Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

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      The Beet Goes On

i) The Way to Play the Ninth

      At 6.45 p.m. on Friday, 7 May 1824, a large crowd gathered at a theatre in the centre of Vienna for the first performance of the greatest piece of music ever written. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in almost total deafness, was a work so radical in form and free in spirit that even those who interpret it almost two centuries later never fail to find within it something revelatory. When the world falls apart or unites, this is the music it reaches for.

      No one could predict this at the time, of course. Since its construction in 1709, the Theater am Kärntnertor had witnessed premieres by Haydn, Mozart and Salieri, and its audience was versed in high opera. The last great work by Beethoven performed at the theatre had been the newly revised version of Fidelio, which was received rapturously, but that was exactly 10 years before. The composer, now aged 53, the state of his finances always precarious, had accepted many commissions from royal courts and publishers in London, Berlin and St Petersburg, had frequently missed his deadlines, and was thought to be overwhelmed not only with work but also with legal battles over the custody of his nephew Karl. Besides, he had developed a reputation for obstinacy and cantankerousness. So there was no reason to expect that Beethoven’s latest work was going to be much more than another worthy milestone, not least since it became known that the piece was long and complex, involving a larger orchestra than usual, with solo singers and a chorus in the finale, and had undergone less than four days’ rehearsal. And there was one more thing. Despite the announcement that the concert was to be conducted by the theatre’s regular maestro Michael Umlauf, assisted by first violin Ignaz Schuppanzigh, it was agreed that Beethoven would also appear onstage for the entire performance, placing his own conductor’s stand next to Umlauf, ostensibly to guide the orchestra in the dynamics of the symphony’s tempo (or as it said in the official announcement of the concert the day before, ‘Mr Ludwig van Beethoven will himself participate in the general direction’). This would, of course, create a complicated dilemma for the orchestra to negotiate. Where to look? Whose tempo to follow? One eyewitness, the pianist Sigismond Thalberg, claimed that Umlauf instructed his players to honour Beethoven by occasionally looking at him, but then to totally ignore his beating of time.

      The evening began well. Before the premiere there were two other recent compositions: the overture Die Weihe des Hauses, which had been commissioned for the opening of another Viennese concert hall two years earlier, and three movements from his great D Major Mass Missa Solemnis. As his new symphony began, Beethoven was a dramatic figure on stage, his hair and arms wild and everywhere – or, in the words of one of the orchestra’s violinists Joseph Böhm, ‘he threw himself back and forth like a madman’. Böhm further remembered, ‘he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor. He flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.’ Helène Grebner, a young member of the chorus, recalled that Beethoven’s timekeeping may have been a little tardy: although he ‘appeared to follow the score with his eyes, at the end of each movement he turned several pages together’. On one occasion, possibly at the end of the second movement, the contralto Caroline Unger had to tug on Beethoven’s shirt to alert him to the applause behind him; these days the audience holds its approval until the end of the entire piece, but in those days praise arrived at regular intervals. Beethoven, still facing the orchestra, had apparently not heard the clapping, or was too busy readying his score for the adagio. Could this really have happened? Or was this last story a myth subtly amplified by time?¹ The performance throws up bigger questions too. How could one so profoundly deaf compose a piece of music that would send almost all who heard it into raptures? Beethoven’s secretary Anton Schindler wrote how ‘never in my life did I hear such frenetic yet cordial applause . . . The reception was more than imperial – for the people burst out in a storm four times.’² A reviewer in the Wiener Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung suggested that Beethoven’s ‘inexhaustible genius had shown us a new world’. Everyone – friends, critics, the whipped-up cream of Viennese connoisseurship – had delightedly thrown their hats in the air. But had they heard what the composer intended? And have we?

      We know the score. The first movement in sonata form that never settles down, the orchestra in an elemental battle with itself, the hovering tension of the first gentle bars soon colliding with the full swaggering crescendo that announces a work of unshakeable emotional force. The second movement, the scherzo, a juggernaut of engaging and urgent rhythm before the controlled and heart-stoppingly beautiful melody of the slow third. And then the last visionary movement, the stirring optimism of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, thunderous as to Heaven, a rhapsodic symphony in itself, described by the German critic Paul Bekker as rising ‘from the sphere of personal experience to the universal. Not life itself portrayed, but its eternal meaning.’

      But how well do we really know the СКАЧАТЬ