Ludwig van Beethoven stood on a Vienna stage on May 7, 1824, waving his arms at an orchestra he could not hear, several bars behind the music, until contralto Caroline Unger turned him around to face the cheering crowd. This episode traces the decades-long path to that night: a melody he had sketched in a simple piano song before 1795, the under-rehearsed 1808 Choral Fantasy that served as a test run for blending voices with orchestra, and the 1817 commission from the Philharmonic Society of London that finally set the Ninth Symphony in motion.

We look at the Vienna of the early 1820s, where Metternich’s censorship and the public’s obsession with Rossini left a deaf, isolated Beethoven feeling obsolete, and at how his threat to premiere the work in Berlin prompted a petition from the city’s cultural elite begging him to stay. We then unpack the music itself: the aggressive scherzo placed second to jolt listeners, the Turkish military instruments, the medieval chant modes, the double fugue, and a choral finale described as a symphony within a symphony. The conversation closes with the Ninth’s afterlife, from the Curse of the Ninth that haunted Bruckner and Mahler to its use as the European Union anthem and the legend that it dictated the length of the compact disc.

• Why the Ninth was a slow burn spanning decades rather than a lightning strike of inspiration
• How deafness freed Beethoven to write for an oversized, imagined orchestra
• The chaotic premiere: two rehearsals, rebellious soloists, and Michael Umlauf secretly conducting
• How the audience threw hats and handkerchiefs so Beethoven could see the ovation he could not hear
• The Ode to Joy’s strange journey through Cold War Olympics, Rhodesia, the Berlin Wall, and the EU