Choral Fantasy (Beethoven) a rather troubled one; according to the composer's secretary, Anton Schindler, it "simply fell apart," a result most likely attributable to insufficient rehearsal time. Because of a mistake in the execution of the piece, it was stopped half way through and restarted. In Ignaz von Seyfried's words: The work includes a sequence of variations on a theme that is widely felt to be an early version of a far better known variation theme, namely the one to which Beethoven set the words of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in his Ninth Symphony. The two themes are compared below. \new Score
Ode to Joy near that it was the early form of the poem, when it was still an 'Ode to Freedom' (not 'to Joy'), which first aroused enthusiastic admiration for it in Beethoven's mind". Over the years, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" has remained a protest anthem and a celebration of music. From demonstrators in Chile singing during demonstration against the Pinochet dictatorship, Chinese student broadcast at Tiananmen Square, the concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein after the fall of the Berlin Wall and "Daiku" (Number Nine) concerts in Japan every December and one after the 2011 tsunami. It has recently inspired impromptu performances at