Klemperer and Beethoven
Although Otto Klemperer had conducted complete cycles of Beethoven’s symphonies in the United States, Italy, France and the Netherlands, it was not until the late autumn of 1857 that he had an opportunity to conduct all nine symphonies in London, in a series of 10 concerts with the Philharmonia Orchestra. The piano concertos were also included, with Claudio Arrau as soloist. Herbert von Karajan came to London especially to hear the Eroica. After the performance he went to see Klemperer in the conductor’s room at the Royal Festival Hall. ‘I have come only to thank you’, said Karajan, ‘and to say that I hope I shall live to conduct the Funeral March as well as you have done it. Good night.’* Walter Legge, founder of the Philharmonia and Klemperer’s record producer at EMI, was cock-a-hoop about the success of the concerts with both audience and critics. He reported to Angel Records, the company’s subsidiary in the United States: ‘Klemperer goes from strength to strength. When we have completed the ninth I shall have given you a Beethoven cycle on records that will be prized as long as records are collected.’**
The cycle at the Festival Hall concluded with two performances of the Ninth Symphony, in which the Philharmonia Chorus, trained by Wilhelm Pitz, the Bayreuth chorus-master, made its debut. The finale, reported The Times on 13 November, ‘exceeded in grandeur and brilliance and human exhilaration all that the foregoing movements had implied.’
Six of the Beethoven symphonies in the Klemperer Legacy series were recorded by EMI at the time of the 1957 cycle: the Second and Sixth Symphonies during the week before it began, the First, Fourth, Eighth and Ninth while it was still in progress. The Seventh comes from 1955, the Roica and Fifth from 1959.
* Walter Legge (ed. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf): ON and Off the Record, Faber, London, 1982
** Letter from Walter Legge to Dorle Soria, Angel Records, 5 November 1857
Symphonies Nos. 2 & 5
Beethoven began his second Symphony in 1801, but did most of the work on it during the summer and early autumn of 1802 at Heiligenstadt, a village on the northern outskirts of Vienna, to which he had retreated on the advice of one of his doctors, in an attempt to come to terms with his increasing deafness. Towards the end of the year Beethoven returned, grim but determined, to the Imperial capital, bringing with him a new Symphony in D, which was performed for the first time on 5th April 1803 at the Theater an der Wien. The parts were published in March 1804 by the Kunst- und Industrie- Comptoir in Vienna, with a dedication to Prince Carl Lichnowsky. An impressive and dramatic slow introduction, three times longer than that of the first symphony, and with a climax in D minor strangely prophetic of the ninth, leads into an Allegro whose important second subject gives the movement (which is permeated by the semiquaver gruppetto of its very first bar) a sense of pageantry and ceremonial; the coda is already almost an extension of the development section. An expansive Larghetto in A and luxuriantly scored, despite the absence of trumpets and timpani, is followed by a witty Scherzo full of dynamic surprises and with a delicious Trio. Beethoven’s sketches for the finale show that he originally planned it as a huge rondo with four episodes, and that the gentle transition between the explosive first subject and the shapely second subject was an afterthought; there is a masterly coda.
Beethoven started work on his Symphony in C minor in 1803, intending it to follow directly on from the Eroica (No. 3) but he set it aside in order to concentrate on No. 4. It was completed in 1807-8 and received its first performance (together with that of No. 6 in F) on 22nd December 1808 at the Theather an der Wien; it was published in April 1809 by Breitkopf & Hartel in Leipzig, and dedicated, like No. 6 to Prince Joseph Lobkowitz and Count Andrey Razumovsky. ‘Thus fate knocks at the door, ’ Beethoven reputedly said of the famous four-note motif which opens, and permeates, the first movement. The ageing Goethe found the music ‘quite wild’ when Mendelssohn played it to him on the piano in 1830, yet the movement is remarkably regular in structure, with a terse development built exclusively on the ‘fate’ theme, and a coda of relentless energy. The slow movement, in A flat major, is a set of three variations on an eloquent theme first presented by violas and cellos. The variations are linked by a secondary theme, beginning in the main key but quickly bursting out into a triumphant C major that seems to look forward to the finale. The mood of the scherzo vacillates between the dark, hushed mystery of its opening and the relentless drive of its main theme: a transformation of the ‘fate’ motif into triple time; the trio (in C major) combines rough good humour with a strong vein of counterpoint. The return of the scherzo music, with its eerie use of pizzicato and reiterated drum taps, leads straight into the blazingly triumphant beginning of the finale (in C major, and with piccolo, contrabassoon and three trombones making their first appearance); the music of the scherzo returns briefly between the end of the development and the onset of the resplendent recapitulation.
Robin Golding, 1998
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