“Japan Sings Along With Beethoven”, 1990-12-29 ():
December in Japan is a festive season, filled with gift-giving, prayers for the new year, bamboo and pine branches in front of houses, office parties and Beethoven’s Ninth.
Beethoven’s Ninth? No one is sure how it happened, but indeed, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Choral Symphony is as much a staple of the season as dry weather and maddeningly short days. The symphony is being performed at least 170 times this month by professional and amateur groups throughout the country. Some orchestras play it several times in a row. The NHK Symphony Orchestra has performed what the Japanese call the Daiku, or Big Nine, five times this month, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra 13 times and the Japan Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra 11 times.
“For Japanese, listening to Beethoven’s Ninth at the end of the year is a semi-religious experience”, said Naoyuki Miura, the artistic director of Music from Japan, which sponsors concerts abroad. “People feel they have not completed the year spiritually until they hear it.” Like the Christmastime sing-alongs of Handel’s Messiah in the West, Beethoven’s Ninth also draws audiences to sing-along performances at which the audiences lustily join in the choruses of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”, singing German words they barely understand.