An die Freude

"Ode to Joy" (German: "An die Freude" [an diː ˈfʁɔʏdə], first line: "Freude, schöner Götterfunken") is an ode written in the summer of 1785 by German poet, playwright, and historian Friedrich Schiller and published the following year in Thalia. A slightly revised version appeared in 1808, changing two lines of the first and omitting the last stanza.

"Ode to Joy" is best known for its use by Ludwig van Beethoven in the final (fourth) movement of his Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824. Beethoven's text does not use the entirety of Schiller's poem, and reorders some sections. His tune (but not Schiller's words) was adopted as the Anthem of Europe by the Council of Europe in 1972, and subsequently the European Union.

Schiller first wrote the poem when he was staying in Gohlis, Leipzig. In the year 1785 from the beginning of May till mid September, he stayed together with his publisher Georg Joachim Göschen in Leipzig and wrote "An die Freude" along with his play Don Carlos.

Schiller later made some revisions to the poem which was then republished posthumously in 1808, and it was this latter version that forms the basis for Beethoven's setting. Despite the lasting popularity of the ode, Schiller himself regarded it as a failure later in his life, going so far as calling it "detached from reality" and "of value maybe for us two, but not for the world, nor for the art of poetry" in an 1800 letter to his long-time friend and patron Christian Gottfried Körner (whose friendship had originally inspired him to write the ode).

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