Naglfar - The Infernal Ceremony

Beethoven omitted those stanzas and lines that Austrian censorship would certainly not have allowed to print in notes or to publicly execute. So, in the sixth stanza at Schiller it was said that joy equates man with the gods; in the seventh - that it is able to pacify even cannibals, in the eighth - about courageous pride in the throne’s thrones ("Männerstolz vor Königsthronen") ... However, Beethoven not only greatly reduced the poem, but also imperiously changed its structure. He was worried not so much about the inevitable quibbles of censorship as the problems of close-up architectonics. He took from Schiller's text what seemed to him the main thing, and arranged the fragments of verses in such a sequence that allowed him to build a monumental musical form. None of the classical symphonies before this time had a choral finale. AND,since Beethoven decided to “blow up” the established tradition by introducing singing voices into the symphony, the finale was to sound like the culmination of the entire work, the victorious result of a long and complex development.