Vocal examples by: Andrew Munn; Text by: Jeffrey Arlo Brown, VAN Magazine
In 1823, Beethoven began composing the famous melody known in English as the “Ode to Joy.” It was an intensive process: As UCLA musicologist Robert Winter showed in his 1977 article The Sketches for the “Ode to Joy,” progress towards that simple, intuitive melody was anything but. Beethoven first sketched a melody based on another section of the text (by poet Friedrich Schiller) in 1798-99; it bears no resemblance to the “Ode.” By June 1823, Beethoven had set the catchy first phrase of the melody we know today. Then he struggled, using “almost fifty pages of finale sketches,” as Winter writes, before coming up with the entire theme.
With hindsight, Beethoven’s rejected melodies seem rather silly. But they make an important point: It’s often the simplest projects that require the most concentrated work. These painstaking sketches contradict the myth of the artist’s random bursts of inspiration. Beethoven embodies the truth that great art is earned, not given.
This not-so-serious ranking of Beethoven’s best and worst discarded “Ode to Joy” themes relies on Winter’s interpretation of Beethoven’s frequently illegible handwriting, and ignores Beethoven’s harmonizations (for which he also made frequent sketches).
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9. The first four-bar phrase of the original “Ode to Joy” already existed at this point, which makes it even less forgivable that Beethoven chose this new, repetitive idea. And while the middle of the melody is familiar, what follows is a poor attempt at a balancing phrase, featuring the same mundane three notes three times in a row. This melody just sort of trails off, which implies Beethoven realized how bad it is while he was writing it.
8. Speaking of the first phrase, this trotting, drinking-song melody shows that Beethoven was smart to have stuck to his original idea here. Yes, an “Ode to Joy” should be simple, but it ought to be more than literally the most simple harmonic progression in western music.
7. How would the course of history have changed if the “Ode to Joy” really was in ⅜-time? This melody, while slightly better than its predecessor, its time-signature cousin, is utterly forgettable.
6. This version has shades of Beethoven’s original idea, but the way it moves in groups of two makes it dull.
5. While the drone on an A in this melody comes across as threadbare in the context of Beethoven, this could sound pretty cool if it was radically stretched out, with maybe ten seconds or so per note. Even LaMonte Young might approve.
4. Interesting gambit here: Beethoven switches around his A and B material. It’s really the last bar in each phrase that ruins this version, with its placid stepwise motion. Also, the turn to minor in the last phrase is too blunt.
3. Those first four bars are familiar and excellent. The next six bars are not great, but acceptable. Then the melody loses its way. Eight bars of just quarter notes mean that the rhythm is just as plodding as the choice of notes.
2. SO CLOSE! This is almost exactly the “Ode to Joy.” Except for bar six and bar 14 to the end. So why is this not the best one on the list? Because those two bars really are exceptionally bad.
1. If Beethoven had only ever written these four bars, that might have been enough.
Vocal examples by: Andrew Munn; Text by: Jeffrey Arlo Brown, VAN Magazine
