96040

BEET
HO COMPLETE
SYMPHONIES

VEN
Staatskapelle Dresden
Herbert Blomstedt
conductor

SENCE · QUINTESSENZ · QUINTESSENZA · QUINAESENCIA · QUINTESSÊNCIA · QUINTESSENCE · QUINTESSENZ · QUINTESSENZA · QUINAESE

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Complete Symphonies

CD1 76’52 CD2 72’25 CD3 78’55 CD4 69’06

Symphony No.1 in C Op.21 Symphony No.2 in D Op.36 Symphony No.5 in C minor Op.67 Symphony No.7 in A Op.92
1 I. Adagio molto – 1 I. Adagio molto – 1 I. Allegro con brio 8’05 1 I. Poco sostenuto – Vivace 13’31
Allegro con brio 9’03 Allegro con brio 13’05 2 II. Andante con moto 11’21 2 II. Allegretto 9’57
2 II. Andante cantabile 2 II. Larghetto 12’33 3 III. Allegro 8’53 3 III. Presto – Assai meno presto 9’45
con moto 8’32 3 III. Scherzo & Trio: Allegro 4’06 4 IV. Allegro – presto 8’52 4 IV. Allegro con brio 9’03
3 III. Menuetto & Trio: 4 IV. Allegro molto 6’43
Allegro molto e vivace 3’26 Symphony No.6 in F Op.68 ‘Pastoral’ Symphony No.8 in F Op.93
4 IV. Finale: Adagio – Symphony No.4 in B flat Op.60 5 I. Allegro ma non troppo 5 I. Allegro vivace e con brio 10’02
Allegro molto e vivace 6’09 5 I. Adagio – Allegro vivace 12’09 (Erwachen heiterer 6 II. Allegretto scherzando 3’56
6 II. Adagio 10’31 Empfindungen bei der 7 III. Tempo di menuetto 4’47
Symphony No.3 in E flat Op.55 ‘Eroica’ 7 III. Menuetto: Allegro vivace – Ankunft auf dem Lande) 9’31 8 IV. Allegro vivace 7’50
5 I. Allegro con brio 15’02 Trio: Un poco meno allegro 5’50 6 II. Andante molto mosso
6 II. Marcia funebre: 8 IV. Allegro ma non troppo 7’10 (Szene am Bach) 12’40 Staatskapelle Dresden
Adagio assai 16’47 7 III. Allegro – sempre più stretto – Herbert Blomstedt
7 III. Scherzo & Trio: Staatskapelle Dresden in tempo d’allegro – Tempo i –
Allegro vivace 5’49 Herbert Blomstedt presto (lustiges Zusammensein
8 IV. Allegro molto – der Landleute) 5’44
poco andante – presto 11’49 8 IV. Allegro (Gewitter, Sturm) 3’42
9 V. Allegretto (Hirtengesang,
Staatskapelle Dresden frohe und dankbare Gefühle
Herbert Blomstedt nach dem Sturm) 9’51

Staatskapelle Dresden
Herbert Blomstedt

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CD5 72’18 4 IV. Presto – Allegro assai – presto Revolution and Enlightenment
Symphony No.9 in D minor Op.125 – recitativo – Allegro assai –
‘Choral’ Allegro assai vivace (alla marcia) The symphony cycle which gave rise to the very idea of symphony cycles opens with
1 I. Allegro ma non troppo, – Andante maestoso – Adagio a slap in the face. The playbill says we are in C major, key of Mozart’s last symphony.
un poco maestoso 16’55 ma non troppo ma divoto – But we are not. We are in F. Then we move to G. The music itself sounds puzzled, and
2 II. Molto vivace – presto 13’48 Allegro energico e sempre ben we should be too. It’s only the first of many sophisticated musical tricks which litter
3 III. Adagio molto e cantabile – marcato – Allegro ma non the symphony, reminding us not only that Beethoven was 25, with a young man’s
Andante moderato – Tempo i tanto – presto – maestoso – desire to shock and impress and amuse, but also that he had the mastery to do so.
– Andante moderato – prestissimo 25’09 A return to first principles is palpable. Nothing can be taken for granted on
Adagio – lo stesso tempo 16’24 this symphonic journey. Everything is open to question, even the obligatory ‘slow
movement’. The opening bars present a microcosm of the symphony’s focused
progression and indeed of the composer’s working methods at the piano: a fourth
Helena Döse soprano · Marga Schiml mezzo-soprano becomes a third becomes a second.
Peter Schreier tenor · Theo Adam bass In the finale the unit of musical currency is a scale, nothing more, nothing less. It
is ‘found’ note by note in the slow introduction as though a weighty proposition was
Rundfunkchor Leipzig being uncovered – but when the Allegro races off, it can be heard at every turn; not
Chor der Staatsoper Dresden always in the most obvious place, but present somewhere.
With the Eroica on the horizon, the Second was the longest and most powerful
Staatskapelle Dresden symphony ever written. The slow introduction is of a grandeur then rivalled only by
Herbert Blomstedt Mozart’s ‘Prague’ Symphony, and with far bolder strokes of modulation. Not even the
length of the coda, nor its abrupt contrasts, can contain the music’s spectacular progress
which culminates in the trumpets ripping through the fabric of the full orchestra.
The slow movement must needs be of Schubertian length and peacefulness to
counterbalance such exhilaration. With the third movement, Beethoven brings the
Recordings: 1976/1979 (CD1); 1978/1979 (CD2); 1977 (CD3);
1975/1978 (CD4); 1980 (CD5), Lukaskirche Dresden
Scherzo to the symphonic form for the first time, and it throws heavy punches at the
Cover: Shutterstock/Maximova Natalya old minuet form before the finale reverts to the style of opera buffa (and in particular
p 1980 Edel Classics GmbH to its apotheosis in the trilogy created by Mozart and da Ponte).
© 2019 Brilliant Classics A myth, a tradition, a man: three interwoven inspirations for the Third. The myth
Licensed from Edel Germany GmbH

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is of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and brought it to men. Beethoven had movement of the Fourth, it is the timpanist’s singular assertion of B flat that leads the
composed a ballet in 1801 for the Habsburg Imperial Court, called The Creatures of development away from distant harmonic peregrinations and back to the home key.
Prometheus about two statues turned to humans and shown, by Prometheus, all the But ask bassoonists about the Fourth and they too may claim it as ‘their’
beauties of civilisation: it was poorly performed and received, and Beethoven made it symphony. When the bassoon articulates the little rocking figure that grounds the
his first and last excursion in the genre. Its principal theme became that of the finale Adagio (and animates its contrasting passages when played upside-down), it prompts
of the ‘Eroica’. He had already used the theme a decade earlier, however, in a dance a clarinet reply, merely a descending, four-note scale, elevated by its colouring
for an entertainment called a Ritterballet. This is where the tradition comes in: at and context into a wonder of suspended beauty at the heart of a long and soulful
such dances it was customary for masters and servants to dance together. The original movement. But it’s the finale where bassoonists really earn their fee, especially when
dedication to Napoleon, torn up when Beethoven learnt that the French general had taken anywhere near Beethoven’s precipitate metronome mark.
declared himself Emperor, clinches the deal: this is a Revolutionary Symphony. Beethoven’s trick of halting the momentum of the finale near its close is even
If the symphony really is a portrait of a hero, many have chosen to identify the more elaborately staged than in the First and Second symphonies. It’s an old joke of
composer himself as the subject of his own work, beset by deafness and despair Haydn’s, told with a new vigour that entirely belies the old reputation of the Fourth
and winning through in a heroic act of self-renewal. How, then, are we to view the as necessarily more graceful or feminine than the heroic statements of the Third and
Funeral March? Certainly, its weight and bottomless grief must mark the death of a Fifth. Of the Fifth itself, perhaps it is enough to note that the symphony’s famous
hero. The timpani, so often reserved for moments of crisis and affirmation, here take trajectory from C minor to C major is not uncomplicated. The relentless proliferation
their place as an integral part of the texture. Even in this Adagio, sforzandi and accent of that four-note molecule in the first movement contrasts with a more relaxed model
markings slash across the score, as if to make the whole orchestra one huge death- of growth in the second. The dark march of the Scherzo and its spectral return on
march drummer. plucked strings presage the famous C major burst of light in the finale – but the
So revolutionary was the Eroica’s heavy weighting towards the first two movements Scherzo music comes back again, as though it has never been vanquished.
that composers have been struggling with the problem of what to do with the Shrinks and couches were yet to make Vienna famous as the birth of
remaining two ever since. Like Beethoven, many have chosen to begin from silence, psychoanalysis, but modern ears may listen to Beethoven’s balancing of energies – the
as if the music was hardly there at all. Its momentum once gained, however, is relentless celebration of C major in the coda as the necessary counterweight to the
unstoppable. The ‘Promethean’ finale presses on with a sweeping gesture that seems unrelieved C minor of the first movement – in the context of another composer with
to dismiss everything that had gone before it – a trope to which he returned for the more than a passing interest in politics and psychology, Michael Tippett, and the
finale of the Ninth. words of his oratorio A Child of our Time: ‘I would know my shadow and my light,
In both the Fourth and the Fifth symphonies Beethoven continues to liberate the so shall I at last be whole’.
drums as an agent of change rather than reinforcement. In the gloom of the Fifth’s While it inspired Berlioz to bring the novel to the symphony with his Symphonie
scherzo they find the C major which irresistibly propels us towards the finale; in the first Fantastique, the form of the Sixth is less radical than it appears. The Storm is the

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‘extra’ movement in number, but counts as a transition between Scherzo and finale of repeated, goes down the octave, then up, then down again. Bar by bar, a figure is
the sort that Beethoven had already devised in the Fifth. What’s revolutionary about developed, long-short-short, as if the music was composing itself in front of you.
the Pastoral is its conservatism. This is far and away his most diatonic symphony: The not-really-slow movement is similarly fixated. The long-short-short figure has a
meaning that when the score says F major (a key for pastoral thoughts in music by long-long appended to it: a dactyl and a spondee, the two classic rhythmic cadence of
Bach and beyond), it sets a path and sticks to it. Beethoven uses patterns and chains a good Homeric line of poetry. The Greeks divided drama into comedy and tragedy,
of rhythms throughout the symphony to a degree unprecedented even for him. and in the implacable tread of this Allegretto, built on the same structural plan as the
Such minimalism (anticipating the American school that bears its name) is even Eroica Symphony’s Funeral March, it is clear which Muse is ascendant.
more germane to the Scene by the Brook. Beethoven sets his scene in motion – the Composed in 1811, the Eighth hangs on the coat-tails of the Seventh, at least in
murmur of the brook in the strings, the song of the earth in the winds, off-beat horns terms of chronology and in the estimation of many listeners who have preferred its
between – and lets his elements interact with a slowly intensifying hypnosis thereafter weightier and more exuberant predecessor. One was foolish enough to ask Beethoven
rediscovered in the late music of Sibelius. why he thought this was so. ‘Because it’s so much better’ came the reply.
It is Beethoven’s orchestration (so admired by Berlioz) that peoples his landscape, Listening to the Seventh, there is not one superfluous note; and yet the Eighth
nowhere more vividly than the Scherzo. The Scotch snap on the clarinet of the strips away even more musical connective tissue; we are left with something bald,
Trio is a red-nosed peasant straight out of Breughel, but the first and only F minor uncompromising and gleaming, a musical skull. Earlier commentators found it
chord in the entire symphony is saved for the beginning of the storm. Beethoven bubbling over with wit and high spirits; the conductor Michael Gielen is nearer the
has entirely withheld drums and trombones until this point, which is what gives the mark when he identifies the humour of the Eighth as ‘the humour of Rumpelstiltskin,
storm its always unexpected vehemence, and only the trombones are retained for the full of wrath and suppressed violence, and without a hint of merriment.’
finale. Now Beethoven introduces his only ‘found object’ of this nature-symphony, Just as we arrive apparently in the thick of things – no grand introduction – so the
a shepherds’ call such as Brahms found for the same crucial point of his own First first three movements do not so much finish as stop. There is no slow movement. The
Symphony. Once more, energy is accumulated patiently, adding instruments towards second movement ticks like one of Beethoven’s new metronomes that briefly tickled
one swell which subsides to prepare for another, each more intense, until the last is his fancy, with a couple of explosions along the way. Only the Minuet offers brief
capped with a radiant horn sunset. respite from the tension, but it dances with two left feet. Beethoven has saved up
For Wagner, the Seventh was ‘the apotheosis of the dance’; Weber said on the all his endings for the overweening force of the finale – itself the longest symphonic
strength of it that Beethoven was now fit for the madhouse. Yet they are, in essence, finale that he had composed until then – which hammers home the key of F on 51
hearing the same piece and reacting to it in the same way. For the symphony carries to separate chords.
extremes – for Weber, self-parody perhaps – Beethoven’s obsession with rhythm. Beethoven wrote his first eight symphonies within the space of 15 years, 1797
Much of the slow introduction is built from simple scales in the strings and or thereabouts to 1812. Another 12 would elapse before the next, and last, was
arpeggios in the winds. They are gradually concentrated to a single note. It is complete. And yet Beethoven had the idea of setting Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ a full 30

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years previously, before the First Symphony was even a glint in his eye. their lands. The voices may have moved the symphony as a form in a decisively new
Symphonic innovation on an unprecedented scale is evident from the outset: direction, but the episodic construction and straightforward harmonies of the Ninth’s
modern commentators may indulge talk of a world or a work creating itself as mere finale draw it back, way past the agonised dissonance of the first movement towards
sentiment, but imagine the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold without it. And as the Enlightenment ideals adumbrated in The Magic Flute of Mozart.
creation begets evolution, so Beethoven must dispose of the formal convention of the © Peter Quantrill, 2019
exposition repeat in order to hasten the development of his two main themes towards
their inevitable immolation at the movement’s climax – after which the movement’s
world must be forged anew – only to result in the final reiteration of its tenebrous
opening and uncompromised reiteration of D minor.
No longer is the Scherzo a ‘joke’: learned fugue has expanded its dimensions, while
abrupt silences contract its rhetoric. Rising cello phrases towards the end of the trio
describe an idyll that the music itself is reluctant to forsake, being finally tugged away
by the scherzo’s implacable return. Withholding the slow movement heightens its
pathos, and so does the care Beethoven takes in drawing out his late slow-movement
style of two complementary tempi and themes – the second slightly faster than the
first. Imagine the loss of impact to the finale’s opening ‘Schrekensfanfare’ – horror
fanfare, as the Germans call it – had the Scherzo come third.
And so, with the return of chaos from the opening movement and its ‘discussion’
in the subsequent cello recitative, voices present the only possible resolution. But
Schiller’s text is no simple celebration of brotherhood: he who is without a friend
or a family or a soul ‘must steal away weeping from this assembly’. Even in the
blithe elegance of this line we may hear a composer who complained of loneliness
throughout his adult life and who in the wake of the symphony’s first performance
sent a stinging letter of rejection to one of his closest companions, Anton Schindler
– and in the ‘Turkish’ episode for tenor and trumpet-and-drum punctuated, choral
statements of the Joy theme we are faced with a violent exhortation to rejoice in
the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a sentiment that would have hit
home to an audience and a kingdom still smarting from Napoleon’s assault upon

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