It was astonishing, Debussy wrote in La Revue blanche on 1 May 1901, that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had not been buried beneath the mass of prose that it had provoked: Debussy’s comment on Beethoven’s symphony is almost as famous as the work with which it deals. The tumultuous applause at the end of the first performance had barely died away before critics were already laying into the composer and his music.
The final movement in particular gave rise to a debate that continues to reverberate to the present day. Is the deployment of the human voice a liberating blow struck in the name of the purely instrumental symphony? Is this final movement brilliantly inspired? Or was it a “blunder”, as the bold composer himself is reported to have said about this fourth and final movement?
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