the Nichiren Shoshu school of Buddhism for excommunicating the Soka Gakkai International on 28 November 1991 because the song had been performed at Soka Gakkai meetings. Nichiren Shoshu claimed that this amounted to syncretism and heresy.
Other musical settings.
Other musical settings of the poem include: