Ode to Joy: 10,000 Japanese sing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony | Music Documentary

Enthusiasm for Beethoven is particularly strong in Japan. Every year in December, 10,000 choir singers gather in a concert hall in Osaka to sing “Ode to Joy,“ the final chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. At the podium for the 20th time is conductor Yutaka Sado, a pupil of Leonard Bernstein. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is performed more often in Japan than in other country in the world. The Japanese simply refer to Beethoven’s Ninth as “Daiku“ — the “Great.“ Participation in the concert is highly sought-after: The singers have to pay the equivalent of 700 euros to sing “Freude, schöner Götterfunken“ in German. And there are far more than 10,000 applicants. The enthusiasm for Beethoven’s most famous symphony goes back to the first performance of the work by German soldiers in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp Bando in 1918. There were 950 German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers interned there from April 1917 to Decembe