Discussions of the recitative intervention from the solo baritone in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony usually focus on how his words might offer a commentary on the discourse of the symphony as understood in instrumental terms. This article seeks to interpret the baritone’s words as a call to song – song in its literal as well as idealized sense, as identified through strophic treatment and folk-like character. Beethoven’s borrowing of material from his own setting of Bürger’s Gegenliebe for his ‘Ode to Joy’ tune is taken as a sign of the composer engaging with Bürger’s advocacy of simple diegetic song, an advocacy that sits provocatively alongside the abstract idealism of Schiller’s An die Freude. Concentrating on the song-like aspects within the finale of the Ninth Symphony in this way might seem to magnify the effect of the silences and disjunctures within the movement. However, Johann Gottfried Herder (the poet and theorist of the lyric) embraced silence as one of the conditions of folk-like song, as Beethoven seems to have understood from his own settings of Herder’s poetry. A comparison between the Ninth Symphony finale and some of Beethoven’s actual settings suggests a new understanding of how the composer uses silence within the symphony. It also points up the radical nature of his balance between abstract and literal renditions of song in this work, a balance that even outstrips the Helen-Gretchen contrast in Goethe’s Faust for its subtlety and pervasiveness.