Program Notes: Xian Conducts Beethoven 9

STEVEN MACKEY 
RIOT 
BORN: February 14, 1956, to American parents stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. 
WORK COMPOSED: 2020 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 21, 2023, in Princeton, New Jersey, with Mackey on electric guitar, mezzo-soprano Alicia Olatuja, the Princeton University Glee Club and the New Jersey Symphony conducted by Xian Zhang. 

American composer Steven Mackey started out as a rock musician whose career path was forever changed at age 19 after hearing a Beethoven quartet that had one of the most psychedelic notes he'd ever experienced up to that point. 

Mackey is currently a Professor of Music at Princeton University, part of the composition faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music and director of the New Jersey Symphony’s Edward T. Cone Composition Institute; a composer of more than 80 works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance and opera, including his 2011 GRAMMY-winning Lonely Motel: Music from Slide; and winner of multiple awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award and so many others.  

Mackey has said his creative voice merges his academic training with the free-spirited physicality of his mother-tongue rock guitar music, which finds him incorporating rock vernacular into traditional classical ensembles. Earlier this season, he presented his new work and Seattle Symphony co-commission, Anemology, a Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra. To close the season, our Music Director is pairing RIOT — his work for electric guitar, mezzo-soprano and chorus — with Beethoven’s mighty Ninth Symphony.  

Mackey wrote the piece for his hometown orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony, where Xian is also music director (she holds the same position here at the Seattle Symphony concurrently until her NJSO tenure concludes in 2028). It was originally commissioned as a musical tribute to the orchestra to commemorate its 100th year.  

In his program note, Mackey wrote, “My daydreams, about what I might do for such an auspicious occasion were grand: my friends in the NJSO joined on a packed stage by a vocal soloist, a chorus and myself on guitar, all singing and playing with abandon. I wasn’t hearing a song cycle, a series of independent songs, but rather a continuous flow of music that occasionally coalesced around the explicit images of a text, like a river lapping around a chain of islands. 

“I asked the poet and (at the time) my Princeton University colleague, Tracy K. Smith, to help define the work by providing a text. Tracy also writes opera libretti, so she knows how to make words sing. I had a good feeling about the idea of collaborating with her based not only on her work but also on the positive energy she radiated as we got acquainted over the years (plus, her daughter and my son were video game buddies). I was happy to finally have a project worthy of her partnership and the New Jersey Symphony was delighted to commission her for a text. 

“We met and discussed the parameters of the commission, leading with the celebratory occasion, but it was the summer of 2020 and George Floyd had been murdered only a few months prior and that fact could not be ignored. 

“Soon after our meeting, Tracy sent me Riot, which foregrounds race and resilience. The first line — 

Sometimes I feel 
the Black in my heart 
like a map 

made of tar. You need 
'only part your lips 
to mar what isn't yours 

“— emanates from a black woman in first person but there is also the subtle presence of ancestors in the reference to the old spiritual ‘Sometimes I feel… (like a motherless child)’ and the uppercase ‘B’ in Black, which suggests the race as well as the color. From the outset Tracy deftly sets up the interplay between personal and communal, the soloist and the chorus.  

“From this dark and personal utterance, the series of six separate but related texts trace a trajectory that culminates in positive affirmation and a celebration of hope, perseverance, commitment and community: 

We live— 
gold hot bright 
the line of us 
never tiring 
We live— 
We live— 

“The music aspires to honor that trajectory.” 

Seattle Symphony © 2026 

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Opus 125 
BORN: December 16, 1770, in Bonn 
DIED: March 26, 1827, in Vienna 
COMPOSED: 1822–1824
WORLD PREMIERE: May 7, 1824, in Vienna. 

Between 1800 and 1812, Beethoven transformed the symphony as no other composer had up until that point (or arguably has done since). His first two works of this kind, written in 1800 and 1802, summarized the Classical-period symphony, which had been his inheritance from Mozart and Haydn, considered the great symphonists of the late 18th century. With his Third Symphony, the epochal Sinfonia Eroica of 1804, Beethoven expanded both the musical and emotional scope of the genre, imparting to it the heroic spirit that would become a hallmark of 19th-century Romanticism. 

The works that followed proved Beethoven’s symphonic style was capable of expression that ranged from desperate struggle to the purifying beauty he found in nature. Equally important, they revealed the imposing command of form and development that places these compositions among the great intellectual achievements of Western culture. 

Then, beginning in 1813, no symphony came from Beethoven’s pen for more than a decade. Much of this period saw a marked decrease in the composer’s output and his progressive withdrawal from most social contact. He was, during this time, embroiled in emotional and legal turmoil engendered by the custody of his troubled nephew. Moreover, he was now almost completely deaf and struggling to accept the impossibility of intimate companionship, something he had long hoped for, but that finally seemed unattainable in view of his failed hearing and single-minded devotion to music. 

These difficult personal circumstances might alone have explained the relative silence of the formerly prolific composer. But the work of Beethoven’s final years suggests that he was passing through a creative crisis as well; for when the flow of compositions at last resumed, the results were distinct from anything their author had produced before. 

In his late compositions, Beethoven seems to be reaching in opposite directions at once. His tone is more intimate, more personal, yet the scale on which his ideas take form has once again expanded. There is a greater feeling of maturity and a sense of profound spirituality in his musical utterances, but his melodies often have the simplicity of folk tunes. And while boldly formulating new concepts of musical design and harmonic language, he takes pains to incorporate such anachronisms as fugal counterpoint in his compositions. 

Nowhere are the contradictions that inform Beethoven’s late music more evident than in his Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824. And nowhere, in either his own earlier symphonies or those of other composers, are there precedents for the grandeur and almost terrifying fervor of this work, nor for the remarkable conception of the symphony’s choral finale. 

But while the Ninth Symphony seems in many ways sui generis, it also represents an extension and culmination of certain concerns that had preoccupied Beethoven throughout his career. The triumph of the spirit, the psychological progression from pathos to joy that had been the theme of the Third and Fifth symphonies, the opera Fidelio and the Egmont Overture, finds its greatest expression in Beethoven’s final symphonic essay. In each of the aforementioned works, the victory of love, heroism or both is celebrated in strong, simple melodies and straightforward harmonies, and Beethoven extends that rhetorical device magnificently in the Ninth Symphony’s closing movement. 

Even the use of Friedrich Schiller’s ode “An die Freude,” the “Ode to Joy,” as the basis of the finale stems from Beethoven’s youth. As a young man, he had sketched a setting of these verses, and the idea of completing it never left him. Thus, the Ninth Symphony was as much fulfillment as breakthrough, a work that crowned Beethoven’s efforts to articulate in music the 19th century’s great humanist vision, even while it opened new vistas in the field of symphonic composition. 

If the finale is the triumphant goal of the Ninth Symphony, the significance of this movement, its cathartic power and seeming necessity stem from the sense of conflict presented at the outset of the composition. The initial movement seems like a work of elemental force and it grows out of the most elemental musical materials. Its initial moments suggest a shapeless, formless primordial void: static harmonies from which fragments of melody tentatively emerge, the music slowly gathering momentum until it erupts to launch what is still the most tumultuous and compelling drama in the symphonic literature.  

The second movement presents a robust scherzo, one in which Beethoven offers a remarkable display of compositional skill. Successive statements of its principal motif, punctuated by startling exclamations from the timpani, are woven into intricate contrapuntal passages suggesting a great cosmic dance. 

In contrast to the vigor of this second movement, the third gives us music of heavenly sweetness, a sense of deep and serene spirituality. The tranquility of this Adagio molto e cantabile—Andante moderato might lead us to believe that the turmoil of the opening movement has been resolved. But as the finale begins, we find that a sense of agitation, conveyed by a harsh fanfare, still lingers over the symphony. 

The disturbing fanfare is answered at once by a more tempered statement from the deep orchestral voices of the cellos and basses. A second outburst is similarly answered. Beethoven now recounts the progress of the symphony thus far, presenting fragments of music from the three preceding movements in turn. Like the fanfares, each of these recollections is interrupted by the low strings. Their declamatory statements seem more like speech than music, as if the notes are groping for words. 

At last, a bit of melody emerges, growing more confident as it is taken up by additional instruments. This is the famous principal theme of the movement, and with its bright announcement by the full orchestra, the symphony seems assured of a joyous conclusion. But victory is not so easily won. Again, the dissonant fanfare sounds, casting the work once more into shadow. 

And then, something quite extraordinary occurs. The declamatory music presented earlier by the cellos and basses again rises up in protest, but now it has a new voice, a human one, and has found the words for which it has been searching: “O friends, not these sounds, but let us raise our voices in joyful song!” The lines are Beethoven’s, and as if in obedience to his call, the symphony bursts into song. The remainder of the movement is an elaborate setting of Schiller’s ode. During the course of this presentation, the composer employs, in varying configurations, the full range of instrumental and vocal resources at his disposal, and the “Ode to Joy” theme, which seemed so modest at its first appearance, becomes a soaring anthem for joy, for brotherhood, for all Beethoven hoped mankind might be. 

Paul Schiavo © 2022, revised 2026