Beethoven - Symphony No 9 'Choral' - Furtwängler, BPO (19 April 1942)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgwRtknwI8k Beethoven, Symphony 9
1:15 1. Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso
19:35 2. Molto vivace
32:34 3. Adagio molto e cantabile
51:36 4. Presto
Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No 9 in D minor "Choral" op 125
Erna Berger, soprano, Gertrude Pitzinger, contralto, Helge Rosvaenge, tenor, Rudolf Watzke, bass, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler
Booklet notes from the Archipel CD release [ARCHIPEL ARPCD 0270]
Michael Tanner: Furtwängler, Hitler and the Ninth
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony gradually achieved an iconic status during the nineteenth century, and no-one felt more fervently its unique position, as a kind of secular sacred rite, than Wilhelm Furtwängler. He refused to conduct it during the First World War, regarding contemporary events as too horrifying to permit of such celebrations as we find in the last movement. While many people have harboured doubts about that movement, Furtwängler saw it as the successful climax of the work, with its message of Universal Brotherhood, its unrestrained exulting, and its insistence that a Creator must live beyond the stars.
Until now we have had eleven recordings of performances, all of them 'live', under Furtwängler. The first dates from 1937, in London, and the last from August 1954, three months before his death. As usual with him, there are many differences of detail and emphasis from one performance to another, but the broad outlines are the same. The most extreme performance to date has been from Berlin in March 1942, where the ferocious intensity of the first movement's central climax is still a shattering experience, despite the limitations of sound. In Bayreuth in 1951, too, where the annual festival was re-inaugurated after the Second World War with Furtwängler conducting the Ninth, as Wagner had conducted it in 1872 at the laying of the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus, there is a quite extraordinary exhilaration about the last movement, an expression of boundless hopes for a new departure for humanity.
But in April 1942 Furtwängler was tricked by Goebbels into conducting this work on the eve of the Führer's birthday in Berlin, something he had always managed to avoid before. Try as he would to insist that he was unwell, had commitments in Vienna, and so on, he was forced to take part and conduct it, after Goebbels had made a speech. The resulting performance is now to be heard on a recording, made privately, for the first time, and is a document of the first importance and of fearful intensity. It is vehement to a degree: the timpani in the second movement sound like Jove's thunderbolts. The great fanfare in the third movement is apocalyptic. And in the last movement, after stupendous ecstasies and paeans, the unspeakable happens: Furtwängler always accelerated wildly for the closing bars, suggesting a barely controlled excitement. But on this occasion the last bars are a nightmare of nihilism, a stampede towards the abyss, such as I have never heard in any other music. It is as if Furtwängler is doing what Thomas Mann's fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn says he will do in Dr. Faustus: take back the Ninth Symphony, because
all the hopes and aspirations of the noble side of humanity have come to naught. But instead of writing a new piece to negate the Ninth, Furtwängler does the unthinkable and revokes the work by the way he plays its own ending. Walter Benjamin said that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. Never has that been more clearly true than in this terrifying account of the Ninth.
