Why you should believe in yourself

Did you know that Ode to Joy was a poem written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785 before being the song we all know ? Me neither. The sad part is that Friedrich regarded it as a failure, going so far as to say it is "of value maybe for us two, but not for the world, nor for the art of poetry" in an 1800 letter to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner (whose friendship had originally inspired him to write it). In short, he gave himself a one star review and moved on.

Fast forward 200 years and the song that Bethoveen wrote based on this poem is now the European Anthem.

Beethoven had been obsessed with that poem since he was 23. He spent thirty years trying to set it to music, filling notebooks with attempts, rejecting over 200 different versions of the Ode to Joy theme before finally getting it right in the Ninth Symphony.

The Ninth Symphony premiered on May 7th, 1824. By then Beethoven was completely deaf. He stood on stage anyway and pretended to conduct — except the orchestra had been privately instructed to ignore him entirely and follow the actual conductor standing nearby.

Schiller called his own work worthless. Beethoven couldn't hear his greatest triumph. And it still became an entire continent's anthem.

"Faith, it seems, is not without a sense of irony" - Morpheus, Matrix (Yeah I know, weird quote... but my blog, my rules)