Defiant Acts of Joy

by Danielle Ofri
The Lancet

Even before the start of the second US presidency of Donald Trump, life was already gunning at 25 hours per day. My clinic job was bursting at the seams, with double the number of new patients on my daily schedule due to the backlog of patients seeking medical care at our public hospital in New York City. Outside of medicine, I was editing Bellevue Literary Review (BLR), helping sort through thousands of poems, stories, and essays. After years of being a university-affiliated publication, BLR became independent, so I was now also the executive director of a non-profit arts organization. And then there was that looming deadline with my publisher for the book I was under contract for.

So when a friend hit me up with a “great opportunity”, my answer was an immediate no. Whatever crumbs of free time in my possession were now taken up with responding to the Trump administration’s attacks on nearly every aspect of society that I hold dear—public health, science, immigrants, universities, freedom of speech, international relations, the rule of law. The very democracy of the USA was suddenly in critical condition and we the people did not have time to dither. There were elected officials to harangue, rallies to attend, letters to write, elections to canvass for. There were phone-banks to staff, petitions to circulate, campaigns to support, articles to write.

“But it’s Beethoven’s Ninth,” my friend beseeched, helpfully attaching 25 dense pages of music to the email. Rehearsal was in three days.

I had taken up cello later in life, but working as a physician and raising kids meant that it was allotted only a fixed sliver in my schedule. I was just barely able to squeeze in a lesson or two each month. Life did not permit ill-advised deviations from my steady curriculum of one etude, one sonata, and one Bach suite. And my nerves did not permit an audience beyond one lamp, one sofa, and one bookcase. (I made an exception for the houseplants, as long as they kept their opinions to themselves.)

So, for every practical reason—time, inertia, stage- fright, democracy—the answer to my friend should have remained an emphatic no. Not to mention that the idea of doing anything fun, given the precarious condition of our world, felt almost unseemly; if there were any free minutes to scavenge, they should be devoted to supporting democracy, protecting the planet, and combating disinformation. Or at least tackling the backlog of test results for my patients.

But something about the moment we are in—the insistent dismantling of venerable institutions, our political leaders’ casual disparagement of people and values, the general tenor of anger and unease in our country—made me reconsider. In particular, the sense of fear percolating in our communities, with its familiar historical ring, gave me pause. Masked immigration agents arresting people on American streets, disappearing them into detention sites without even a pretention of due process—this could have been the “Dirty War” of Argentina, or Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu. Autocratic regimes large and small have always thrived on making the populace fearful. Fear fragments communities—both socially and practically. People who are afraid cannot fight back. Fear begets hopelessness and isolation. It also, by design, quashes joy.

And that was when I realized that this project made perfect sense in this moment. Not that an amateur orchestral performance—or any one thing— is consequential in the grand scheme of humanity. But doing something entirely impractical and wholly joyful—publicly, with a phalanx of strangers—suddenly felt essential. When Ludwig van Beethoven wove Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy poem into the finale of his last symphony, he was punctuating the urgency of coming together to proclaim joy. Which in itself was an act of defiance for a man who was, by all accounts, increasingly reclusive, mortally ill, financially struggling, and famously bereft of hearing when he wrote the symphony. Beethoven had been obsessed with Schiller’s poem for decades, its insistence on humanity and optimism despite the savagery that society was doling out to its citizens.

After an emergency consultation with my music teacher—who advised me to clear the decks and dive in—I packed up my cello and lugged it up to the United Nations complex, fifteen blocks north of my hospital. The UN Symphony Orchestra had started as a social club for musically inclined UN employees, but expanded into a community orchestra. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its internationally rallying Ode to Joy, was chosen to help celebrate the 80th anniversary of the UN.

We had just under 3 months to pull together the symphony—one of the most mammoth in the repertoire. While many in the orchestra had played it before, it was entirely new for me. And bruisingly hard. Late in life, Beethoven apparently ceased caring whether musicians could actually play his music, something that was evident in the whipsaw runs that—in my medical opinion—were anatomically impossible for the human hand.

I have crammed for medical boards before, but those were not nearly as arduous as battling the Ninth. My brain throbbed every night as I dug through one gnarly section after another. And then there was the issue of trying to learn all four movements at once, a daunting proposition for someone accustomed to the orderly acquisition of information. The miserly hours allotted by the clock simply could not compete with the sheer dimensions of the symphony and I was rattled by the perpetual state of triage required. Leaving measures only half-learned, moving on by necessity to the next musical casualty, was unsettling, almost grievous. The music itself was dense, maddening, and massive—more than 3000 measures to learn—but bracingly beautiful, almost profligate in its power to astound.

At each weekly rehearsal with the full orchestra, more pieces of the musical puzzle came together, offering tantalizing snippets of what this symphony could be— and all from a rarefied inner perspective. Much like my first peelings into the human body, this excavation of the intimate insides of a symphony was heady and awe- inspiring. Each week I found myself astonished anew.

Over the course of the spring, the contrast between the surging exhilaration of the music and the darkening political clouds grew ever starker. The steady gouging of the country was sickening—evisceration of medical research, destruction of public health infrastructure, mass firings of federal workers, cancellation of international assistance for health and development, decimation of arts and cultural programs, and the spiteful vilification of people and institutions. It was a painful dissonance to close the newspaper and open the musical score. Yet I had to, every single night. I was not sure I could survive without it.

On June 21, 2025, over 120 people crowded onto a stage in Manhattan—two choirs, four soloists, full orchestra, together representing more than 20 countries. The symphony opens with a hush of tremolo, barely audible. It is a deceptive feint that catches the audience off guard: has it even started yet? Is the orchestra is still tuning? But then it crashes the gates with colossal Beethovian power, surging forward at this intensity for well over an hour. It was simultaneously a grueling marathon and a heart- pounding sprint. My nerve fibers oscillated frenetically as I tried to stabilize my concentration, even as I was blinded by the beauty of what was swirling around me. Beethoven deals out one breathtaking passage after another, and somehow we had the miraculous fortune to be in the middle of it. And when the choir launched into the soaring Ode to Joy finale, it was hard not to feel as though the heavens had been commanded open. Even as it took every last muscle fascicle I possessed to hang onto the cannoning tempo. Even as the orchestra pumped out its last reserves of energy. Even as American bombs were dropping on Iran just as we galloped furiously to the final crashing note.

Joy is often perceived as a lightweight, rosy fluff to satisfy our shallowest appetites. Of course, we rightly emphasize the joy of medicine to our trainees, hoping to kindle their passion for patient care and research. But joy by itself carries a whiff of self-indulgence, a petulant insistence that mere satisfaction is not enough. And the dwarfing contrast from the genuine suffering around us can render joy thin.

Joy, however, can also be defiance. Autocratic regimes strive to make you feel alone, hopeless, and powerless; it is a time-tested strategy to break the spirit of the public. So it is no accident that joy has been a subversive element in fighting autocracies during the 20th century in Chile, Czechoslovakia, and Estonia as well as in the American civil rights movement. Joy bolsters hope—a confidence that, despite current ambiguities and anguish, possibilities yet remain. It is a willingness to grapple with both what is and what could be, a rebuff to the easy cynicism of those who retire to the sidelines.

The precarity of our world at this moment means that we need to keep fighting, with whatever tools we have at our disposal. We have to remind our leaders—and ourselves—that power is distributed over a vast political geography, and that we the people have much to flex. And some of that flexion needs to be joy, despite the depressing news that greets us every day.

In fact, this may be exactly the right time for an ode to joy in our lives. Read the news and stay informed. Dog your elected officials when they cravenly cave. Reassure your patients that you will never stop advocating on their behalf. But also invest some time for joy, especially if it connects to others. As Beethoven and Schiller well knew, joy can disrupt the cycle of doom, and disruption can be an irrefutable power.