To Joy.

Tom Blackburn reminds us to take a minute today to celebrate Schiller's 250th birthday ("If you do the math, you notice that Schiller was a contemporary of Jefferson and Madison. Something was in the air in those days.")

Or don't, and suffer the consequence of a life not knowing ... your choice.

By Tom Blackburn
Palm Beach Post Columnist
Monday, November 09, 2009

The choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is being performed somewhere in Europe today, on the 20th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall. It is a rule in Europe that no major ceremonious occasion can be held without it.

The Ode to Joy, or, as Friedrich Schiller called it, To Joy, is not only a poem that inspired the great romantic composer but also a Rorschach test for the young and idealistic. Schiller was thinking of joy when he wrote the poem at 26, but he also was thinking of freedom. The play William Tell, another work appropriate on civic occasions lasting a week or longer, came later. Schiller is known as the poet of freedom.

Schiller was thinking, too, of brotherhood. "Alle Menschen werden Brüder (All men become brothers)" is a bit of editing by Beethoven, but the original line was "Beggars become princes' brothers."

The poem preaches that joy, or freedom, brings all of humankind into one huge embrace with Nature's Creator. When Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth in a celebratory concert televised live all over Europe on Christmas of the Wall-ending year, he had the singers substitute "freedom" for "joy," which is easy in German, where the words, Freiheit and Freude, sound similar and scan alike.

The Wall fell in 1989 on the eve of Schiller's 230th birthday. Tuesday would be his 250th. Germany isn't going all-out this year because of the Wall commemorations and because it had a Schiller tribute just four years ago on the 200th anniversary of his death. If you do the math, you notice that Schiller was a contemporary of Jefferson and Madison. Something was in the air in those days.

Marbach, a picturesque town on the Neckar River downstream from Stuttgart, reopens its renovated Schiller museum Tuesday in the house in which the poet was born. He didn't spend much time there. His family moved when he was 4, and he got out of the duchy Württemberg as quickly as he could after his first play, The Robbers, about a Bavarian Robin Hood, was produced and promptly banned. It's now a classic. German schoolchildren have to read it.

It must have been exciting to live at a time when poets and playwrights were known - and banned - for their ideas rather than for whom they were sleeping with. Back in those days, politicians wrote long articles - and people read them - instead of mouthing other people's sound bites.

Not long ago, a young person, on first encountering Schiller, would glow with exciting dreams and inspiring thoughts. Now, we don't pester students with dead Europeans. We test them. A student might get close to the Ode to Joy through John Lennon's Imagine, but his best chance of encountering that now would be on a Florida license plate.

Songs, as Alec Wilder wrote, are made to sing while we're young. As Winston Churchill did not say (but some clever person did), "If you are not liberal when you are 25 you have no heart; if you are still liberal when you are 40 you have no brain." Even Schiller eventually felt embarrassed by some of the exuberance in his famous poem.

But everybody needs to be young and open to thrilling hopes at some point in life. If you miss that, how will you know what's going on in Beethoven's Ninth when you finally can afford a concert ticket?

We seem to be trying to achieve a generation of young fogies who will confuse accomplishment with celebrity, whose definition of freedom is low taxes and waving the sign they were given, whose highest aspiration would be a better car and whose goal is a shot on American Idol.

Judging by some grown-ups, that project is succeeding. Oh, well. "Seid umschlungen, Millionen..." In honor of the birthday, "I embrace you millions. This kiss is for the whole world."

It's even for the growing number who can't feel the joy of the Ninth.