Judge Dennis Davis
Beethoven: The Revolutionary 9th

Judge Dennis Davis - Beethoven: The Revolutionary 9th

- This is a beginning of a series that I’m going to be doing on various composers, some of which I’ve already done. And so, although this was advertised as the Beethoven 9, and I will talk about the Beethoven 9 and the revolutionary character thereof, I’ve already talked about the Beethoven 9. It’s quite difficult to remember when, but at some point, to many of you in lockdown university. And I thought therefore, that I would combine two symphonies to talk about the kind of remarkable, if you could call it, revolutionary courage of Beethoven as a musician. The break that he had from so many of the other traditional composers who preceded him. And therefore, I’m going to talk a little bit about the Beethoven Symphony number 7, there are number of reasons for that which I’ll advance and then I shall fit to the 9th. It’s obviously too much to discuss each of these symphonies even in an hour because of the magnitude of the music. So I’ve selected various movements to illustrate the points I want to make. Now let’s start then with the Beethoven 7. Composed in 1811 to 1812, it was about three years after the premier of the 5th and the 6th Symphony. And probably about five years after Beethoven had actually completed at least significant draughts of those early two symphonies. He hadn’t been inactive, ‘cause we know that the “Emperor” piano concerto, the “Farewell” piano sonata, the “Archduke” piano sonata had all been written in the interim. But the 7th symphony, which was finally premiered in 1813, is remarkable for a number of characteristics that I’d like to draw your attention to.

It’s part of a charity concert for soldiers winded in the Battle of Hanau, and it’s probably therefore most renowned with the fact that the programme included the first performance of the Battle Symphony, Wellington’s victory, an anti Napoleon patriotic showpiece, which celebrated the British victory over the French at the Battle of Vitoria. It’s a terrible piece of music, which probably indicates that even the greatest of composers can write questionable music. But it was accompanied by the 7th at the same time. And when the 7th came out, it was really greeted exceptionally by music critics. Let me give you just two. In fact, let me give you two illustrations. I’ll give you a third more contemporary one when we’ve completed the clips I want to play for you. But let’s hear what Richard Wagner said. He said that “all the tumult, all the yearning and storming of the heart become here the blissful insolence of joy, which carries us away with Bacchanalian power through the roomy space of nature, through all the streams and seas of life, shouting in glad self consciousness as we sound throughout the universe the daring strains of this human sphere’s dance. The symphony number 7 is as Wagner said in the famous phrase, "the apotheosis of the dance itself.” “It is”, he wrote, “dance in its highest aspect, the loftiest deed of bodily motion incorporated into an ideal mode of tone.” He wasn’t the only one, which is why I’m suggesting to you that it had a revolutionary component all its own. In 1862, this is what Berlioz said about the symphony and in particular about the second movement, which is the one I want to play for you, the allegretto, the second movement of the symphony, which many people regard as one of the great movements of all symphonic music.

And to confirm that this is what Berlioz said, “A simple rhythm is again, the principle cause of the extraordinary effect produced by the Allegretto. The rhythmic pattern consists merely of a ducktail, one long and two short syllables followed by spondi, two long syllables played relentlessly, he then three parts of it, only in one. Then all the parts together, sometimes it serves as an accompaniment, but frequently it focuses attention on itself and also provides a starting point for a small fuedal episode with two subjects played by the strings. It appears first in the lower strings about violas, the cellos, the double basses playing pianissimo, then is repeated soon after in a more pianissimo full of melancholy and mystery.” And Berlioz goes on, which suggests that this is truly a remarkable movement, a movement of anguished lament, which in his view was the quintessential contribution to symphonic music. So when you’ve heard quotes like that from Wagner and Berlioz, I think one has to take it very seriously. And the way I’ve taken it very seriously is by giving you one of the most serious renditions of the 7th. And that is a rendition by Carlos Kleiber. Now if you ever get a Carlos Kleiber recording, of which there are not many, certainly there’s the famous Beethoven 5 and the 7 and there’s the Brahms 4 and there’s the Schubert “Unfinished” and there’s some opera. Grab it because they are utterly remarkable. You do know, I hope, that when recently there was a poll of conductors as to who the greatest conductor of all time was, the person who came out tops was Carlos Kleiber. A curious person. His father was of course a famous conductor, Erich Kleiber.

His nationality was Austria and of whom Herbert von Karajan said, that “Carlos Kleiber only comes out to conduct when there’s no food in the freezer.” He was a very, very recluse man who did very rare recordings, very rare performances. Offered for example, to be the successor to Von Karajan in the Berlin philharmonic, he refused it. But when you look at his recordings, they’re utterly remarkable. I’m going to start with the first, an extract from the allegretto and when we stop there, I want to tell you what a contemporary musician had to say about this. So Judy, if we can start with an extract from the famous allegretto of the second movement of the 7th symphony. I think this is the third movement, but okay. Okay. Judy, can we move on? It’s partly 'cause I’ve got a lot of music to get through as much as I’d love, I just wanted to to read you what Joshua Bell had to say about this piece of music and in particular about the second movement. If I can find it. This is what Bell says, Joshua Bell. “So I think the symphony is a sense of triumph. There’s nothing as triumphant as Beethoven 7th symphony, but I call the second movement the ultimate expression of despair. Anything, especially as it reaches a peak. It’s the ultimate crying of lament. The slow movement even ends with an unresolved chord with no root, ust as it begins, it leaves you feeling the kind of longing right from the beginning and it leaves you with that same feeling as it ends on an unstable chord. But the build of the piece, the way the instruments are layered, it’s just incredible.”

And then he says, “It’s got to be the most goosebump-inducing piece of music that has ever been written.” I can’t but agree with what Joshua Bell has to say. But now let’s observe, because I’d love to have taken you through it all, but I’ve still got to do some of the 9th. So I wanted to play for you the last four minutes of this, and you’ll see, unlike the second movement, when we get to the final movement, the finale, it’s a sublime effect. It signals that the movement offers no repose from the driving rhythm and the Beethoven intensity, which just goes on and on right through an energy which compels listeners almost as if you wish to rise to your feet at the end. So dramatic is the end. It really is a remarkable piece in that Beethoven way in which it is rhythm that is critical to the way composed. And nothing beats these three to four minutes and nothing beats this particular edition by Kleiber. Thank you. It’s just absolutely fantastic the way, in my opinion, Kleiber deals with that particular point. There is an interesting aspect to this if I might just add, there’s a debate which I’m going to come onto presently, a great debate about the timing of Beethoven symphonies. And I know that we had a lecture some while back by Benjamin Zander, who has a particular view that you should follow the metronome markings which Beethoven used. And his view interestingly, is that the only person who really to a large degree followed what he thinks Beethoven intended was Kleiber.

I’ll come back to that particular controversy presently, but I think you have to agree with me that when the notion that you literally want to stand at the end as that rhythm just drives through and the way Kleiber does it, makes the 7th Symphony unique. And in my view, something which like the 9th really does contribute to Beethoven’s reputation as a breaker of musical paradigm. Now, the 9th symphony, which is where we’re going to go to now, is unique for all sorts of reasons. It was by far and away the largest symphony ever written at that time, way over an hour. For some, others not, I’ll come back to that. It certainly had the biggest orchestra that Beethoven ever used. And of course we all know that it was effectively conducted by a man who was deaf at that point. I think it’s also true to say that all composers, all composers after the 9th grappled with what Beethoven had done. We know that Brahms was so influenced by this, that the Brahms first symphony has a part which really approximates the “Ode to Joy”. And we know the struggle that Brahms had to produce a symphony, great as Brahms was, because of this dominant force of Beethoven. And there’s no doubt that if you then look at sort of some of my heroes like Mahler, there’s no question about it, that the 9th Symphony propelled complete changes in music. That’s apart from the fact that it was the very first symphony where the human voice was shown. Now the symphony itself has of course an interesting history. It was composed in 1823. It’s something that Beethoven had planned for some while, 'cause he wanted to set a symphony to Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”, which had been written in 1785, revised in 1803. And he then adapted the “Ode to Joy” in order to compose his 9th symphony.

Just on that point, I should tell you, that Beethoven initially did not want the choral part as we know it, to be part of the symphony, he changed his mind as he was grappling through. The symphony has a context too. After the 8th symphony had been composed by Beethoven, Beethoven was really concerned about oppressive, reactionary political developments after the Congress of Vienna. And of course there was personal suffering. His deafness, the fact that he was not well, there was in a sense, Beethoven’s own character, which was so out of sync with that of the majority of his society, was seeing both political and personal challenges, which he found extraordinary. And so if you ask yourself ultimately what’s the 9th about, it seems to me that it symbolises powerfully the struggle through night into light, into hope, of progress against reaction. Which in a way, if you wish, Beethoven dedicated his entire composition life, it’s a struggle in musical terms, between a dark minor key and a final affirmative, major key. And the finale, as we will just play a little bit towards the end, celebrates the victory thereon. The victory that has come with incredible struggle, the victory which is personified in the symphony by listening very carefully, as we must, to the first movement and to the beginning of the first movement. Now let me just say this about the first movement of the 9th before we move on. It was in many ways the longest, well, it was the longest movement of that time depending who played it. Between 13 to 17 minutes long, very long for a movement at that time, probably as long as many of the symphonies which had preceded.

And there were no repeats, there was no repeats of any exposition, which made it even more remarkable. In other words, 13 to 17 minutes, depending how long you took, of basically original music. Now what is interesting about this is the way the symphony starts. When I say it’s from darkness to light, it’s from some process of inchoate creation to the development of a world in which freedom triumphs. It’s terribly important then to listen very carefully to the beginning. It has a very, very striking opening. Now, Beethoven always had striking openings. We discussed in a previous lecture, the remarkable opening of the 5th. At some point I want to lecture on the “Eroica” symphony, which in fact has exactly the same sort of remarkable beginning. And you can just imagine audiences when they listen to the “Eroica” saying, “Goodness, what is this?” But here there’s no dramatic, there’s not a situation of Beethoven as it were, having a very loud, aggressive opening, almost saying to his audience, “Shut up, I’ve got something to say.” Here, there’s nothingness. All we hear is 17 measures, just A and E notes. And listen very carefully to the way in which they’re constructed, because he starts by repeating two bars four times and then he speeds it up because effectively the two bars are repeated twice. And then he goes double the speed, but they’re the same notes speeded up, until finally we get the breakthrough, we get what would be the major statement for the first movement and for many ways for the whole symphony. And so what I thought would be interesting just to compare two conductor’s approach to this conundrum of the beginning of the Beethoven 9th.

The one is Furtwangler. I think it’s the '53 recording. I did not want to use the '43 recording where Goebbels was in the audience, but I’ll make a reference to that later. And then one of my favourite contemporary conductors, Claudia Abbado, opening as well. Judy, can we have Furtwangler first? You’ve got to listen very carefully. It’s very, very quiet. Not that we haven’t got the music on loud at this point. It’s very quiet start. Okay, Judy, if we can just stop that for a moment. I just wanted to make one point when I play the Abbado, as I said, it starts in the ae in this very, in the D minor key of despair. And of course I hope, Furtwangler is actually very interesting because you are comparing to Abbado now, but just how he does create that sense of creation ex nihilo in those first few measures, which he plays until we finally get the breakthrough. And just one other point is that it’s incredibly, it’s a very, very kind of, as it were, severe movement in many ways. And yet just at one point as we play it towards the end, you’ll have noticed that this kind of, almost the battle cry, which Beethoven announces is answered by a woodwind motif, very gentle. Almost as it were, as the gathering forces are there, there’s a cry of despair in a very gentle way. And in many ways, if you look at the biographers of Beethoven, many of them said, of course, whilst he was a fierce, rude, awful man, he could also be incredibly kind and very gentle.

And in a way, even in this movement, in this unbelievably aggressive shouting at the world, there is just those moments, those moments of gentleness. I wanted to play you a second opening just for you to compare the way in which conductors approach this. This is another great conductor, Claudio Abbado. So you can compare the two. and this raises interesting points. The Abbado certainly doesn’t, as it were, hold on to that ENA 17 measure, you know, that’s 17 measures, quite as long as Furtwangler does. And you can also, even on the first five or six minutes I’ve played for you, see that it’s done quicker. If you really want to know, the Abbado recording is about somewhere in the region of 68 minutes and the Furtwangler is about 10 minutes longer. And that raises a really interesting point. I did say I would come back to the Zander point, which I’ve spoken about before, let me make my point on this. So Zander’s argument is if you follow the metronome markings that Beethoven therefore intended, which would basically tell you if you were a conductor at what speed the symphony should be played, you come out around about 60 minutes, 61 minutes. So Abaddo is slow, not too slow, but slow. Furtwangler is very slow. Ricardo Muti, the famous conductor of the Chicago Symphony, was even longer at 79 minutes. So the question is, you know, what’s going on here? And it’s a very interesting debate because those who counter the metronome markings say that Beethoven was deaf at that time and the markings were transcribed by his nephew, who didn’t get it entirely correct in the first place. So they’re unreliable and therefore many conductors do not rely on them. It’s an interesting question.

The only point I’ll make is that Zander conducted the 9th in Cape Town at that 60 minute one, I thought it was a terrible, terrible performance, that it rushed and it didn’t actually capture even though it was faster, somehow it didn’t capture the intensity which the great conductors like Abbado are able to capture. But that’s a very personal view. But there is a debate about how long they should be. And it’s extraordinary. It is true. There are many contemporary conductors that do do it quicker. The older ones, Klemperer and Furtwangler were longer. But you know, really, I suppose it’s how you feel about it. I haven’t got time to go through all the movements. I’ll just say this about the second movement. After this intense, unbelievably intense kind of heroic mighty protestation against the world in the first movement, in which the struggle against darkness has not been resolved. All of a sudden in D Minor, the second movement begins with a joyful dance. And in fact it does appear that what he’s trying and there’s a lot of influence almost of folk music and it’s almost as if Beethoven is capturing the joy of people. The idea that unlike the joyless world of the first movement, it is possible to actually find joy and happiness in the world. The third movement is a somewhat different, it contrasts to the second, there’s no activity in the way there is in the second movement. But for those people who say that Beethoven couldn’t write beautiful, beautiful melodies and in a sense a beautiful glimpse of a thoughtful, introspective, beautiful world, well, this movement basically just is a total answer to all of that. And you’ll see that the violins sing the main theme. It’s a very soulful theme and then that moves through the orchestra.

Let’s listen to the first three, four or five minutes of this utterly remarkable beautiful movement before we get to the finale with the choir. Oh, just one thought, sorry, this is Dudamel by the way, who many of you are going to be seeing because he’s now become the musical director of the New York Philharmonic. Okay, Judy. Absolutely extraordinarily beautiful third movement comes after that first and the kind of exuberance of the second. And Beethoven is managed before he gets to the choral piece, to that contemplative music of a remarkable reflective quality in which the world goes quiet but thoughtful. And I assume by the way that many of you will be, those of you who are lucky enough to live in New York, no doubt be making an acquaintance with Dudamel when he takes over, should be quite an exciting prospect taking over the New York Philharmonic. Last time I lectured in some length about the choral part. I’m not going to do that now 'cause firstly I’m running out of time. But secondly I just wanted to focus on the last few minutes. 'Cause when you get past the “Ode to Joy” part, what is extraordinary as we come to the end, this affirmation of life, this affirmation of brotherhood and sisterhood, what Beethoven does is incredible 'cause he hasn’t done many of them. But here he actually constructs a double fugue, a double fugue in which what I think he’s trying to say musically is that the intertwining of the friendship of people and the joy of general human happiness are inextricably linked. And so what we hear are choral multitudes by undulating sort of figures on the strings by the brass and the trombones and the trumpets and the shouts of joy and joy. And the climax is reached in a way in which we have finally got there. We started off in darkness in 17 measures of uncertain music. And we now come to a double fugue.

We are all inextricably linked musically as Beethoven says. And we’re linked because we suddenly have reached that moment of great joy when the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind can be celebrated and is probably celebrated in no more dramatic sense than these last four few minutes of the 9th symphony. Thanks. I just want to make one or two final comments in the light of that remarkable ending. So many people ask well, how do you deal with the lines? How do you interpret it? After all, in 1943, as I mentioned earlier, Furtwangler conducted the Berlin philharmonic orchestra on Hitler’s birthday rendition of the 9th when Goebbels came up to him and shook his hand in the entire audience, you know, enormously enthusiastic. Is that what the 9th means? Or does it mean what Leonard Bernstein did when the falling of the wall and he gave that famous rendition of the 9th, as it were, in celebration of the wall coming down. What kind of 9th is it? And maybe I want to conclude with just one sentence from one of Beethoven’s more contemporary biographers, Jan Swafford, who says this, “How one views the 9th depends on what kind of Elysium one had in mind. Whether all people should be brothers or that all non-brothers should be exterminated.” It’s a real thought. I’d like to think that the 9th in the light of the fact that it has become as it were, the anthem of the European Union, that it’s celebrated on New Year at the Proms, at various other concerts, that in fact it’s more than that. It is the unity of all. But one cannot, as it were, ignore the fact that it’s had a very, very, as it were, contradictory history. For me it represents universal community. But sadly that has not always been its history. Thank you very much for listening. I lost unfortunately for some reason a whole lot of your questions. I’m not quite sure why. It’s partly 'cause I think of load shedding and my thing went down. But I will just answer a couple before we get to eight o'clock.

Q&A and Comments:

Harold asked says “Carlos Kleiber’s recordings can be found on Spotify.” I cannot emphasise how wonderful they are.

Adrian Bolt Peter was very highly rated, very fine conductor and a fine Beethoven conductor.

Melvin says quite rightly, I don’t think that Beethoven’s metronome markings could be taken too seriously. I certainly don’t, but I did feel, in all honesty, that I should mention Zander to you.

Thank you very much, Ruth. Yes, Ruth, it can be militaristic, the fourth movement. It really depends on the hands of the conductor. Thank you Erica and Naomi.

Q: And then Ron, question about performance of the 9th for Hitler and when the Berlin War fell. Should we not separate music from its cultural history?

A: Can we? I think the music can stand on its own, Ron, which is what I was trying to argue but I suspect we all have our own interpretations. My own view about it is that, let’s leave aside some of the history. I mean, Beethoven can’t be blamed for the fact, you know, that Goebbels and these murderers arrived to listen to it. But I mean it does just, as it were, complicate the history.

But anyway, thank you very much to everybody and Judy, thanks again. I could never have done this without you. Take care everybody. And goodnight.