Ode to Joy

"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.

Friedrich 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 famous 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).

The prominent experts Hans-Jürgen Schings, Wolfgang Riedel and Peter-André Alt accentuate the influence of the pietistic theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger upon Schiller's philosophy of love. Reinhard Breymayer () has newly detected that Oetinger's former pastor Philipp Matthäus Hahn too had such influence upon Schiller and, moreover, a connection to the family of Maria Wilhelmine Countess von Thun und Hohenstein, remembered as the sponsor of a Vienna musically and intellectually outstanding salon and for her patronage of music, notably that of Mozart and Beethoven. Her husband, Franz Josef Count von Thun und Hohenstein, father-in-law of Mozart and Beethoven's patron Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky, ordered an astronomic machine constructed by Hahn and produced by Philipp Gottfried Schaudt, head teacher in Onstmettingen near Hechingen. Josef Friedrich Wilhelm, Prince von Hohenzollern-Hechingen, an uncle of count Thun-Hohenstein, had ordered too such an astronomic machine. According to Breymayer's statement, Schiller's poem and particularly the verses "Brüder - überm Sternenzelt/ muß ein lieber Vater wohnen" ("Brothers, above the starry canopy/ There must dwell a loving Father"), are a reference to Hahn's kernel concept of The Fatherly Love of God.

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