Humankind, help yourself! Beethoven shaped his last epic to that end, written in a dark time to keep alive Schiller’s poem and its exaltation of freedom, without which there can be no true joy, no hope for a better world, no all-embracing brotherhood, no Elysium. In Austria, meetings of more than a few people outside one’s family were forbidden, and one could be arrested for speaking the very word freedom.
