Noctave
The piece
The tune comes from the finale of the Ninth Symphony, first performed in Vienna in 1824, where Beethoven set Friedrich Schiller's poem An die Freude. In the orchestra the theme first appears without words, played by the cellos and double basses alone, before the voices take it up. The Council of Europe adopted it as its anthem in 1972. Written for Noctave, this arrangement keeps the tune, only lightly simplified, over a simple bass on C and G.
Almost everything lies under five fingers from C to G, thumb on middle C, and the melody moves mostly by step. At the end of each phrase, the dotted quarter and eighth (E–D, later D–C) should sound clearly long-short. In the middle phrase, a pair of eighths, E–F, slips in between the quarters: keep them even and don't rush. And once, the melody dips to the G below middle C, so get your hand ready for that move a bar ahead. The left hand plays only one or two notes per bar, which leaves your attention free for the tune.