Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity

Beethoven’s Nine : Ode to Humanity is more than a documentary about music, it is an exploration of resilience, and the ways art intersects with life. In early 2023, filmmaker Larry Weinstein set out to document the enduring legacy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and its relevance 200 years after its creation. However, as global events unfolded, Larry found himself pulled into his own film, turning the project into a deeply personal reflection on the power of art in the face of adversity.
The film features nine voices, including Ukrainian-Canadian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, leader of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, an orchestra composed of Ukrainian refugees. Joining her are composer Gabriela Lena Frank, Polish rock artist Monika Brodka, psychologist Steven Pinker, philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, and conductor Leonard Bernstein.

Finalist at the Golden Prague International Television Festival, Czech Republic (2024).

The director’s statement:
​“I have just directed a film which inadvertently has become the most personal I’ve ever made. What was to have been a tribute to the greatest of all classical composers took a violent turn that has affected me and my family in a terrible and terrifying way.

The film opens with a musical explosion — the first notes of the second movement of Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony. It saunters its way through melodies that seem to ask the questions, ​“Why? Why are we here? Where are we going?” Music that wordlessly foreshadows the very central themes of the film to come. A conductor is seen making her way through the darkened corridors of a concert hall, musicians ready themselves to go onstage, a choir warms up with eerily dissonant vocal harmonies. All the while a narrator questions why Beethoven deliberately chose to alter the course of musical history by using words sung in a symphony — something that had never been done before: ​“Why? Why were these idealistic words so important to Beethoven? What were Beethoven’s intentions – did he really believe that one day humankind would be capable of achieving harmony?”

Canadian/​Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson gathers the forces of her formidable musicians who comprise the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra. They perform onstage in front of a massive Ukrainian flag. The music intercuts with images and sounds of rockets and explosions over the cities of the Ukraine. Like Beethoven, we too are forced to wonder whether we can ever achieve a better world that we all seek.

Beethoven’s Nine is an intricate weave of stories of nine characters of various ages, genders, backgrounds and walks of life who are all somehow linked by their connection to Beethoven’s masterpiece, and all that it has come to represent.They range from conductors to environmentalists to a rockstar, a comic strip artist, a social psychologist, a philosopher, a deaf composer, a filmmaker and an orchestra recently founded upon the very same principles that inspired Beethoven’s Ninth – the ideals of peace, freedom, compassion and belief in humanity.

The stories of the nine connect and overlap with one another across continents. The theme is strong and eternal : to understand the motivations of the greatest of composers to write a piece that was unlike any other. Beethoven, aware of his mortality and pain, wrote the first symphony in history accompanied by words – words that were about love and freedom, hope and peace, embracing all of humanity and ​“kissing the millions”. He wrote this music both as a love letter to all of humankind and at the same time as a powerful protest piece. No matter how bad the world has become, this was a symphony dedicated to posterity, when we might finally all come together in order to embrace ideals that make life worth living.

As we were in the midst of filming our subjects for Beethoven’s Nine, a horrifying and historically unprecedented event gave us a new harrowing focus. On October 7^th Hamas militants left Gaza for Israel and sped to several communities, including my sister Judih’s Kibbutz Nir Oz. Even before arriving at the kibbutz, they encountered and immediately shot my sister and her husband, Gadi, making them the first civilian casualties of the entire war. Gadi most certainly succumbed to his wounds immediately, but Judih’s fate was unconfirmed. Soon after the attack, my cinematographer and dear friend, John Minh Tran insisted that he turn the camera on me because it related so strongly to the themes of our film. The idea was abhorrent to me, but I acquiesced. Since then, my experience and my sister’s story have become intertwined with the other stories in the film, as is the question of how we remain objective about the stories we tell as filmmakers, or if we ever really can be anything but immersed in our own subjectivity

Hope, and what to hope for, is the at core of Beethoven’s Nine. After two hundred years since the Ninth Symphony was written, are we any closer to its ideals? Are we yet worthy of the hopes and dreams of the highly evolved and thoroughly modern artist who composed it ? Or has the Enlightenment fallen into an irretrievable abyss of darkness ?”
- Larry Weinstein.

In the presence of the producer Jason Charters March 16^th in Montreal.