La neuvième

I did not expect a musical documentary to throw such an original perspective on history. It's not only a well documented and skilfully made film about one of the greatest pieces of music, but it's also a political and historical reflection about how Beethoven's symphony was confiscated, adopted, distorted, enrolled, marched, trumpeted, and used for all possible political purposes by all kind of political systems in history.

The 9th was a hymn of evil - it was named Bismarck symphony, it was the masterpiece of the Nazi regime which made out of Wagner and Beethoven the official composers of the 3rd Reich, it was broadcast through all Soviet Union in the first propaganda transmissions of radio Moscow, it got Chinese proletarian text to be sung under Mao, and was the official song of racist Rhodesia.

The 9th was also a hymn of Good when Europe chose it as its common symbol, when it sounded in the air and heats while the Berlin wall was falling in pieces and it is the 9th that aliens will first hear as the finest sample of Earth music when Voyager will reach the worlds no human has ever reached yet.

How it comes? What makes the same piece of music a symbol to be selected by good and evil? It's not only the music but it's also or mainly the genius of a composer who was as tormented and as contradictory as any human can be, and who sublimed in his music the contradictions and beauty of all mankind.