“Kerry Candaele says he remembers exactly where he was when he first heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” reads an article in Tuesday’s (1/14) Deceptive Cadence blog at NPR. “He was in his 20s at the time, in the 1970s, driving up the California coast in a car he’d borrowed from a friend. He popped in a cassette he found, and what he heard both shocked him and transported him. Now, Candaele has turned his obsession with Beethoven’s Ninth into a documentary film: Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony,” which has been appearing in selected U.S. movie theaters. “He follows the Ninth around the world, to Chile and China, where it became an empowering anthem of solidarity, and to Japan, where performances of daiku—the Great Nine—are a cherished annual tradition…. It became this yearly event [in Japan] where sometimes 5,000 people, sometimes 10,000 people, who have practiced singing in German for six months, stand together in December and sing the ‘Ode to Joy.’ ” Candaele’s first-person article about the making of the documentary appeared in the March-April 2010 issue of Symphony.
Posted January 16, 2014
