josep,...Full lyrics for the Ninth...



...Gosh Steve.........You still think he was 'PROBABLY'...(whatever you said)???

He was setting a bloody poem written by somebody else, fer chrissake (Anton Schiller to be precise). Not only that, Beethoven chopped the poem around mercilessly. If you are somehow concluding from this that Ludwig was a God-botherer, you'll have to try a bit harder. Far more scholarly persons than me (and, certainly, than you) have gleaned no more than that Beethoven was, at the most, equivocal about God and religion. He would no more refuse to set a religious or (as in this case) a quasi-religious text than I would refuse to go into Europe's great cathedrals and admire the architecture and stunning religious works of art therein (which I do). Bach's Mass in B minor and Mozart's Great Mass in C minor are among my desert island discs. But if you were to attempt to conclude from this that I was secretly not an atheist at all, you'd be no more than a confounded bloody fool.