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Maria Popova is an award-winning Bulgarian blogger. For nigh on two decades she has been issuing a weekly ‘Marginalian’ blog (www.themarginalian.org) dedicated, in her words, ‘to encouraging cross-disciplinary curiosity and self-directed learning.’ Her posts are thorough and thought-provoking, left field and resolutely upbeat.
She describes her blogging as the product of her reading, and of her reckoning with a perpetual search for meaning, conducted ‘always through the lens of wonder.’ Popova studied at the University of Pennsylvania and has been based for many years in Brooklyn, New York.
Almost always Popova’s posts, generous, erudite, highly illustrated, showcase the creativity of others: writers, poets, musicians, artists, philosophers.
It’s rare that she writes in the first person. But for her blog of 17 May 2022 the tone was different: in this issue she wrote movingly about the relationship she’d long ago established with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, his Ode to Joy.
Popova describes what it was like in 1989 when, as a young girl ‘in the spring of life’ living in Sofia, the capital of her country newly-liberated from Communism, she’d ‘stood alongside a dozen classmates in the National Symphony Hall to perform the Ode to Joy, recently adopted [in 1985] as the anthem of Europe by the European Union, the union to which my country longed to belong.’
The lyrics Popova’s choir sung were originally adapted from a poem by the German poet Friedrich Schiller, written in 1785, and discovered that year by Beethoven, aged fifteen at the time.
At its heart the poem is, albeit covertly, a paean of praise to freedom, its aims aligning with the transcendental idealism of the era of Enlightenment. This doctrine claimed that peace and kindness would envelop humankind as an inevitable consequence were freedom, justice and human happiness to be placed at the centre of personal and political life.

Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee,
God of glory, God of love;
Hearts unfold like flowers before thee,
Opening to the sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness;
Drive the dark of doubt away;
Giver of immortal gladness,
Fill us with the light of day!

The young Beethoven registered these sentiments and as Popova explains, ‘took Schiller’s bright beam of possibility and magnified it through the lens of his own genius to illuminate all of humanity for all of time.’
Conductor Leonard Bernstein, who famously conducted the Ninth Symphony at the breached Berlin Wall on Christmas Day 1989 (re-wording it in its final movement as ‘Ode to Freedom’), said of the music Beethoven wrote 37 years after first hearing Schiller’s verse, that as a composition, the Ninth Symphony represented ‘the closest music’s ever come to encompassing universality.’
After the long gestatory period Beethoven finally began work on the symphony in 1822. When achieved, it was to become not only his personal greatest creative and spiritual triumph but also ‘a turning point in the history of music that revolutionized the symphony… an eternal masterwork.. making meaning out of chaos, beauty out of sorrow… Inside its total drama, a total tranquillity,’ in Popova’s lyrical prose.
Although Beethoven had not composed a symphony in a decade, although his hearing was by now almost completely gone – and over and above all – regardless of the fact that no composer before him had ever woven lyric poetry, or indeed any words at all, into a symphony, he was determined his Ninth would culminate with the full force of a crowning final chorale.
Only in song, Popova tells us, ‘could Beethoven integrate the solace of poetry with the drama of music, and channel his own poetic rage as a force of beauty to turn the human darkness he’d witnessed and suffered into something incandescent.’
Ambitious, stubborn, undeterred, he puzzled on about he’d introduce the words, and how choose the voices that would best carry them.
Eventually the work’s premiere took place on 7 May 1824 in Vienna. Four soloists were to anchor the sizeable choir while the orchestra was huge in size: 24 violins, 24 wind instruments, 12 cellos and basses, ten violas and a whole lot of percussion.
Popova describes the scene, ‘Something shifted as soon as the exalted, sublime, total music rose… subsuming every soul into a single harmonious presence.’ Before even the Ode’s final chord had died away the theatre’s gasping silence cracked open into wild applause as the audience members, having leapt to their feet, chanted Beethoven’s name while waving fluttering handkerchiefs above their heads.
And the rest, as they say, is history. The Ode remains to this day a protest anthem and call to solidarity; in our times the need for its clarion call has remained paramount.
In Ukraine, for example, in recent years its version re-imagined by composer Victoria Poleva has been played to defy Putin’s tyrannical invasion; in earlier times its chorus was sung by Chilean protestors as they took down the Pinochet dictatorship; Chinese youth in Beijing’s Tianenmen Square sounded it out as the tanks rolled in in April 1989, while a 2018 performance in the Royal Albert Hall for London’s Proms commemorated the centenary of WW1. 

For those in the UK, 2026 presents three opportunities to attend a Ninth Symphony performance:
Friday 12 June: the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Saturday 13 June: the same orchestra at the Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
Saturday 19 September: the Royal Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall, London

Popova concludes her blog with this contemporary comment, ‘Even as we live through nightmares there is something in us more powerful than tyranny and destruction, as long we remain ultimately unassailable – and this we can become by placing freedom, justice and personal happiness at the centre of our commitment to life.’
Experiencing another spring, she signs off with this personal note, ‘On my wireless headphones as I cycle across the Brooklyn Bridge I am hearing a recording of the Berlin Philharmonic playing the Ode.
I ride into a life undreamt of by the girl who sang its chorus in Sofia’s National Concert Hall, a life of infinite possibilities…
I ride into the spring night, singing. This in the end, might after all be the truest translation of ‘joy’ – this ecstatic fusion of presence and possibility.’