Ode to Joy

The melody comes from the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, finished in 1824, where a baritone stands up in the middle of a symphony and starts singing, which nobody had done before. The words are Friedrich Schiller's poem An die Freude, written in 1785. Beethoven had been circling that poem since his twenties and got to it at the very end, by which time he had been profoundly deaf for years. He stood on stage at the premiere anyway, beside the conductor who was really running the orchestra, and the story that one of the singers had to turn him around so he could see the applause he could not hear has been told ever since.

The tune did not stay in the concert hall. It is short and it walks in steps, and it fits a hymn meter, so hymnals took it. In English it is usually printed as Hymn to Joy and sung to "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee", words Henry van Dyke wrote in 1907. It has also been the anthem of the European Union since the 1980s, played there without any words at all, since choosing a language would have meant choosing a country. Sixteen bars, and they have served as a symphony finale, a hymn and an anthem.

On a mandolin this is the easiest page on the shelf and a fair candidate for the first tune anybody ever learns. Almost every note is a quarter, so the counting is one note to a beat and no faster. The line hardly ever skips. It steps up, steps down, and stays inside a single octave from the open D to the D above it, so the hand never shifts and never goes past the fifth fret.

There is one rhythmic wrinkle, and it pays to learn it properly instead of smoothing it over. Three of the four phrases come to rest by leaning on a dotted quarter and then hurrying an eighth into the cadence, written here as B3A the first time and A3G the other two. Those three eighths, plus two pairs more tucked inside the second strain, are the only notes in the whole tune quicker than a quarter. It is a small syncopation and the only place the even tread of the melody breaks. Play it flat and the phrase loses the push that makes it land.