Voices of Connection: 07/21 Ode to Joy
FROM GUEST CURATOR MELISSA BYBEE
In May 1987, I graduated from LSU with a bachelor of music in piano performance and stayed an additional year to study voice. My teacher, Robert Grayson, along with renowned soprano, Martina Arroyo, an artist in residence at LSU at the time, prepared my senior recital and graduate school auditions. I was accepted into The Manhattan School of Music graduate program in vocal performance in 1988 and was off to the rest of my life in NYC. While my years at MSM were tough - for starters, I moved four times in three years - they were also exciting. I wasn’t in the opera program long before a tenor colleague and certain faculty members encouraged me to audition for the alto solo in the solo quartet of the fourth and final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (the Choral Symphony), which was to be performed by the school orchestra and chorus with guest conductor, Roger Nierenberg. I auditioned and got the part. Since that initial introduction, I’ve had the privilege of singing the Ninth many times as a professional chorus member with great conductors like Zubin Mehta in 1990 at the United Nations and Michael Tilson Thomas in 2008 at Carnegie Hall, and I never grow tired of it. The Ninth, composed between 1822 and 1824 and Beethoven’s final symphony, is considered the first major symphony to utilize a chorus. Beethoven was also stone deaf when he wrote and conducted the premiere of the piece - a point not lost on the singers, whose parts, especially the sopranos, hover just beyond comfortable for much of the piece. The text ”Ode to Joy,” by the German poet, Johann Christoph Friederich von Schiller with Beethoven’s modifications, describes joy, the daughter of Elysium, kissing and uniting the whole of humanity in love and harmony. Combined with his universally familiar ”Ode to Joy” tune, Beethoven imagines musically what we, as humans, will never achieve in reality: a world free of strife and division. The finale is approximately 25 minutes long, so I’ve chosen an excerpt from a brilliant 2014 performance at Carnegie Hall conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, which features the Vienna Philharmonic and New York Choral Artists, several of whom you may also recognize from Voices of Ascension. – Melissa Bybee, Voices of Ascension Alto and Board Member