Keyword »Jubilation« – the playlist

Whenever the players and team of the St. Pauli Football Club have a goal to celebrate at their Millerntor home stadium, this Blur song comes booming out of the loudspeakers. It's the perfect anthem for anyone drunk on beer and victory who doesn't know the text by heart, as the refrain consists of just one single word, or sound: »Woo-hoo!«

It would be hard to express a sense of rejoicing any more powerfully and directly than this. But we shouldn't forget that this noisy grunge sound was just one of the styles cultivated by the extremely versatile band. Starting with 90s Britpop, they worked their way through the more mainstream US charts to experimental indie-rock territory. Frontmann Damon Albarn has even written several operas, and has been described by the Daily Telegraph as one of Britain's 20 most important creative artists. Woo-hoo!

This is an article from the Elbphilharmonie Magazine (issue 01/2022), which is published three times per year.

A blessing and a curse at the same time: Handel wrote 42 operas and 32 oratorios, and was such a dominant figure on the London music scene for a good 40 years that statues of him were already put up during his lifetime. But at the end of the day, everyone only remembers him by these four minutes from his oratorio »The Messiah« where the chorus belts out »Halleluja«. The one-hit wonder also conceals Handel's real dramatic trick: he wrote an oratorio about Jesus Christ without having Him appear on stage (which would have been strictly forbidden in English at the time).

One small side-effect is that the Hebrew cry of rejoicing from the Old Testament – it literally translates as »Praise the Lord!« - has become firmly established in general usage, and has even found its way into pop culture thanks to Leonard Cohen. The Ancient Greek »Eureka!«, on the other hand, likewise the Baroque »Rejoice!« and the Prussian cry »Hip hip hoorah!« are all gathering dust in the curio cabinet of history.

As head of the NDR music department and director of the Hamburg State Opera, Rolf Liebermann (1910–1999) played a leading role in the city's musical life for decades. In his 17-year tenure at the opera he put on more than 25 major premieres of works by composers like Kagel, Henze and Penderecki, and made Hamburg an important international centre of contemporary music. In addition, he also made a furore – in the truest sense of the word – as a composer.

»Furioso« is the title of his first orchestral work from 1947, which was also on the programme of the Elbphilharmonie inaugural concert, where it advanced to become the secret highlight of the evening with its jubilant, virtuoso cascades in the string section.

When 24-year-old choirmaster Edwin Hawkins assembled his nearly 50 young singers in a recording studio in 1967, he was just trying to get some money together to finance a trip: the plan was to pay for the choir from Oakland/California to travel to a contest in Washington DC with the proceeds from the record sales. But as chance would have it, the album fell into the hands of a radio DJ, who selected the gospel song »Oh Happy Day« for some airplay – and launched a worldwide hit.

The song's roots go back as far as 1704, but both the tune and the time changed more than once before Hawkins wrote his arrangement for all eternity. His version was subsequently sung by Joan Baez, Aretha Franklin and Nana Mouskouri – and of course by Whoopi Goldberg in »Sister Act 2«.

Pretty stupid really, when a prison warden is caught keeping an innocent man behind bars. But Don Pizarro, the baddie in Beethoven's »Fidelio«, has already found a way out of the dilemma: he resolves to simply eliminate the prisoner Florestan, living proof of his arbitrary decision, without further ado. So he pulls out his dagger and sings one of the loveliest and most wicked arias of triumph in the history of opera: »Ha! What a moment! O bliss, what good luck! I was already nearly in the dust,close to being ridiculed. But now 'tis up to me to murder the murderer myself; in his last hour, my blade in his wound, to shout in his ear: Triumph! The victory is mine!«

However, he hadn't reckoned with Florestan's brave wife, who falls into his arms and ensures that the right people rejoice at the end of Beethoven's only opera.

In 1936, the world collapsed for Dmitri Shostakovich: Josef Stalin walked out of a performance of his opera »Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk« and had the composer's style publicly denounced as »muddle instead of music«. For months afterwards, Shostakovich slept in his clothes, fearing that he might be arrested any moment and deported to the gulag, as had already happened to his sister.

The following year he wrote his Fifth Symphony under this pressure, officially as an apology and a declaration of belief in the rules of socialist realism. But the symphony's apparently triumphant finale can be understood differently, as the composer's memoirs suggest (though their authenticity is disputed): »In my opinion it should be obvious to anyone what is going on in the Fifth. The jubilant mood was enforced under threat, as if we were being hit with a stick and told to rejoice, rejoice! You would have to be a complete fool not to hear that.«

given their support to the Afro-American civil rights movement, to the cause of truth and justice«. A badge that the 83-year-old could certainly pin to her own lapel, having devoted her entire life to exactly this mission as an activist, author and actress.

But her voice didn't become known all over the world until 1998, when British DJ and hit producer Fatboy Slim used it as a sample for his track »Praise You«. And there is an extra titbit here: a music video filmed with a concealed camera that shows what seems to be a bloody amateur self-help dance troupe making a guerilla appearance outside a cinema. Even the security guy only manages to interrupt their intentionally clumsy performance for a moment or two.

We know that victories in battle were celebrated in ancient Rome with much pomp, with triumphal processions featuring chariots and the spoils of war, drums and trumpets en masse. In musical history the motif came to the boil one last time in 1871, when Verdi presented his hit opera »Aida«, which is set in Eygpt, with the well-known victory march. He even had pseudo-antique extra-long trumpets built for the purpose.

»Aida« was written to mark the opening of the Suez Canal and the new Cairo opera house, but Verdi himself was not wildly enthusiastic: »Compose an opera for Cairo?! Ugh!! I won't be going there to produce it, I would be afraid of being mummified.« It took what was probably the highest fee ever paid to a composer, and the threat that the Governor of Cairo would otherwise give the commission to Verdi's arch-enemy Wagner, to change his mind. But to this day, opera producers continue to despair over how to stage the victory parade, which seems to go on forever.

In the mod-1970s the rock band Queen found itself facing a rather unusual problem: in the meantime their fans knew the songs so well that they sang along at the top of their voices at every concert. Guitarist Brian May recalls: »We sometimes had to stop playing and just listen to the audience«. This happened in May 1977 in the Midlands town of Stafford, when adulation for their idols prompted the fans to belt out the football chorus »You’ll never walk alone«.

Queen solved the problem by writing songs explicitly designed for the audience to join in: the stamp-and-clap hit »We Will Rock You« and the epic, elegiac ballad »We Are the Champions«. The latter number has established itself as a hymn for all times at celebrations of any kind, and was declared the »catchiest song ever« by music experts in 2011.

text: Clemens Matuschek; last updated: 18.11.2021.

translation: Clive Williams