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: read more…