Nicholas Cook puts it well: “Of all the works in the mainstream repertory of Western music, the Ninth Symphony seems the most like a construction of mirrors, reflecting and refracting the values, hopes, and fears of those who seek to understand and explain it … From its first performance [in Vienna in 1824] up to the present day, the Ninth Symphony has inspired diametrically opposed interpretations”. Those interpretations include those earlier listeners and commentators who heard and saw in it evidence that Beethoven had lost it compositionally speaking; that the piece, with its incomprehensible scale, nearly impossible technical demands, and above all its crazily utopian humanist idealism in the choral setting of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy in its last movement, amounted to madness. On the other side, Hector Berlioz thought it the “culmination of its author’s genius”.

The Ninth Symphony is arguably the single piece that inspired the methodology of musical analysis, a discipline of forensic musicological close-reading of the score that tried to prove just how unified and coherent a conception this symphony truly is underneath its chaotically diverse surface. It’s been held up as the central work of Western classical music both by those who imagine it as the ne plus ultra of symphonic, technical, and compositional imagination and mastery, and by those who want to say that classical music can embrace the world outside the concert hall as well as within it, and that the piece is a sounding bell of social change, of emotional hope, and even of political reform.

But those reflections and refractions on and of the Ninth Symphony must also encompass the ways in which the piece has been used as a manipulative ear-worm by less-than-savoury regimes. The Ode to Joy tune - which Beethoven composed as a motto for the whole world to take to its heart, to become a national anthem of humanity itself, something much bigger in its impact even than the anthems of nation states that had emerged by the early 19th century - has been adopted as a the motto of dictatorships as well as democracies. As Beethoven’s most recent biographer Jan Swafford says, “how one viewed the Ninth … depended on what kind of Elysium one had in mind, whether all people should be brothers or that all nonbrothers should be exterminated”. (Esteban Buch’s book, Beethoven’s Ninth – A Political History has more on this particular side of the symphony’s history.) Today, the Ode to Joy is the anthem of the European Union and the sound of Hogmanay and New Year celebrations everywhere from Germany to Japan, and it’s an annual fixture at the Proms, traditionally on the penultimate night of the season, as it is this year. Some feel that Beethoven was simply too successful in writing a tune that really could be sung by all humanity, and that its vision of universal (or nearly – I’ll come on to that!) brotherhood is kitsch at best, or politically dangerous at worst. Conductor Gustav Leonhardt, talking about the finale, said simply: “That ‘Ode to Joy’, talk about vulgarity! And the text! Completely puerile!”

Detail of the viola part of the opening of Beethoven’s 9th (choral) symphony. Photograph: Eitan Simanor / Alamy/Alamy

So the question is: given that the Ninth Symphony belongs to the whole world, and is now the sum total of all of these imaginings over the last 190 years, and its myriad performances and interpretations, what actually is it? There are many valiant attempts out there to show how the piece ties the room together, to tame its disturbing discontinuities and diversities by hearing it as a steady revelation of the Ode to Joy theme. That defining tune is indeed consistently prefigured in all three of the previous movements, and you can hear the finale as the logical end-point of this process. Beethoven even makes that journey absolutely explicit at the start of the finale, as the cellos and basses in their recitative-like outbursts reject music from the previous three movements as unfit for the grander purpose of the finale (a process clinched by the bass solo, who sings Beethoven’s own words: “O Friends, not these sounds!”); that destiny is revealed in the tune that steals in and takes over the orchestra, and it’s fulfilled once the soloists and the choir stand up to sing Schiller’s words to the Ode to Joy theme.

That musical trajectory is paralleled by the symphony’s emotional narrative, starting with the burial of the old heroic ideal, as Jan Swafford suggests, in the first movement. Remember the Eroica Symphony: well, the first movement of the Ninth represents the interment of the great-man military heroism that the earlier symphony celebrates: the funeral march at the end of the Ninth’s first movement puts the nail in the coffin of the Napoleonic dream, which had curdled so devastatingly and produced the political repressions that Beethoven was living and working under when he was writing the Ninth Symphony in the early 1820s. Then comes the ironic bucolic energy of the scherzo, and the Arcadian vision of the slow movement, Beethoven’s most opulently lyrical music, an idyll that dreams of a new kind of heroism towards the end of its rapturous pastoral, as those brass fanfares suddenly appear amid harmonic premonitions of the most visionary music of the finale. That final movement itself is then an enactment of a victory for humanity, as individuals come together in joy and love: a community of choir, vocal soloists, and musicians that isn’t led by great men or even by God, but rather is built on the bonds between “brothers” of Schiller’s poem, as this new, true heroism of humanity creates its own destiny and fashions the world in which Beethoven wanted to live. That world symbolically includes geographical and ethnic diversities just as it encompasses the secular and sacred, in the Turkish music that interrupts the finale and with which the whole symphony noisily, joyously, overwhelmingly ends; as well as its virtuosic counterpoint, its sensuous polyphony and its cantata-like – but terrifyingly challenging - choral writing.

The frontispiece of Beethoven’s choral symphony. Photograph: DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images

Yet it’s precisely because of the power of Beethoven’s fulfilment of this symphonic, dramatic, and social vision (dimensions that Beethoven is working on simultaneously and symbiotically in this piece) that it asks so many questions that resound, unresolved, after any performance. One is about the text; even if you don’t have to go as far as Gustav Leonhardt, you have to recognise that not everyone is actually included in this Utopian brotherhood. That’s implicit in Schiller’s lines: “Yea, if any hold in keeping / Only one heart all his own / Let him join us, or else weeping / Steal from out our midst, unknown”. As Theodor Adorno puts it, “Inherent in the bad collective is the image of the solitary, and joy desires to see him weep … In such a company, what is to become of old maids, not to speak of the souls of the dead?” Beethoven sets Schiller’s loneliness-punishing lines, in the middle of the exposition of the Ode to Joy theme, with a strange diminuendo, sung by the soloists and then the choir, a moment of doubt amid a foment of affirmation. A detail perhaps, but a reminder that even this universal Utopian society has its darknesses, its excluded citizens. The irony is that Beethoven himself, while dreaming in his music of that joyful and loving connection with other human beings, searched for but only rarely found those connections in his own life: his music became what he could not.

There there’s the “fart” in the finale. Not my word, but conductor Roger Norrington’s description of the intervention of the contrabassoon, two bassoons, and bass drum, in the wrong key, in a new speed, and in what you soon realise is the wrong beat of the bar, a bathetic moment that comes just after the choir have invoked a vision of God with some of the powerfully revelatory music of the symphony. This musical petard hoists an accompaniment to a drunken soldier’s – sung by a helium-swallowing tenor, of course! – hymn to “conquering heroism”, as Beethoven savagely sends up the old ideals of great-man-militarism, with Janissary, Turkish-band music borrowed and wildly exaggerated from Mozart’s most popular opera during his lifetime, The Abduction from the Seraglio. And from exactly the opposite extreme, there’s the music that comes shortly after this pissed private’s paean of praise (alliteration – the lowest form of poetry, apologies!), the sublime setting of the last verse of Schiller’s poem, a vision of the embrace of “you millions”, the “kiss of the whole world”, and a creator “dwelling beyond the canopy of stars”. In music that sounds shockingly slow and spare after the hell-for-leather double fugue and triumphalist version of the Ode to Joy tune we’ve just heard, Beethoven has trombones, low strings, and male voices intone the starkest of “embraces”. This isn’t about spiritual or sensual comfort, but something much stranger and deeper. The composer Jörg Widmann even describes this music as creating a “horrible” soundworld, in music that seems to directly contradict the salving sentiment of the words. Instead, this passage of the finale sounds out humanity’s awe at the coldness and vastness of the cosmos, putting us listeners in touch with our microscopic futility as individuals and even as collective humanity faced with the depths of creation. What happens next – just after Beethoven creates a celestial soundscape on a vertiginously anticipatory dominant 9th chord that shimmers and pulses with strange tremolos and registers, the choir contemplating that “father beyond the stars” – is that the music is ripped back to earth for the start of the symphony’s astonishingly jubilant coda, and the Ode to Joy theme leaps around in a triple-time explosion.

But that climactic juxtaposition between the cosmos and earthy celebration is only among the most extreme of the dozens of contrasts that define the finale in particular, and the symphony as a whole. Think of the opening image of musical plasma out of which the melodies of the first movement creep and crash into being, or later in the opening movement, the most dissonant-sounding first-inversion major-key chord in orchestral music – the D major return of the first theme, which Jan Swafford aptly describes as the sound of the hero “sowing ruin” in the symphony’s structure. (For Susan McClary, in a 1987 article, this moment symbolised instead the “throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release”, another of those diverse interpretations the Ninth has inspired.) There are the disruptive, out-of-phase timpani strokes that puncture the scherzo, next to which the rustic drones of the trio section are shockingly stable and good-humoured. On its own terms, the music of the Adagio molto e cantabile slow movement is serenely lyrical, but in the context of the symphony as a whole, it’s music of extreme dramatic contrast, an oasis magicked out of the chaos around it.

All of these increasingly severe jump-cuts as the symphony goes on might well be in service of Beethoven’s compositional credo, that “even when I am composing instrumental music my custom is always to keep the whole in view” (which is decidedly not the same as a striving for a single-minded compositional unity). Yet that “whole” remains riddled with questions, about who we are as a society, about what the purpose of our lives should be – and what the limits of the symphony might be. Or rather, the Ninth Symphony is a realisation of the limitless possibilities of the symphony, to reflect who we are, a sounding board for vastly different ideas and ideologies about music, the world, and our place in it. That’s why Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is arguably the central artwork of Western music: it is as much of a challenge now as it was in 1824 to its listeners, to performers, and to every composer who has written a symphony since. But it’s not because this piece is a monolithic monument of certainty; instead, it’s because its gigantic, irrefutable musical power is a wellspring of endless renewal and possibility. Rather like the whole story of the symphony, you might say...

Five key recordings

Wilhelm Furtwängler/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra: maybe the most terrifying music-making that I know; a performance for Hitler’s birthday in 1942 that seethes with a daemonic intensity. The end sounds more like a scream of pain rather than a shout of joy.

Roger Norrington/London Classical Players: still incendiary and iconoclastic after more than two decades; thrills with the paradoxical shock of the new, as the Ninth was revealed to the world on period instruments for the first time.

John Eliot Gardiner/Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique: Proof of the range of possibilities of historically informed performance practice: Gardiner’s recording, made just a few years after Norrington’s, is if anything wilder and freer.

Leonard Bernstein/orchestra from all over the world!: the performance that Bernstein conducted with players from Germany, France, Britain, Russia, and America on Christmas Day 1989 at the Brandenburg Gate to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall – a searing “Ode to Freedom” (“Freiheit” replaced “Freude”, joy, for this performance).

Riccardo Chailly/Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra: a recent, and brilliant, performance that pairs Chailly’s patina-stripping creativity with the Gewandhaus’s magnificent orchestral tradition. The result is catalytically imaginative – and you can hear this combination at the Proms this week.

Riccardo Chailly conducts Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at the Proms on Friday 12th September.