Humor and love

While the Eighth is Beethoven’s shortest and most ironic symphony, the Ninth is his most ambitious and ethically charged. Yet all of this had been prepared in a laboratory devoted to compressing dramatic tension and expanding festive energy. “Serious” quartets and “songs of grace”, together with trios such as the Ghost and the Archduke , paved the way for the contrapuntal density of the Hammerklavier and for increasingly daring experiments such as his final Sonata, op. 111 , not to mention the Missa solemnis . In other words, the sonatas, quartets and the rest of his output became sketches for summoning up the monument to peace and friendship that would be the Ninth Symphony .