Beethoven's Ninth Symphony premieres

On 7 May 1824, at the Karntnertor Theatre in Vienna, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony received its first performance. The composer, almost totally deaf, stood on the stage beating time, though the conductor Michael Umlauf directed the orchestra; at the end, according to the story, the contralto Caroline Unger turned him round to see the applause that he could not hear. The symphony was the first by a major composer to include voices, in a choral finale setting Schiller's Ode to Joy. The theme became the anthem of the European Union in 1985. The manuscript is on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

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