"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

E. M. Forester, Howard’s End, 1910

“Only connect,” E. M. Forester’s admonition to the world, the way to bring what is most base in us into harmony with what is most profound in us, is today rarely achieved. Music, and the love for its transcendent power, has always been a constant source for deep connection to something beyond the mundane of daily life. Following The Ninth, a film about Beethoven's Ninth across borders and across the globe, will show us the human will to grandeur, strength of character, and the longing for beauty in its most sublime form that we all possess regardless of country or culture that surrounds us.

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827), took the trials and tragedies of his life and turn them into the most enduring and powerful art the world has ever known, no more so then in his final symphony, the great Ninth.

Near the end of his life in 1824, and completely deaf, Beethoven conducted The Ninth Symphony for the first time. This was the composer's first on-stage appearance in twelve years; the hall was packed. Although the performance was officially directed by Ignaz Umlauf, Beethoven shared the stage with him. At the beginning of every part, Beethoven, who sat by the stage, gave the tempos. He was turning the pages of his score and was beating time for an orchestra he could not hear. Two years earlier, Umlauf had watched as the composer's attempt to conduct a dress rehearsal of his opera Fidelio ended in disaster. This time, he instructed the singers and musicians to ignore the totally deaf Beethoven.

As violist Josef Bohm recalled, "Beethoven directed the piece himself, thatis: he stood before the lectern and gesticulated furiously. At times he raised, at other times he shrunk to the ground, he moved as if he wanted to play all the instruments himself and sing for the whole chorus.”

When the audience applauded at the end, Beethoven was several measures off and still conducting. Because of that, the contralto Caroline Unger walked over and forcibly turned Beethoven around to accept the audience's cheers and applause. According to one witness, "the public listened to his wonderful, gigantic creation with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause." The whole audience acclaimed him through standing ovations five times; there were handkerchiefs in the air, hats, raised hands, so that Beethoven, who could not hear the applause, could at least see the ovation gestures. The theatre house had never seen such enthusiasm in applause.

With the Ninth Symphony Beethoven had set out to change the nature of music, and he succeeded. Beethoven made a grand statement, a plea for universal brotherhood and connection across all borders and boundaries, a message both utopian and necessary in his day and ours. We have been living with the repercussions of his genius ever since.

When the Chinese military invaded Tiananmen Square in 1989, the students there were playing the Ode To Joy as their anthem of liberation. In the same year, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth at the Berlin Wall, where people were in the process of dismantling this symbol of oppression of the human will for freedom.

The Ninth appeals to humanity in general because of its depiction of struggle to achieve artistic transcendence itself, a four-movement piece of musical art that covers the sweep of human emotions, from despair to joy, to the search for meaning itself.