Such, however, was the early power of British and American record companies that Weingartner’s 1926 London recording and Leopold Stokowski’s 1934 Philadelphia version both had the finale sung in English, and poorly translated English at that. As Tovey pointed out, the English have never been all that keen on the sublime, which may explain why the Ninth has never been a particularly happy hunting-ground for British conductors. The work had long been prey to ideologies of differing inclinations but none proved more pernicious than that which appeared in the 1930s in Germany itself, where it was accorded special status.Įnglish claims on the Ninth (or Choral as it’s been called here since its earliest performances) are based on nothing more than the £50 donation which triggered its formal commission in December 1822. Though the First World War had left the Ninth largely unscathed, the Second had not. The symphony’s dedicatee was German and, had Beethoven had his way, its premiere would have been in Berlin, not in Rossini-obsessed Vienna. The text of the finale, carefully assembled from lines in Schiller’s famous ode, indicates as much. The Ninth is the most German of Beethoven’s symphonies. To find the perfect subscription for you, simply visit: .uk/subscribe
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Subscribing to Gramophone is easy, you can choose how you want to enjoy each new issue (our beautifully produced printed magazine or the digital edition, or both) and also whether you would like access to our complete digital archive (stretching back to our very first issue in April 1923) and unparalleled Reviews Database, covering 50,000 albums and written by leading experts in their field. By then, however, the Ninth was no longer quite what it once had been. Collectors who bought his 1935 recording must have thought themselves in seventh heaven, and probably remained so until the 1950s when new technologies rendered it temporarily redundant. With so much to absorb, it was as well that Weingartner was not only a fine conductor but a master of assimilation. It had been an arduous journey, from the shambles of the earliest performances in 1824‑26, through years of painstaking bar-by-bar rehearsal by the pioneering French conductor François-Antoine Habeneck, to an era of growing mastery and understanding in the period between Palm Sunday 1846, when Wagner first conducted the symphony, and 1912, when Heinrich Schenker published his Die neunte Sinfonie, a book, prodigious in its reach, that analysed the music, its problems in performance and its attendant literature. Born in Austro-Hungary in 1863, Weingartner had been educated by a generation of musicians – Liszt and Wagner prime among them – who had witnessed at first hand the evolution of the Ninth as a performable work. The earliest recommendable recording, happily still extant, is the one Felix Weingartner made with the Vienna Philharmonic for English Columbia in 1935. With that question in mind, it’s perhaps as well to hang on to our hats this can be no ordinary collectors’ guide. Not so Professor Nicholas Cook, who entitled the final chapter of his superb 1993 Cambridge Handbook on the piece ‘Beyond Interpretation?’.
‘We shall never make head or tail of the Ninth Symphony until we treat it as a law unto itself,’ wrote Sir Donald Tovey in Essays in Musical Analysis, published in 1935. One problem has been the difficulties the work presents to performers another is the very nature of the symphony. No symphony has been more widely discussed, or been a greater divider of musical opinion, than Beethoven’s Ninth.
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