Music to so many ears.

Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History By Esteban Bach; translated by Richard Miller University of Chicago Press, 344 pages, $27.50

Early in his study of the most famous segment of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Esteban Buch explains: "The communists hear in [the "Ode to Joy"] the gospel of a classless world, Catholics hear the Gospel itself, democrats hear it as the voice of democracy." The poetry of Friedrich con Schiller, which provides the work with its vocal component, imagines "All men will become brothers / At the gentle touch of [joy's] wing." But, as Buch shows us, men have become brothers only in finding within the "Ode" a glorious harmony through which they have sought to amplify their own pursuits.

Buch combines musical analysis with cultural and historical contexts, as he investigates how the "Ode" and its composer have fared since the Ninth's initial performance on May 7, 1824 at the Karthnerthor Theater in Vienna. There, the composer himself "stood totally deaf and absorbed in the score...[until] Karoline Unger took his arm and turned him around to face the audience that was applauding him."

The opening chapters, on music and politics in eighteenth-century England and France, are meant to introduce the reader to the interrelations of state politics, musical composition, and collective patriotism. But Buch's deft explanation of these matters as they relate directly to Beethoven's own milieu actually render these sections unnecessary, as we learn of how the composer participated in the evolving tradition of state-invested music while radically innovating it. Buch explains that "the establishment of a narrative thread leading from conflict to its resolution is at the crux of the transformation of the symphonic form that is one of Beethoven's principal contributions to musical history."

Buch devotes the main section of the book to the political reception of the "Ode." Much of the nineteenth century was marked by claims from competing camps over the work's true import. Buch judiciously quotes from primary sources ...