Schiller called his poem “The Ode to Joy”: Thy magic reunites those / Whom stern custom has parted; / All men will become brothers / Under thy gentle wing. Beethoven followed suit. Today, November 9, is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and those profound words have reverberated. Freude! Joy! Freiheit! Freedom! Protesters in Chile sang it demonstrations against the Pinochet dictatorship. Chinese student broadcast it at Tiananmen Square. Perhaps, most famously, Leonard Bernstein conducted it after the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Berlin’s Schauspielhaus. The concert was broadcast live in more than twenty countries to an estimated audience of 100 million people. If singing it is beyond your skill level and that of your 200 closest friends, you are in luck. Josephine Daskam Bacon adapted it in 1951 as “The Hymn for Nations.” This you can do. We’ll even provide the sheet music:
Build the road of peace before us,
Build it wide and deep and long.
Speed the slow, remind the eager,
Help the weak and guide the strong.
None shall push aside another,
None shall let another fall.
Work beside me brothers, sisters,
All for one and one for all.
(If you want to skip straight to the choral part, go to 1:05)
(The photo at the top of this page is of the chunk of the Berlin Wall that is sited in front of the Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University. What’s with the horses?)
