You wise founders of happy states
Your wise founder of happy states (WoO 95) is a choral composition by Ludwig van Beethoven .
Emergence
Beethoven composed the choir in September 1814 in the run-up to the Vienna Congress , which, under the direction of Klemens Wenzel Lothar von Metternich, was supposed to regulate the reorganization of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars .
It is unknown who wrote the text and whether the choir ever performed; Beethoven may have wanted to perform it first at the opening of the Congress of Vienna on November 1, 1814, at which the cantata The Glorious Moment op. 136 was finally heard.
To the music
The choir is in A major and is characterized by a march-like, dotted rhythm. After a short instrumental prelude, a melodically simple hymn sounds, which is accompanied by an orchestral tutti when it is repeated.
Musicologist Nicholas Cook compared Your Wise Founder of Happy States with the choral finale of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 . On the one hand, both works deal with the theme of community from an ideological perspective; there are also musical parallels between the choir piece and some tutti passages of the symphony finale. On the other hand, as musicologist Tobias Janz describes it, what is contained in an otherwise instrumental symphony like a quotation can have a "broken and affirmative effect" in the choir.
literature
supporting documents
- Choral music for the Congress of Vienna - "You wise founders of happy states" WoO 95 and "The glorious moment" op. 136 , in: Sven Hiemke (ed.): Beethoven-Handbuch. Bärenreiter, Kassel, 2009, ISBN 978-3-7618-2020-9 , pp. 273-279.
further reading
- Michael Ladenburger: The Vienna Congress in the Mirror of Music , in: Beethoven. Between Revolution and Restoration , ed. by Helga Lühning and Sieghard Brandenburg , Bonn, 1989, pp. 275-306
Web links
- Ye Wise Founders of Happy States (WoO 95) : Notes and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project