By the time Ludwig van Beethoven completed his Ninth Symphony he was almost entirely deaf; he never heard the work with his own ears. At its Vienna premiere on 7 May 1824, as he tried to help direct the orchestra from the stage, he could not see the applause behind him — and, the story goes, one of the soloists had to turn him round to face the audience.

The symphony marks a formal rupture. Beethoven added a chorus and four soloists to the final movement of a genre that had until then been wholly instrumental, setting Friedrich Schiller's poem "An die Freude" (Ode to Joy). Bringing words into the symphony showed later composers — Mahler, Liszt, Wagner — that music could carry ideas and ideals directly. The work's scale, length and emotional intensity also permanently raised expectations of what the form could be.

The fate of the "Ode to Joy" theme came to exceed the symphony itself: its melody of human brotherhood became a twentieth-century emblem of freedom and unity, and in 1985 it was adopted as the official anthem of Europe. For most music historians the Ninth stands as one of the clearest thresholds between the Classical and Romantic eras — the herald of an age that prized individual expression and large-scale narrative.