Beethoven's Symphony No 1: which recording is best?

In 1800, when Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his First Symphony at the Burgtheater in central Vienna, there were those naysayers who wondered if there was any future in the symphony. Haydn had written his last such work five years previously; and after Mozart’s sequence of late, great symphonies, what was left to say?

But Beethoven saw, and heard, matters differently. His Symphony No 1 turned out to be a quietly trailblazing essay on where the four-movement form he had inherited from, among others, his teacher Papa Haydn might head next. He had enjoyed successes in Vienna before but this premiere of a new symphony, on April 2, marked the moment that a ‘modern’ view of Beethoven as an audacious musical explorer and fearlessly independent musical mind was born. It was a high-risk strategy. Not only did Beethoven present and promote the concert himself but he packed the programme with music guaranteed to illuminate any shortcomings in his new piece. A symphony by Mozart opened and the programme included music from Haydn’s The Creation alongside Beethoven’s own First Piano Concerto and Septet. And, directly before his new piece, Beethoven gave his audience a taste of creativity in spontaneous action by improvising at the piano.

Two hundred and thirteen years later, now listening with knowing ears to music thoroughly absorbed by our porous cultural radar, trying to reawaken the sting of the new is not easy. Although a modest shock compared to the earth-shaking openings of his Third, Fifth and Ninth symphonies, the first chord of Beethoven’s First Symphony, first time you hear it, gives first notice that this composer is about to give our expectations of how symphonies behave a right old shake-up. Beginning with a fantastically ‘illegal’ tonality-knocked-off-centre dominant seventh chord, Beethoven’s orchestration twists the sonic thumbscrews ever harder by underpinning shrill woodwind figures with pizzicato string chords, the dynamic range shifting from forte to piano within two beats. This sonic blast from the future perhaps unsettled that Viennese audience of 1800 like unsuspecting music lovers of today confronted for the first time by a Helmut Lachenmann score.

Which raises a basic interpretative point of order: should performances of the symphony reflect what we know about the stylistic fingerprints of the great man’s mature symphonic style or be interpreted as though an adjunct to Haydn? Beethoven’s form is traced explicitly around the model of Haydn’s late symphonies. An Adagio prologue leapfrogs into a main-body Allegro con brio first movement, while the melodic contours of the slow movement are like a commentary upon every Mozart slow movement you ever heard. The form might be classically Classical but he is clearly harbouring new ambitions and feeling beyond what he already knew.

The process of writing was all about figuring out, at the turn of a new century, what a symphony might be. Typically, as would become clear over the next two decades, Beethoven was not interested in structures that merely box-ticked the archetypes; the workings of symphonic form were instead placed under careful investigation. And, after numerous false starts – eureka! The theme Beethoven had been attempting to mould into a first movement had far greater potential as the basis of his finale. With that marker now secure, taking aim at the rest of the symphony became manageable.

And taking aim meant unifying his material. Reverse-engineering what was now the finale, Beethoven prepared his ground, and his listeners, by dropping elements of its harmonic contours into earlier sections of the symphony. But the figure of a rising semitone, heard for the first time in bar one and then scattered around like a compositional catchphrase, properly cemented the symphony together. There it is in the first movement’s development section, chromatically prising open the plain C major triadic shapes of Beethoven’s theme, and again colouring his slow movement, and again in his kittenish Scherzo, rising and then tumbling back the other way. Structural unity was everything; and, as Beethoven rethought orchestral weight and balance – new prominence given to woodwind and brass, the score scattered with his soon-to-be trademark sforzandos – the symphonic game was afoot.

EXPOSITION: LAYING DOWN THE LAW

In 1969 Dover Books reprinted On the Performance of Beethoven’s Symphonies and Other Essays, an anthology of writings by the Austrian conductor Felix Weingartner. His primer on the First Symphony laid down a basic interpretative rule of thumb: dislocating the time was verboten and tempo relationships must always be kept in proportion. But the tempo change in the First Symphony’s first movement, he thought, proved an exception. To allow the new tempo to bed in, Weingartner suggested a steady, subliminal accelerando through the opening bars of the Allegro con brio; and, up to a point, his October 1937 recording with the Vienna Philharmonic demonstrates the soundness of his advice.

Putting the molto squarely into Beethoven’s Adagio molto introduction, Weingartner leaves himself plenty of wiggle-room to pick up speed during the Allegro con brio, impetus playing catch-up with harmonic certainty as brass and timpani reassert chromatically unpolluted C major following the initial statement of Beethoven’s theme. His essay recommends that the tempo be kept steady during the repeat of the exposition but, presumably because of time restrictions on 78rpm recordings, Weingartner cuts the repeat. Other undermining problems – inaudible timpani and kamikaze horns – push this historically important recording way down the pecking order. That said, the orchestra’s lilting, feather-touch strings during the waltzing Scherzo are a true Viennese whirl.

Weingartner is amiable but slightly fusty; Arturo Toscanini, recorded only a few days later with a fledgling BBC Symphony Orchestra, invokes a freshly minted sound world that’s as stark a contrast to Weingartner as the moment The Wizard of Oz switches from black-and-white to colour. Toscanini is driven by the revolutionary ideals of Beethoven’s score and the BBC SO comprehensively outplay the Vienna Philharmonic: modern ideas about interpretation and recording go live. His tempo-timed-to-perfection Adagio introduction – shrill flutes and resonating string pizzicato to the fore – reconnect us with the sheer red-blooded boldness of Beethoven’s notion of how to start a symphony. True enough, no conductor today would stress the slurs that Beethoven writes into the string parts in the Andante but, occasional period features like that aside, Toscanini remains perpetually contemporary.

And, ja Herr Weingartner, Toscanini does nudge slightly forwards in the exposition of the first movement but more subtly than you, his tempo suspended expertly – just right with a hint of recklessness. His finale is surprisingly Haydnesque; but where Weingartner neatly tucks in moments of harmonic rupture, Toscanini wants you to feel the storms. And then you can be sure that there’s no place quite like home.

Other pioneering early recordings include Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic in 1947, Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1952 and Hermann Scherchen with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra in 1954, each defining an approach that would resonate with later conductors. Furtwängler, depending on your point of view, makes heavy weather of the slow introductions to the first movement and finale, or pumps them with expressive juice alien to Weingartner and Toscanini. The emotive push-pull of the Adagio molto, to my ears, feels overcooked and the Allegro con brio drags. Furtwängler’s recording was highly influential and much-loved but questions are left hanging: did he project a style more appropriate to the later symphonies on to Beethoven’s piece?

Scherchen’s oddball stylistic hybrid is let down by a toneless, cadaverous string section. The first movement is a blend of Furtwängler tempi with Scherchen’s own obsessive ear for articulation, characteristic of a man minded to unpack scores by Schoenberg and Xenakis. But then he lightens up during his high-velocity Scherzo and finale, steering the piece back towards Haydn. For Bruno Walter, it’s dancing tempi and light-on-its-feet textures all the way. And what fine form the NYPO were on that day in Carnegie Hall. Walter’s lightness of touch, paradoxically, reveals the relative weight of Beethoven’s orchestration – in the first movement (at 2'10") listen to the ricocheting antiphonal brilliance of sf woodwind chords on the third beat answered by sf strings on the fourth beat. One other version to mention here: Toscanini’s 1951 remake with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, spirited enough but a schooled and less spontaneous performance than in 1937. And what a pity about that extraneous external noise – a car horn perhaps? – which unwittingly smudges the opening of the slow movement.

DEVELOPMENT: 1960s

In 1953 the 45-year-old Herbert von Karajan cut his first Beethoven First at London’s Kingsway Hall with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Eight years later, now firmly established as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, he began a second Beethoven cycle. There’ll be more about Karajan later but for the meantime his 1950s version has a clear edge. True enough, in 1961 Karajan went with the repeat in the first movement, playing Weingartner’s tempo ground plan to the letter, but EMI provided him with a mellower recorded sound than DG’s engineers, one suited to subtle moments like his pure-toned balance of woodwind voicings in the Scherzo.

Recorded in 1957, Otto Klemperer, again with the Philharmonia, promotes an approach so far removed from where Beethoven scholarship points conductors today that it’s difficult to imagine a time when sluggish tempi like this seemed desirable. Looking at it charitably, Klemperer’s ‘gigantism’ gives succour to the idea of heroic Beethoven, while his ear was far more discerning than that would imply. His snail’s-pace approach unambiguously maps out the symphony’s architecture – more an issue in other, more complex Beethoven symphonies than here – but quite simply, rightly or wrongly, history has left Klemperer behind. Of the three cycles from Eugen Jochum, his 1967 Beethoven First with the Concertgebouw Orchestra feels most satisfying and acts as the perfect antidote to Klemperer.

Although no Toscanini or Karajan when it comes to speedy tempi, Jochum is infinitely more flexible than Klemperer, unafraid to hold back where necessary, and something more humane emerges. But George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1964 offered something remarkably left-bank: a truly ‘Classical’ performance with a physicality and brightness of tempo that anticipate Gardiner and Chailly. Alas, Leonard Bernstein and the NYPO, recorded in the same year, can’t match the lucidity of Szell’s textures. The opening Adagio is molto muddy but Bernstein is determined to meet the challenges of Beethoven’s metronome marks and pulls his New York musicians along with him – a high point of Bernstein’s inconsistent NYPO Beethoven cycle.

CRISIS: 1970s and ’80s

And Karajan’s mid-Seventies Beethoven First – genial enough but curiously blasé – was a low point of that particular cycle, especially during a decade when views of Beethoven began to change so fundamentally. By the early to mid‑1980s, conductors like Roger Norrington, Christopher Hogwood, John Eliot Gardiner, Frans Brüggen and Nikolaus Harnoncourt were changing hearts and minds; and, even if you didn’t buy into Historically Informed Performance, it was wise to take heed of the wider messages.

Georg Solti’s speedball 1974 Chicago Symphony Orchestra version clearly sniffs the change in the air; ditto Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1985 – but just what were Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin thinking in 1999? That 1952 might make a comeback? Christopher Hogwood in 1983 – recorded, as it happens, nearly 30 years to the day in the Kingsway Hall after Karajan and the Philharmonia – deployed a 44-piece Academy of Ancient Music which he directed from the fortepiano. Hogwood’s instrumental contribution is all but inaudible and the real bolts from the blue here are his tempi, and not only the punk speed of the first movement, Scherzo and finale. Hogwood avoids stealing time in the name of expressivity – once set, the pulse is the pulse is the pulse.

Roger Norrington with the London Classical Players, recorded three years later, matches Hogwood’s tempi but pulls off a ‘performance’, leaving Hogwood sounding more like a demonstration of the possibilities. The roughed-up sound – timpani hollering, brass producing a tone nothing like a conventional orchestral section – was a shock at the time, but Norrington relished explaining himself in the media. He had the chutzpah to pull it off, and there’s no argument about how sonically exhilarating the finale is. But, less often mentioned, the second-movement Andante has an objectified beauty that’s very persuasive, the timpani’s abrupt jumps between forte and piano heard like never before. Frans Brüggen and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, recorded live in 1985, come with a lighter touch than either Hogwood or Norrington.

Harnoncourt and Gardiner’s recordings – Harnoncourt with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in 1990, Gardiner with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in 1993 – ended up appearing at around the same time, upping the ante further. John Eliot Gardiner keeps the Adagio molto clean-cut and neutral, révolutionnaire winning out over romantique. Nikolaus Harnoncourt – and I didn’t expect to write this – injects an undeniable tone of romanticism into Beethoven’s introduction, after which my preference switches. Harnoncourt’s Allegro con brio has an infectious wit and joy, qualities which Gardiner’s marshalled strings lack. In the second movement, too, Harnoncourt’s more measured approach – phrases given scope to breath and exhale – shows Gardiner’s inexplicably pushed tempo a thing or two. But the theatre of the Scherzo and finale clearly appeal to Gardiner; I love the chivalrous call-and-response woodwind and strings in the third movement, and the chattering, shattering, clattering grandeur of the finale is something very special.

But where did finding a future in the past leave conductors of the previous generation? This is where it becomes easy to dismiss performances that ordinarily would be pleasing but, with the whole recorded history at your fingertips, start to feel workaday. Typifying this tendency would be Wolfgang Sawallisch’s stodge-fest of a performance with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1993 and Sir Colin Davis’s surprisingly dull account with the Staatskapelle Dresden, released in 1995. Karajan in 1984 is clinical and lacking in the ardour of old; pinched phrasing and those same-old same-old slow tempi not cutting the mustard in the new reality. Bernstein in 1977 with the Vienna Philharmonic is quite the revelation. There are some cranky tactics around – the transition in the finale from Adagio introduction to the Allegro molto e vivace takes so long that you can only assume Bernstein is waiting for planning permission. But, far from the suspicion that late Bernstein means slow Bernstein, his racy tempi reconnect the symphony with the dance; the last few pages of the finale are a bona fide show-stopper. Günter Wand with the NDR Symphony Orchestra in 1986 also performs against type – bright-life tempi as standard.

UNEASY RECAPITULATION

In the late 1990s the British musicologist Jonathan Del Mar handed conductors something else to think about – a new, corrected edition of Beethoven’s scores, a jolt to people who had assumed these Old Testament riches were in any way definitive. David Zinman with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich was, in 1998, the first conductor to take up this new edition, although his added expressive ornaments were not without controversy. Zinman’s tempo decisions palpably owe much to Harnoncourt, Hogwood et al, although flexibility is his watchword and he makes much of Beethoven’s dynamic leaps. I like the way Zinman slightly raises the bassoon in the mix – check out its deadpan rising scales in the finale – although others may find the effect synthetic.

The coincidence of Sir Simon Rattle with the Vienna Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic releasing Beethoven cycles within a few months of each other was inevitably written up as the battle of the maestros. Rattle’s live version from 2002 consciously tries to marry the august VPO with period-performance practice and just about gets away it. Abbado, recorded a year earlier, seems to be looking back towards Toscanini at least in terms of tempo, although some would argue texture too. This conductorly battle royal was clearly ‘won’ by Abbado’s settled view; his first movement skips and dances, and his Scherzo gently roars. Rattle lives to fight another day, though. We will review his next Beethoven cycle, with the LSO, in the April 2023 issue.

The buoyant textures and swift tempi of John Neschling with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in 2005 and Osmo Vänskä with the Minnesota Orchestra in 2007 both epitomise where Beethoven interpretation has reached in this new century. But three releases that appeared in 2011 – Riccardo Chailly with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Emmanuel Krivine with La Chambre Philharmonique and Christian Thielemann with the Vienna Philharmonic – helped crystallise the arguments and point the way forward. There’s no joy in Thielemann’s calculating approach, with its thespy curtain-raising introduction and meandering, going-nowhere, too-slow tempi. Krivine wisely conducts in dog years in comparison, but Chailly really does fill one with hope for the future. His view of Beethoven’s First Symphony is thoroughly Classical and yet the 19th century clearly looms into view. Nothing quite prepares you for the sheer physical lash of the playing; but no details have been lost in terms of personality and shaping. Never have Beethoven’s sforzando markings been taken so literally; never have they meant so much. And, of course, Chailly has the advantage of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s silken strings and sweet‑toothed woodwinds.

CONCLUDING CODA

Out of all the modern versions, Chailly is a clear front-runner; and, given that Toscanini in 1937 is my historic choice, this symphony clearly brings out something of the Italian in me. Karajan’s Philharmonia recording I prefer certainly to Klemperer and Böhm, and definitely to any of his later problematic Berlin Philharmonic performances. But the fascination here is in the wild cards. Who would have guessed that Bernstein’s 1977 version would be so tapped into modern ideas, that Scherchen would be tripped over by precisely the strengths that made him so persuasive in modern repertoire, or that John Neschling, in Brazil, would create such a memorable performance? A version that I chose not to discuss above, Karl Böhm with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1972, is one of those ‘sleeper’ performances; on its own terms beautifully controlled and delicately handled but retreading old ground, a trait ruthlessly revealed in the recording studio. With Beethoven those terms must always remain under review. The beat goes on. Blink and you miss the boat.

RECOMMENDED RECORDINGS

Historic Classic

Toscanini Naxos 8 110854 Buy from Amazon

Toscanini’s 1937 recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra still delivers an urgent message nearly 80 years later. The BBC SO strings pulsate with life; the finale dances with joy.

Old Classic

Karajan EMI 515863-2 Buy from Amazon

The older Karajan got, the further an ideal Beethoven First moved away from him. His earliest recording finds him in London in 1953, perfectly in tune with the Philharmonia at Kingsway Hall.

Unexpected Classic

Bernstein DG 474 924-2GB5 Buy from Amazon

Perhaps a controversial choice – but Bernstein’s 1977 Beethoven symphony cycle remains underrated and his daredevil tempi and visceral excitement are infectious.

Instant Classic – Top Choice

Chailly Decca 478 3492DH5 Buy from Amazon

Riccardo Chailly’s cycle, released in 2011, filtered the entire history of Beethoven interpretation through a highly original view of the symphonies. This killer-diller First sets the tone.