By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My how time flies…Beethoven is 250 years old in 2020! I cannot let such a landmark birthday pass by unnoticed. After all, he wrote the crescendo music for our wedding mass—the last song used at our marriage ceremony over three decades ago on August 12, 1989.
Ludwig van Beethoven was born/baptized a Catholic on December 17, 1770 in Bonn, Germany. Like Mozart, he was a child musical prodigy. He studied and performed in Vienna with many royal, noble, and wealthy benefactors. After an accident, he started to lose his hearing in 1798 but still created some of his greatest works despite a particularly unfortunate disability for a musician.
In only 57 years of life, he composed a total of nine symphonies, five piano concertos, one violin concerto, thirty-two piano sonatas, sixteen string quartets, two masses, the opera Fidelio, and other great works. Of course, Beethoven’s best known composition is the Fifth Symphony (listen here: Fifth Symphony ). The great work opens with the famous four-notes segment, the “ta-ta-ta-taaa” we all know and which is reiterated throughout the first movement.
I first discovered Beethoven because of someone named Schroeder. It would stroke my ego to have you believe this Schroeder person was a classical music scholar who tutored me in the fine arts. My Schroeder, however, was a character in the Charles Schulz Peanuts comics featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and company.
I met Schroeder when I was just a kid, reading the daily comic strip and watching the animated television specials based on it. Both in print and on TV, Schroeder played Beethoven’s music on his little black piano, often with a small bust of Beethoven’s head on it. The name Beethoven was so unusual, I remembered it.
I had other fleeting encounters with the great musician when I was in school. He was mentioned in some music appreciation and history classes. I wrote a short school report about him, intrigued by his wild hair portrait from one of our books. In Catholic grade school, we had the same teacher for both music and science. She named our three classroom guinea pigs Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
Snippets of his Fifth Symphony were featured in a popular 1970s song called “A Fifth of Beethoven” from the movie Saturday Night Fever. The lead characters in the film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure kidnap Beethoven to improve their grade in a history class. I was no musician, however, and so my regard for Beethoven was only skin deep. Other than enjoying his work in fleeting moments of popular culture, I gave him little thought—at least until my future wife Vicki and I were planning our wedding in 1989.
We got married in Salt Lake City’s lovely and historic Cathedral of the Madeleine. To pick the entrance and recessional music for our ceremony, we had to meet in advance with the musical director and organist. He was a very pleasant fellow, but immediately notified us he would not play the traditional “Here Comes the Bride” Wedding March by Mendelssohn (listen here: Wedding March by Mendelssohn) because it was “overused” and “liturgically inappropriate.”
That was fine with us, so we asked what else he would play. He suggested Jeremiah Clarke’s “Trumpet Voluntary” (listen here: “Trumpet Voluntary” ) for the bridal party’s entrance and then played part of it. We liked it, and said yes. (We learned a few years later that the composer had some dark history, but oh well: Jeremiah Clarke: Why You Shouldn’t Play “Trumpet Voluntary” at Your Wedding).
I asked if he would play Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (listen here: “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” ) for the immediate preamble. This was the part when I would walk up the aisle with my ushers and escort my mother to her seat, and my best man would walk Vicki’s mother to her seat. The organist agreed. Now all we needed was the big finish.
We heard several possible options. Finally, the music director suggested a hymn called “Ode to Joy” attributed to Beethoven. “Ode to Joy” is based on a German poem written in 1785 by Friedrich Schiller. Beethoven adapted and used it with a full choir in the final (fourth) movement of his Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824 (listen here: Ninth Symphony).
Critics have described Beethoven’s decision to bring a choir into the piece revolutionary—“a soaring voice to a poem that had thrilled Beethoven as a young man.” Hmmm, something “soaring” sounded like a good way to wrap up a wedding. We asked the music director to play it on the cathedral’s powerful organ. He did, and we were smitten.
We especially liked that we could include the lyrics to the 1907 adapted hymn (by American novelist and clergyman Henry Van Dyke) in the wedding program, and have our guests sing along. You probably know the words too:
Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee
God of glory, Lord of love
Hearts unfold like flow’rs before Thee
Op’ning to the Sun above
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness
drive the dark of doubt away
Giver of immortal gladness
fill us with the light of day
On the big day, all the music was lovely, and greatly enhanced the beauty of the ceremony. After we said our vows and mass was over, we turned to the crowd and smiled. The mighty cathedral organ played our closing song and we walked down the aisle together—joyfully—as husband and wife.
Over the years, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” has been used for both “good and ill” purposes (Beethoven’s Ode to Joy has been harnessed for good and ill). It sure lived up to its name, however, on our wedding day. From time to time afterwards, I have felt such exuberant and unadulterated joy again, notably on the days when our three children were born. Unfortunately, there were no musical accompaniment options available for those thrilling moments.
The great German composer probably did not write “Ode to Joy” just for us to use in our wedding, but it’s nice to pretend that he did. So 250 years after he was born, it’s probably high time I publicly thank Beethoven—and Schroeder—for the great gift of music that kick started the soundtrack of our life together.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah will be published in the Spring of 2021.
