Imagine what life would be love if lived, in May Sarton’s lovely phrase, with “joy instead of will.” That's what Beethoven imagined, and invited humanity to imagine, two centuries ago in the choral finale of his ninth and final symphony, known as “Ode to Joy” — an epochal hymn of the possible, half a lifetime in the making. In the spring of two thousand twelve, the Spanish city of Sabadell set out to celebrate the one hundred-thirtieth anniversary of its founding with a most unusual, electrifying, and touchingly human rendition of Beethoven’s masterpiece, performed by a flashmob of one hundred musicians the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Lieder, Amics de l’Òpera and Coral Belles Arts choirs.

Watching the townspeople — children with kites, elders with walkers, couples holding hands — collect to savor the unbidden music in a succession of confusion, delight, and ecstasy is the stuff of goosebumps: living proof that “music so readily transports us the present to the past, or what's real to what is possible.”