MOZART'S "ODE TO JOY": CONVERGENT MUSICAL EVOLUTION

Vincent P. de Luise M.D.

Mozart in 1770, with the Order of the Golden Spur
Anonymous 1777 oil, copy of the lost 1770 original

Ludwig van Beethoven began writing his ninth symphony in 1817. The Ode to Joy theme in the final movement stemmed from a melodic idea he had hatched in 1790, when he began setting to music a 1785 poem and drinking song by Friedrich Schiller, an die Freude (To Joy). Beethoven/s 1795 Lied (German art song), Gegenliebe (Returned Love), contained the motif that he would later employ as the Ode to Joy.

Ah, but Wolfgang Mozart had already penned that melody twenty years years earlier, in 1775, in a sacred work, the Misericordias Domini, KV 222.

In Mozart's Misericordias Domini, at the 1:05 mark, you can hear the Ode to Joy melody, i.e., Beethoven's Ode to Joy. The motif repeats several times in Mozart's composition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEBYufTXJQk

How can this be? Did Beethoven copy Mozart?

Beethoven in 1819
by Joseph Karl Stieler

It is highly unlikely. There is no evidence that Beethoven ever heard the Misericordias Domini, or ever saw the autograph.

A similar example is heard with Beethoven's 1805 Eroica symphony theme. Mozart had penned a similar melody thirty-seven years early in the overture to his 1768 opera, Bastien und Bastienne, KV 50. Bastien was performed only once in Mozart's lifetime, a private performance at the home of the physician Dr Hans Mesmer. The opera was not published until the 1880s and received its first known public performance in 1890. It is highly unlikely for Beethoven to have seen the manuscript and he never heard the opera.

Here is a snippet of the overture to Bastien und Bastienne. Do you hear a bit of the first theme of Beethoven's Eroica symphony within it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad7WlYjxS3Y

These serendipitous motivic events are examples of what I call, Convergent Musical Evolution. These melodies are simple and direct, diatonic, with no chromatics, and with small intervals between the notes. 
Convergent Musical Evolution is a form of Convergent Evolution - an analofy would be butterflies and birds independently adapting and evolving, over eons, to develop wings.
What we have here with these lovely motifs is very straightforward: two geniuses independently conjuring and crafting eternal and universal melodies.


Ars longa !

Vincent

@ 2017 Vincent P. de Luise M.D.