The opera Palestrina has given Hans Pfitzner (1869-1949) a kind of musical immortality, but he was a conductor, too. For a time shortly before and during the First World War he was Generalmusikdirektor in Strasbourg. It was there, during a sabbatical year working on Palestrina, that he took on the young Otto Klemperer as his assistant.
‘Real music seemed to me to begin only with Beethoven’, Pfitzner wrote, recalling his student days in Frankfurt. ‘With Beethoven, “old” music came to an end. He opened the gates to what came after.’ As a conductor, Pfitzner became closely associated with the music of Beethoven (and Schumann, with whom he also had a particular empathy). So there was no surprise when the German Grammophon company invited him to take on five symphonies in the Beethoven cycle which the company had commissioned to mark the advent of electrical recording and the Beethoven centenary in 1927.
Pfitzner was not the only Beethoven ‘name’ in Germany at the time. Among older conductors, Weingartner – who had been snaffled up by English Columbia for a rival centenary project – was even better known. But Pfitzner’s Beethoven had a particular following: much as, say, Britten’s Mozart did in the 1960s.
Down the years, antiquarians in the gramophone world have talked in awed tones about some of these Pfitzner recordings (that of the Pastoral in particular), though the discs never had the commercial success or the wider general acclaim of the Weingartners. Hearing the performances again in Naxos’s new and technically expert CD transfers, it is possible to be impressed by the vigour and nobility of Pfitzner’s readings whilst at the same time being aware of what it is that makes the recordings period pieces, albeit deeply interesting ones.
First, the sound itself is oddly unsatisfactory. Where English Columbia’s early electrical recordings had a fresh, open feel to them, here it is a bit like looking at a landscape through the eye-piece of an old-fashioned box camera. Nor is the image always absolutely in focus. Like all the great romantic conductors, Pfitzner built sound from the bottom up. Here we have superb, and superbly audible, basses, cellos and violas and, when the Berlin Philharmonic is the orchestra, long stretches of superb violin playing. The wind choirs, however, are generally more distant. (Not distant enough, alas, to mitigate the aural distress caused by raucous German clarinets.) At times, the first oboe – the nearest thing to the lead-player in these great music-dramas – is all but inaudible. Nor does Pfitzner have the professional’s knack of making a less than first-rate orchestra sound consistently first-rate. The CD on which he conducts the Berlin Staatskapelle in a fresh but often wayward and poorly executed performance of the Fourth Symphony, and on which Erich Kleiber also conducts the same band in a spacious, generous-sounding account of the Second Symphony, makes the point with almost brutal frankness.
I suspect that the 60-year-old Pfitzner cut a somewhat unworldly figure in the recording studio. There is nothing that even the finest transfer engineer can do about 78rpm side-breaks that are flagged in advance by the conductor slowing towards the changeover. (The Pastoral has several such examples.) I suspect, too, that Pfitzner and the engineers were to some extent still thinking in terms of the old acoustic recordings: distrustful of Beethoven’s own orchestration and the gramophone’s ability to register it. For a self-proclaimed textual ‘purist’, Pfitzner is pretty free with the touch-up paint.
Yet the best of these performances – the Eroica, the Pastoral and the Eighth – have great human appeal. Unsettling as it is to be confronted in the Eroica Symphony’s first movement with two distinct sets of tempos, or to have a quick-fire Scherzo, shorn of all repeats, which is over in the blink of an eyelid, the impression one takes away is that of a grand and exciting work, nobly realised.
It is the same with the Pastoral Symphony, which opens here with two slow movements and, then, after a fierce switch of mood in the peasants’ merrymaking and storm, resumes its search for God-in-Nature in the shepherds’ thanksgiving. (Note, however, the admonitory chill of the muted horns on the final page, an emblem of winter and death if ever there was one.) This would later be Furtwangler’s way with the Pastoral. It suggests an approach to Beethoven interpretation that has a dangerous disregard for the letter of the score but a sublime regard for its inner spirit.
Such an approach works far less well when the music itself lacks some kind of personal programme, which partly explains why Pfitzner makes little of the First Symphony. This is a pedestrian, provincial-sounding performance, until the finale, which is all life and airy grace, with quicksilver playing by the BPO strings.
According to Bruno Walter, who knew him well, Pfitzner was a tremendous ‘character’: opinionated, impassioned and overbearing but possessed of a fine mind and a ready wit. I mention this because his 1933 recording of the Eighth Symphony, the last of the Grammophon series to be recorded and one of the best technically, has all these qualities. It is an immensely characterful performance, Pfitzner squaring up to his hero with relish and humour, a rousing act of homage imbued with something of Beethoven’s own indomitable spirit.'