Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony has long been thought to be less a created work of art, more a force of nature that simply is. Along with its rumbustious sibling, the Eighth Symphony, it’s Beethoven’s last and purest expression of the classical symphonic form. Nothing has been thrown overboard – neither classical tonality nor classical proportions – yet, paradoxically, it’s one of the few works from this period in Beethoven’s creative life that brings him closest to the music of the generation that followed his death. One thinks of the second-movement Allegretto being encored at the premiere and on many occasions thereafter. Berlioz wrote a famous commentary on it; Schubert was haunted by it to the end of his days.

During the course of the four symphonies Beethoven created from the Eroica through to the Pastoral, he had revolutionised the Viennese symphony by harnessing it to politics, nature-worship and a new line in musical self-analysis. An ominous silence followed, until 1812, when the 41-year-old composer – near the peak of his powers and in as good a place personally as he would ever be – astonished the world by producing a classical symphony that was agenda-free. ‘The symphony is so overwhelmingly convincing and so obviously untranslatable,’ Donald Tovey later wrote, ‘that it has for many generations been treated quite reasonably as a piece of music, instead of as an excuse for discussing the French Revolution.’

Beethoven’s Seventh was – and remains – a pinnacle of the Viennese classical symphony (A. Dagli Orti-NPL-DeA Picture Library, Bridgeman Images)

The symphony had long been a popular favourite, which raises the question why it was not until 1936 that the gramophone produced a plausible reading that can still be heard with pleasure today. Perhaps the lack of an agenda counted against it. Writers and musicians could catch its gist in words. (Ernest Newman’s remark about the symphony’s ‘joyous acceptance of life and the world’.) But that was never much help when it came to conducting it.

The Seventh has no nickname. Yet there’s one phrase, stripped of its original context, that has clamped itself to the symphony like a limpet to a rock. It’s Wagner’s ‘the apotheosis of dance’, a phrase from his The Artwork of the Future (Zurich, 1849) that appears, not in Part 3, ‘The Art of Dance’, but in Part 4, ‘The Art of Tone’. It’s here that Wagner speaks of ‘an ideal mould of tone’, of ‘melody and harmony uniting round the sturdy bones of rhythm to make firm and fleshy human shapes’. What Wagner, and practically every other composer-conductor of the time, knew from the outset was that no performance of the Seventh can fully succeed unless all its constituent elements sing together – its harmonic battles tempering an inexorable rhythmic life that itself seems bent on reimagining dance as a form of enraptured song.

You’ll hear nothing of this on the symphony’s very first recording, made in 1921 under Albert Coates’s direction, where the first movement sounds like an early Rossini overture and the finale like the accompaniment to a silent film car chase. Nor did Richard Strauss help with a 1926 Staatskapelle Berlin recording that reduced the finale by half: baling out at the start of the recapitulation before resurfacing 40 bars from the end. Leopold Stokowski took no such liberties in his 1927 Philadelphia recording, though in a dazzling 1963 Proms performance, now on ICA Classics, he removed the strategically important second appearance of the third-movement Trio: a cut even he hadn’t dare make in Philadelphia in 1927.

WEINGARTNER AND TOSCANINI

Felix Weingartner’s 1906 monograph On the Performance of Beethoven’s Symphonies was widely known and consulted, not least by the young Arturo Toscanini. Weingartner recorded the symphony twice in London in the 1920s, but it’s his 1936 Vienna Philharmonic recording, less streamlined than Stokowski’s with his fabulous Philadelphians, that’s the necessary starting point for any study of the Seventh on record. That and Toscanini’s own recording, made in New York later the same year.

Arturo Toscanini (photography: Everett Collection, Bridgeman Images)

Mindful of the interdependence of the symphony’s rhythmic and harmonic life, Weingartner settled on tempos that were judicious without being slow. He was supported in this by metronome marks which, with the exception of that for the third-movement Trio, are a pretty good guide to the basic pulse from which the necessary relaxations and accelerations can be made. In practice, he played the finale three notches below Beethoven’s minim=72 to allow the players what he called ‘time to develop a greater intensity of sound that naturally brings with it a greater cleanness in the execution’. Toscanini concurred, as he did in his pacing of the Allegretto where, like Weingartner, he approaches Beethoven’s flowing minim=76 from a starting point in the mid-60s – an advance that mirrors the music’s ‘reach for the stars’ upward trajectory.

Weingartner’s was a settled reading. Toscanini’s, by contrast, was still work in progress – witness the marginally broader tempo adopted for the symphony’s vast Poco sostenuto introduction in his live 1935 BBC performance (recorded by EMI but not released at the time) and in the first take of the famous 1936 New York Philharmonic set. The second take, said to be preferred by him, is faster, though wasn’t used until 1942, when the original shellacs began showing signs of wear. (Both takes can be heard on Mark Obert-Thorn’s Naxos transfer.)

After New York, Toscanini’s reading became a good deal more regimented. The 1939 NBC broadcast is a real horror, musical execution in the firing-squad sense of the term, as Stravinsky would have put it. His live 1951 Carnegie Hall recording, a highly influential version in its day, is better recorded, with the NBC players more at ease with Toscanini’s somewhat crazy decision to take at face value the printed metronome for the third-movement Trio. Beethoven’s written mark is ‘much less presto’. Given that the Scherzo can dance the light fantastic as rapidly or gently as the conductor pleases, simply halving that tempo is as effective as it is proportionate.

This is the one question in the handling of the Seventh that would drive a wedge between Anglo-Saxon and Austro-German conductors and commentators in the cultural hiatus that followed the outbreak of war in 1939 and the decade of recuperation and renewal that followed its end.

KLEMPERER AND FURTWÄNGLER

At which point, enter Otto Klemperer. Klemperer’s own road-to-Damascus moment had been hearing Gustav Mahler conduct the symphony in Prague in 1908. As he himself rose to prominence in the 1920s, audiences and critics as far afield as Paris, Leningrad and New York marvelled at what The New York Times’s Olin Downes called the ‘dramatic fire and architectural strength’ of Klemperer’s reading. Since there’s no Klemperer recording of the Seventh before his epoch-making 1955 Philharmonia account, we can only guess at what his early performances sounded like. Not like Toscanini’s, for sure, but not exactly a carbon copy of Mahler’s either. The American cultural historian Joseph Horowitz probably put his finger on it when he wrote of the tensions that existed within Klemperer between his ‘Mahlerian intensity’ and a career-long commitment to the ‘new objectivity’ that Toscanini and others so single-mindedly espoused.

Otto Klemperer (Michel Neumeister, Bridgeman Images)

Whatever the cause, Andrew Porter was bowled over by the 1955 recording (the best of the three Klemperer eventually made) when he reviewed it in these columns. From the oboe’s opening high A, he sensed that all was going to be well – something that’s often the case, just as the perfect placing of those two triple forte chords (a rarity in Beethoven) in the symphony’s coda proves that the symphony’s structural integrity has, indeed, been nobly served. The Kingsway Hall sound is a great improvement on that which EMI had provided for Herbert von Karajan in 1951 with an as yet less firmly grounded Philharmonia Orchestra. What’s more, the Klemperer exists in stereo: part of a famous series of recordings Christopher Parker made with his own equipment and microphone rigs in an adjacent room in Kingsway Hall. Porter concluded that the Klemperer would be his clear first choice for the Seventh, with the proviso that there might be days when he’d find the broad tempos a little too deliberate – a judgement that probably holds true today.

Some readings evolve, others are thought through ahead of time. Such was Wilhelm Furtwängler’s, a reading which, like Klemperer’s, must have been rich in composer-derived insights, much as Wagner’s and Mahler’s had been. The third-movement Trio aside (a lumbering dotted minim=42), Furtwängler is as loyal to the printed metronomes as Toscanini, albeit with greater imaginative flexibility. Furtwängler was never in two minds about the pacing of the opening Poco sostenuto, which he takes below the written metronome, the musical lines tensing and stretching like the wings of a bird slowly rising above the valley beneath. After which, the tempo doubles as the music moves into the joyous Vivace, taken by Furtwängler at the printed dotted crotchet=104. There are other effects, too, such as Furtwängler’s prolonging the stripped-down opening and closing chords of the Allegretto so as to emphasise the almost Sibelian chill they purvey.

There’s just one Furtwängler studio recording of the Seventh, made by EMI in Vienna in 1950. However, it’s the two Berlin concert performances that live along every vein and artery of their being. The 1943 performance is a musical apotheosis that smacks at times of epoch-defying desperation. The 1953 is in better sound and offers a measured but no less exciting performance, with the Berlin Philharmonic’s powerful lower strings, terrific timpani and searing brass at their irresistible best.

Furtwängler’s Vienna recording was not released until September 1951, and then only on 78s – this, five months after Decca’s pioneering 1950 LP recording with Erich Kleiber conducting what had until recently been Willem Mengelberg’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. Kleiber’s Toscanini-style direction won a measure of admiration, though it’s only in his powerful account of the finale that he comes close to the impact of Mengelberg’s own performance, recorded live by Philips in April 1940.

EARLY LP

Meanwhile, EMI had Herbert von Karajan waiting in the wings to take control of the LP market, which his 1951 Philharmonia recording duly did until the arrival of the Klemperer. In fact, Karajan had already recorded the Seventh with the Staatskapelle Berlin for Deutsche Grammophon in June 1941. It’s a meticulously prepared performance, worked out within the parameters of the thinking of the age – not unlike the flawlessly controlled performance the 33-year-old Claudio Abbado would make with the Vienna Philharmonic for Decca in 1966. The first Karajan recording resembles an architect’s blueprint of the piece. The blueprint would be modified, of course. Despite his Austrian roots, it was probably Karajan’s ambition to record a performance that could be for his time what Toscanini’s 1936 New York recording had been for its. Karajan achieved this in Berlin in 1962, in the same sessions, interestingly, that yielded a famously superfine account of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony: a performance, like that of the Seventh, which he never fully replicated.

While British and American record companies continued to return, not always successfully, to saleable names, one of the best early LP recordings came from a newly founded Polish label, Polskie Nagrania Muza, with the revered Polish conductor Witold Rowicki conducting his own locally created Polish Radio SO. When the 1956 recording finally reached these shores courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon, Gramophone’s Deryck Cooke was rightly enthusiastic. ‘The tempo of each movement, beautifully chosen to accommodate both dynamic and lyric elements, is adhered to firmly throughout, and, most important, it is kept moving with a persistent forward impulse that nevertheless gives the players time to phrase each note.’ Points of climax and arrival were similarly judged to a nicety.

Alas, the delayed release put it up against a superb new 1959 East German recording by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under its formidable music director Franz Konwitschny. It was a performance that shared many of Rowicki’s qualities, abetted by stereophonic sound and a complete set of exposition repeats, a rarity at the time. It’s the finest of all the Leipzig recordings of the Seventh: superior to Kurt Masur’s 1972 Philips recording (9/75), which reverted to a repeat-free text and had none of Konwitschny’s self-contained fieriness, and to Riccardo Chailly’s gamesome and keenly argued, but in the final movements rushed and lightweight, 2008 Decca version (A/11).

Given that the Seventh is a masterpiece of musical form on an epic scale, proportions matter. Nowadays the best performances play a full text. The arrival of LP, however, brought with it a regrettable pick-and-mix attitude to repeats. The worst was the playing of repeats in the first movement and Scherzo, before going for gold in a dash to the line in a repeat-free finale – a procedure that throws the work badly out of kilter. Fritz Reiner, fierce and rather literal-minded, does this in Chicago in 1955, as does William Steinberg in Pittsburgh in 1962, and many more besides.

The arrival of stereo brought a further round of commercial activity, with record companies again pandering to big-name conductors. Decca paired Georg Solti and, shortly afterwards, Karajan with the Vienna Philharmonic, while moving Pierre Monteux from Vienna to London for what turned out to be little more than a spirited read-through with the LSO in an over-reverberant Kingsway Hall. Solti never did record a plausible Seventh, not even with the Chicago Symphony, whose own most memorable recording would be a typically trenchant performance made for EMI under Carlo Maria Giulini’s direction in 1971.

NEW BLOOD AND OLD TRUTHS

A welcome exception to this trend was EMI’s invitation in 1961 to the 33-year-old Colin Davis to record the symphony with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Blessed with a finely balanced Abbey Road recording, it’s a performance of vitality, style and quiet authority of the kind the orchestra’s late founder, Thomas Beecham, might have given us in one or other of his late-1950s recordings had he not been inclined to treat the piece as a bit of a joke.

In 1964 Leonard Bernstein made a memorable recording, his second with the New York Philharmonic, whose associations with the symphony went back, via Toscanini, to Mahler himself. Like the 1955 Klemperer, Bernstein’s is a performances that’s touched by greatness from the very first note, led by a master conductor whose forensic musical intelligence relishes everything and misses nothing. It’s a big performance (all the repeats) but one that never outstays its welcome, such is its generosity of spirit and the joy of the music-making. Curiously, neither Davis nor Bernstein repeated their achievement. Davis’s 1992 Dresden account (Philips, 12/95) is an altogether more ponderous affair, blowsily recorded, while Bernstein’s 1977 Vienna Philharmonic remake (DG, 3/80) is a bit of a stunt: a none too carefully made live recording of a performance that’s a travesty of its former self.

A rather happier experience – something of a revelation, in fact – is the performance the 92-year-old Pablo Casals conducted at the Busch-Serkin Marlboro Festival in Vermont in 1969. You could describe this as ‘the symphony recollected in tranquillity’ such is the humanity of the reading. It’s a very Schubertian Seventh, Casals stressing the symphony’s pastoral underlay, with its rustic drones and Irish reel of a finale. The third-movement Trio has all its repeats, a summertime idyll such as we might have in an equivalent movement in a Mahler symphony. (Did Mahler do likewise, one wonders?) Casals doesn’t detain us with outer-movement repeats but gives space to an Allegretto that is as perfectly realised as any. As for the finale, it’s more a rounding out than an apotheosis. The great wisdom of an old man!

And talking of such men, why did John Barbirolli never record the Seventh, the Beethoven symphony he conducted more than any another? Happily, he chose it as the final piece in his 70th-birthday concert with the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester in December 1969, with the BBC on hand to record the occasion. Harold C Schonberg, who heard Barbirolli conduct the work in New York in the 1930s, says Barbirolli never fell for the ‘shined-up, fancy Beethoven’ of Toscanini and his acolytes. Everything remained ‘clear, logical, musical and direct’. What we have in this Hallé performance is a much-loved symphony that’s been brought out for a special occasion like some favourite wine.

KEEPING GOING

Karl Böhm’s 1971 Vienna Philharmonic cycle of the nine, recorded the year after Barbirolli’s death, includes one of the finest of all modern Sevenths; unsurprisingly, given that it was recorded during the same sessions as Böhm’s matchless account of the not entirely unrelated Pastoral Symphony. Nor should we forget that Böhm, like Furtwängler, was pretty well unsurpassed as a conductor of Schubert’s Great C major Symphony. If you can master the one, you can generally master the other.

Karl Böhm (Michel Neumeister, Bridgeman Images)

Conventional wisdom has long held that Carlos Kleiber’s 1975‑76 Vienna recording is the one to have from this (or any) age. As a performance it’s probably a match for Böhm’s with the same orchestra. Unhappily, the recording is not. Robert Layton, who admired the performance more than I did, described it as ‘reminding one of a coarse-grain black-and-white photograph with no trace of glamour and high finish’ – sound, he suggested, that suited the intensity and urgency of the performance. There is both intensity and urgency in Kleiber’s live 1983 Amsterdam Concertgebouw performance, but with Kleiber play-acting more than conducting, and the orchestra often left hanging by its fingernails, it makes for uncomfortable viewing.

Aside from the Böhm, it’s Günter Wand’s not dissimilar 1987 Hamburg recording, and Riccardo Muti with the Philadelphia Orchestra, who continued to have the measure of the piece as a great classical symphony. Bernard Haitink, too, though success with the Beethoven symphonies came late to him, making his 2005 LSO Live performance the best of his available recordings.

It was Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell who famously longed for ‘something that will encourage conversation’, especially at the end of the season ‘when everyone has practically said whatever they had to say’. Which is where period performers generally make their entry. Not here, alas. Rome wasn’t built in a day and it’s a sad fact that the earliest period bands simply couldn’t cope with the Seventh. Some could – Roger Norrington’s London Classical Players a notable example – but British strings in general, and modern period strings in particular, often sound underpowered in this music. Chamber ensembles also pitched in, notably the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in a famous cycle under Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Warner, 11/91), though his reading of the Seventh mixes too many traditions, and, like many live recordings, can be careless of dynamic levels, especially in the Allegretto.

Beethoven scored the Seventh for a lean, mean classical machine that deploys pairs of woodwinds (without piccolo) and brass (without trombones), timpani, and as many strings as can be afforded and usefully deployed. The latter point bothered Beethoven. Even before the first rehearsal, he was begging for a string band capable of coping not only with the dance but with what Wagner would later call the ‘tone’. It’s this, among other things, that finds expert ensembles such as Emmanuel Krivine’s La Chambre Philharmonique (Naïve, 7/11) or Antonello Manacorda’s Kammerakademie Potsdam (Sony, 2/23) clearing some Beethoven fences, but not that of the Seventh.

THE CAVALRY ARRIVES

Happily, three conductors, with three exceptional orchestras, have absorbed more than two centuries of performance practice and musical scholarship to give us a trio of recordings that it’s difficult to imagine being bettered. The Vienna Philharmonic doesn’t mind being put on a diet, but all too rarely is in Beethoven, which is why the Böhm recording is such a winner – and Simon Rattle’s, made in Vienna in somewhat controversial circumstances in 2002. Yes, the dryness of the vibrato-reduced string sound can occasionally seem like a strategic threat, but the performance has about it an incandescence even Furtwängler might have wondered at.

Then there’s Mariss Jansons in a thrilling and grammatically flawless reading with the Bavarian Radio SO that couples Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies with Jörg Widmann’s specially commissioned Con brio: a telling short illustration of what the two Beethoven symphonies might have sounded like to contemporary Viennese ears. These are performances to hear, not to watch, a co‑equal with the Abbado if it’s CD that you seek.

If in the end I opt for Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, live in Rome in 2001, it’s because it’s quite simply the greatest performance of the Seventh I’ve ever heard or ever expect to hear, both in the framing of the musical ‘case’ and the specifics of the execution by Abbado and an orchestra that, on its day, makes the work its own. The symphony had been an Abbado speciality back to that remarkable recording with the Vienna Philharmonic 45 years earlier, but this Rome performance is something other: a performance, like the work itself, of unstoppable energy and joy, delivered, phoenix-like, by a conductor whose health had been in a more than precarious state at the time.

Either format will do, but the filmed version is the one to have. It’s only here that we get the complete experience: witnessing such things as the arrow-like continuity with which the performance evolves. That matters, too. The Seventh is a work full of smiles and, yes, jokes, such as Beethoven’s unexpectedly crashing out of the Scherzo to launch the finale, brazenly, in the wrong key. Watch and wonder.

TOP CHOICE

BPO / Claudio Abbado (EuroArts)

The performance of a lifetime led by a conductor who’d viewed the Seventh from every perspective and through many lenses during the course of a living engagement with the work that had spanned nearly half a century.

RETURN TO VIENNA

VPO / Karl Böhm (DG)

Let’s not forget that this festive revel has its roots in Austrian soil. Few understood this better than Karl Böhm, whose recordings of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Schubert’s Great C major, the Seventh’s country cousin, are also classics of the gramophone.

CONSUMMATION

BPO / Wilhelm Furtwängler (DG)

No conductor better understood a work whose harmonic battles temper an inexorable rhythmic life that’s bent on reimagining dance as a form of enraptured song. This 1943 Berlin performance must have scorched the very timbers on which the players sat.

UNIGNORABLE

Philharmonia Orchestra / Otto Klemperer (Warner Classics)

It was Gustav Mahler who opened the young Otto Klemperer’s ears to the monumental, many-sided nature of the Seventh. After three decades astounding audiences with his own dauntless reading, Klemperer presented the world with this remarkable 1955 recording.

SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

Recording Date / Artists / Record company (review date)

1936 VPO / Felix Weingartner Naxos 8 110862 (5/36, 7/03)

1936 Philh SO of New York / Arturo Toscanini Naxos 8 110840 (12/36, 2/02)

1941 Staatskapelle Berlin / Herbert von Karajan DG 477 6237GOM6 (4/88, 9/06)

1943 BPO / Wilhelm Furtwängler DG 483 7361 (12/19)

1950 Concertgebouw Orch / Erich Kleiber Decca 477 6080DC6 (4/51)

1953 BPO / Wilhelm Furtwängler DG 474 030-2GOM6 (8/03)

1955 Philh Orch / Otto Klemperer Warner Classics 567851-2 (7/56, 2/03)

1956 Polish RSO / Witold Rowicki Maestro Editions ME251 (3/60)

1959 Leipzig Gewandhaus Orch / Franz Konwitschny Documents 285929 (5/60)

1961 RPO / Colin Davis Warner Classics 9029 51272-3 (9/61, 6/62)

1962 BPO / Herbert von Karajan DG 479 3442GH6 (2/63)

1964 New York PO / Leonard Bernstein Sony Classical 19075 97048-2 (4/73)

1966 VPO / Claudio Abbado Decca 478 5365 (11/67)

1969 Marlboro Fest Orch / Pablo Casals Sony Classical SK45893; MYK37233 (2/76)

1969 Hallé Orch / John Barbirolli Barbirolli Society SJB1098/9

1971 Chicago SO / Carlo Maria Giulini Warner Classics 9029 52861-4 (9/71)

1971 VPO / Karl Böhm DG 437 928-2GX2 (11/72)

1975/76 VPO / Carlos Kleiber DG 447 400-2GOR (9/76, 4/95)

1983 Concertgebouw Orch / Carlos Kleiber Decca 070 100-9 (10/88)

1987 NDR SO / Günter Wand RCA Red Seal 19075 81887-2 (12/88)

1988 Philadelphia Orch / Riccardo Muti Warner Classics 355668-2 (1/89)

1988 London Classical Plyrs / Roger Norrington Erato (45 CDs) 9029 62452-7 (11/89)

2001 BPO / Claudio Abbado DG 477 5864GH5 (11/08); EuroArts 205 7378; 205 7374 (A/03)

2002 VPO / Simon Rattle Warner Classics 9029 66076-3 (4/03)

2005 LSO / Bernard Haitink LSO Live LSO0578 (6/06); f Í LSO0598

2012 Bavarian RSO / Mariss Janssons BR Klassik 900137; Arthaus 107 537; 107 536 (12/13)