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One of the crowning achievements of Western music, Beethoven's Ninth (and final) Symphony, epic in scale and character, is one of the earliest and still best-known examples of the use of human ...
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- A Very German Symphony
- Furtwängler’s Dilemma
- A Problematic Movement
- Karajan and Bruno Walter
- Otto Klemperer
- No Going Back
- Berlin and Vienna Again
- The Ninth on Film
- Top Choice
- A Sense of Period
The Ninth is the most German of Beethoven’s symphonies. The text of the finale, carefully assembled from lines in Schiller’s famous ode, indicates as much. The symphony’s dedicatee was German; and, had Beethoven had his way, its premiere would have been in Berlin, not in Rossini-obsessed Vienna. And herein lies a problem. Though the First World War...
But what of Wilhelm Furtwängler? A master of the Wagner-Beethoven repertory and a pupil of Heinrich Schenker, he if anyone was the Keeper of the Seal where the Ninth Symphony was concerned. So how did he deal with the Ninth during a time of war, and a German-induced war at that? With a mixture of panic and anger, it would seem, if his 1942 Berlin p...
The problem with the first movement is that, defying precedent, it offers no clear narrative. Sonata form charts a course towards a home port, says Ralph Vaughan Williams in his great essay on the symphony, but here there is none – merely a complex network of themes on which we are invited to meditate. One unnamed 19th-century Russian put it well w...
There are five studio recordings of the Ninth conducted by Herbert von Karajan, alongside three DVDs and more than a dozen off‑air recordings. Here the 1959 New York Philharmonic performance (a CBS radio transmission currently available on Archipel) is of particular interest; and not only because of the close interest taken in Karajan’s rehearsals ...
The very name Otto Klempererinspires awe. As with Weingartner, this is a classicist’s Ninth, albeit on a far grander scale. Tempos, subtly adjusted, are broader than the norm, except in the slow movement where Klemperer respects the character of a mediation that is cast in the form of a theme (or themes) and variations. Yet thanks to open textures,...
In the late 1980s, with the sale of traditional accounts of the Ninth falling away and even the tradition itself being questioned, there appeared a rush of recordings on period instruments. The great merit of Roger Norrington’s Beethoven cycle with the London Classical Players was the remarkable quality of the playing of the old instruments, someth...
At the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the Ninth suffered a further ideological shift as the word ‘joy’, descriptive of one of the most enduring and life-enhancing of human emotions, was traded for ‘freedom’, a political buzzword that has always been notoriously difficult to define. This was for a Christmas Day celebration in Berlin’s Schauspielhau...
Few collectors, I imagine, want to watch the Ninth Symphony, though students of conducting, and of the symphony itself, might care to track down a grainy black-and-white 1948 telecast of Toscanini directing his NBC forces. With the cameras fixed exclusively on Toscanini, what we have is a masterclass in the conductor’s craft, selflessly, unsparingl...
Bayreuth Fest Orch / Wilhelm Furtwängler A viscerally thrilling, essentially recreative realisation of the Ninth Symphony by a conductor deeply versed in the music itself, as well as the 19th-century German culture from which it sprang and which later sustained it.
COE / Nikolaus Harnoncourt Though the Ninth Symphony is beyond the pale of period performance, no one has managed to historicise it more skilfully or more effectively within the context of an expertly directed contemporary performance than Nikolaus Harnoncourt.
May 2, 2024 · Beethoven had not appeared before a Viennese audience in a dozen years, but he was moved by the letter’s sentiment and agreed to debut his new work, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, in the city.
The best recordings of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 - Classical Music
A guide to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 - Classical Music. We examine the impacts & motives behind Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Visit BBC Music for more guides and insights into the wonderful world of classical music.
