The 100 Best Live Recordings - No. 100: Furtwängler Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1942)/Berlin — or — Furtwängler Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1951)/Bayreuth
No. 100 - Beethoven Symphony No. 9 - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Wilhelm Furtwängler (1942) — OR — Beethoven Symphony No. 9 - Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Wilhelm Furtwängler (1951)
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.1
Where to start when you don’t know where to start.
Before sound recording, the only way to experience musical performance was live, one hundred percent in the present. The notes played did not exist before their performance (except in the mind’s ear of the composer) and after only in the unstable medium of human memory. Beyond the actual performance is the less friable metadata: the location, date and maybe time of the performance.
What sound recording provided this paradigm was the tangible soundtrack of a performance. We begin this series of The 100 Best Live Recordings with two mid-twentieth-century classical performances that long ago entered the myth of war and, possibly, redemption.
These recordings involve several artistic pinnacles: the greatest Western composer, his greatest composition, that composition’s greatest interpreter presenting each on the opposite sides of the seismic hinge of the largest event in the twentieth century.
Hyperbole?
Not when the composer is Beethoven, and his greatest composition, the Ninth Symphony. The interpreter was Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose cultural memory includes personal relationships with Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Cosima Wagner (Richard Wagner’s wife and Franz Liszt’s daughter), as well as Wagner’s sons, Siegfried and Winfried.
These performances occurred on March 21-24, 1942, in Berlin and July 29, 1951 in Bayreuth, with Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the former and the Bayreuth Festspielhaus Orchestra. The first performance occurred in celebration of Adolph Hitler’s 53rd birthday (April 20, recorded earlier for radio broadcast) in wartime Berlin with soloists Tilla Briem, Elisabeth Höngen, Peter Anders, Rudolf Watzke, and the Bruno Kittel Choir. The second performance happened at the reopening of the Bayreuth Festspiel with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth Höngen, Hans Hopf and Otto Edelmann, after having been closed at the end of World War II.
These are two performances charged by the history surrounding them. In 1942, World War II found Germany overextended on two fronts, en route to losing the war. In 1951, one could still smell the smoke of Germany burning. As such, Furtwängler conducted two very different Ninth performances.
The 1942 Berlin Performance has generated a million words. As many critics believe that this is the greatest Ninth Symphony on record, as do not. Some believe the performance reflects Furtwängler’s dislike of the NAZI regime, others believe that is an inferior performance by an inferior orchestra.
Compare:
…Furtwängler’s next recording [was] at the Berlin Philharmonie in March 1942, but by now everything had changed. The world was at war, Germany was losing and all in the hall knew that their people were committing the most horrendous crime in history. From the symphony’s opening hush there is an intimation of imminent catastrophe. Furtwängler ratchets up the tension, allowing the listener a momentary illusion of familiarity before introducing a twist of expression that throws everything into primal uncertainty. There are passages in the first movement that remains terrifying at the tenth hearing. The ‘presto’ movement conveys a sense of destiny, the third movement reaches into bottomless tragedy and the finale withholds the assurance of hope. The performance was staged around a celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 53rd birthday. Some regard it as Furtwängler’s expression of distaste at the regime. This is a devious and dissident reading of the symphony, never imitated or equalled. It ranks with the all-time indispensable recordings2.
with
…He left us one great Beethoven Ninth: the Lucerne Festival performance with the Philharmonia Orchestra from 1954, on Tahra. All of the others suck in one way or another. There is the infamous 1942 “Nazi Ninth” so beloved of his fans, a performance characterized by “danger” (dreadful ensemble, Hitler in the audience) and “extreme tension” (tape overload and atrocious balances3.
The same dichotomy of opinion exists for Furtwängler’s 1951 Bayreuth Ninth.
Witness the same two critics:
…{The] in 1951 are epic… The Adagio in his Bayreuth interpretation has an infusion of Wagnerian mystery, as if the composer himself had been mystically reincarnated in Furtwängler’s corporeal form. (Lebrecht, 2020)
Wow! Compare this with:
As to the performance itself, this is still one of the poorest accounts of the first movement ever recorded. It’s desperately slow–slower even than Klemperer, and far slacker. Opening with [a] shaky ensemble, and painfully flabby in the second subject and much of the development section, it’s a disgrace to the memory of a fine musician. (Beethoven: Symphony No. 9/Furtwängler - Classics Today, 2024)
Whoa! Can these summations be about the respective performances?
Yes.
It is a matter of perspective. Lebrecht is a romantic staring down the cosmic telescope’s big end back to two rarified moments in history, performed under certain duress. Hurwitz provides a very “new criticism” take on the recording, commenting on the poor sonics and musicians. Who is right?
Both are.
To be sure, the sonic fidelity of these recordings is lacking in direct relation to the mid-twentieth century recording technology. Both recordings sound as if emanating from the horn of a Victrola. It is hard to get beyond the sound, but even harder to ignore the Romantic appeal of such a period sound. Critics accused the Romantic poets of worshiping the "piles of rock" that were once majestic buildings. Just read Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and you will get the idea:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed…
Indeed.
I believe it is impossible to separate a work of art from its circumstances. Furtwängler’s wartime reading is strident with militant rhythms. The choral fourth movement almost marches, either in deference to or opposition of the NAZI officials in attendance. The 1951 Bayreuth performance is a rising Phoenix, where the conductor summons the spirit of Richard Wagner, providing Beethoven’s masterpiece with an expansive vision of the future. These performances deserve, if not, demand, to be heard and considered by each generation’s listeners, who can then give their own contemporary account of what they heard.
"An die Freude." Friedrich Schiller, from Don Carlos (1785)
Lebrecht, Norman. (2020, September 3). Beethoven’s 9th: Furtwängler or Karajan? - Slippedisc. Slippedisc. https://slippedisc.com/2020/09/furtwangler-on-beethoven/
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9/Furtwängler - Classics Today. (2024, October 7). Classicstoday.com. https://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-14240/#:~:text=It's%20desperately%20slow%E2%80%93slower%20even,memory%20of%20a%20fine%20musician.