![]() The symphony received its British premiere at the hands of Sir George Smart in March 1825, its French debut with Francois-Antoine Habeneck in March 1831. Gustav Mahler, who approved of Wagner’s changes, arguing that improvements had improved in efficacy and range since Beethoven’s time, conducted the symphony in 1900 with 100 musicians and 500 singers in Vienna’s Musikverein – ‘carrying out Beethoven’s wishes,’ as he put in, ‘even in seemingly insignificant details and ensuring that nothing the master intended should be sacrificed or drowned ina general confusion of sound.’ He was fired soon after as chief conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. The French composer Charles Gounod provoked a row by defending Beethoven’s original manuscript against Wagner’s amendments. ‘Everything significant about this symphony comes from Richard Wagner,’ wrote Richard Strauss in his conducting score. ![]() Wagner went on to revise Beethoven’s score for an 1846 Dresden performance (his version has been recorded for piano and voices here), inaugurated his Bayreuth theatre the the Ninth in 1872 and published an analytical essay titled The Rendering of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. ![]() I received in reply a letter saying ‘that the publishers had not yet decided to issue the Ninth Symphony for the piano, but that they would gladly keep my laborious work,’ and offered me remuneration in the shape of the score of the great Missa Solemnis in D, which I accepted with great pleasure. I sent my work to Schott, the publisher of the score, at Mainz. I set to work at it, and actually composed a complete piano solo, which I tried to play to myself. The symphony at that time had not yet been arranged for the piano it had found so little favour that the publisher did not feel inclined to run the risk of producing it. I well remember that on one occasion the sudden appearance of the dawn made such an uncanny impression on my excited nerves that I jumped into bed with a scream as though I had seen a ghost. This, I thought, must surely contain the secret of all secrets, and accordingly the first thing to be done was to make the score my own by a process of laborious copying. At the very first glance at the score, of which I obtained possession with such difficulty, I felt irresistibly attracted by the long-sustained pure fifths with which the first phrase opens: these chords, which, as I related above, had played such a supernatural part in my childish impressions of music, seemed in this case to form the spiritual keynote of my own life. It was considered the ‘non plus ultra’ of all that was fantastic and incomprehensible, and this was quite enough to rouse in me a passionate desire to study this mysterious work. I was first attracted to it by the opinion prevalent among musicians, not only in Leipzig but elsewhere, that this work had been written by Beethoven when he was already half mad. Richard Wagner, as a teenager, was overwhelmed: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony became the mystical goal of all my strange thoughts and desires about music. The young Robert Schumann wrote that ‘with his Beethoven, the German forgets that he has no school of painting with Beethoven he imagines that he has reversed the outcome of battles lost to Napoleon.’ Beethoven, in Schumann’s view, unlocks the fantasy German for whom history is a never-ending victory. No sooner did the work exist than the world began wondering what it might mean beyond its music and words, what it signified for Germans as a nation and for humanity as a whole. (See part 1 here and how to choose a Beethoven 9th here). Welcome to the 109th work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition
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