Last week, WPBT ran as a featured presentation during its pledge drive a film of the Christmas 1989 performance of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, played in what was then East Berlin, in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

This was one of Leonard Bernstein’s last performances before his death in October 1990, and it was good to see again the flamboyant, engaged style he brought to the podium. But it also reminded me of the extraordinary power of this one composition, which virtually since its premiere in 1824 has gripped the listening imagination like few others in the history of Western music.

A performance of the Ninth is always momentous, and it’s been heard in South Florida recently. In March, violinist Itzhak Perlman fulfilled a longtime dream of his and led a very fine account of the symphony with the Russian National Orchestra at the Festival of the Arts Boca, and back in January 2007, Franz Welser-Most conducted it with his Cleveland Orchestra during the first year of the orchestra’s residency at the Knight Concert Hall.

This season, it will be performed twice: On Oct. 24-25 at the New World Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, and Dec. 11 and 13 at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, when the Palm Beach Opera will open its season with the symphony in lieu of a fourth operatic production; conductor Bruno Aprea will lead the opera company’s orchestra and soloists including soprano Ruth Ann Swenson.

What is it about the Ninth that gives it such an impact? Some of its reputation certainly comes from the German wellsprings of our classical-music culture, which flowered in the late 19th century as major American cities looked around and decided what they needed most for civic uplift was an orchestra and an opera house. And surely some of it comes from that same middlebrow cultural impulse that Bernstein catered to in the mid-20th century, most notably in his Young People’s Concerts.

But tradition and Zeitgeist can carry a piece of music only so far. At some point it has to pay its own freight, and the Ninth does this in an exceptional way, it seems to me. Few other symphonies have such variety, and such seriousness of purpose — the embrace of all mankind — without the attendant stuffiness. This is because the immediate heart of Beethoven’s art was his skill at improvisation, and all his most innovatory works have a sense of limitless invention that keeps them eternally fresh.

The Ninth is not universally popular, of course, and the finale in particular has been the subject of heated debate since its premiere. Composers from Ludwig Spohr to Fanny Mendelssohn and Ned Rorem have expressed their dislike of it, as the American musicologist Richard Taruskin pointed out in a major essay a few years back. But surely Taruskin was right to point to its twin qualities of naivete and awesomeness as central to its appeal, though I’d add that it’s less naive than it is absolutely unabashed about its intention: Beethoven really did believe in a brotherhood of man, and this was his most immense utterance on the subject.

The Ninth had a huge impact on composers who followed Beethoven; the music of Bruckner and Mahler, just to name two, is impossible to imagine without the older composer’s example. In Bruckner’s case, there is a shared musical lexicon of material and developmental strategies, and in Mahler’s case, the Beethoven Ninth introduces the idea that a symphony can contain anything its composer wants, and need not be restricted to four instrumental movements.

But the primary reason audiences keep coming back to the Ninth is that it’s hugely memorable, exciting to listen to, and ravishingly beautiful, especially in the third movement. It has drama, power, tenderness, and great tunes, and for some listeners that makes it as close as you can come to a complete classical composition.