Kammerorchester Basel & Giovanni Antonini - Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (2018)

×

Kammerorchester Basel & Giovanni Antonini - Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (2018)

Close

Within days of the first performance, Beethoven’s favourite pupil, Carl Czerny, had written that “on its own, the idea of introducing the chorus with Schiller’s Song of Joy was very finely conceived and equally finely executed (albeit at undue length), but it would be far better suited to a fantasy. As an instrumental composer Beethoven is such a great and unique figure that human voices fetter him more than they exalt him.” Also present at the concert, which featured not only the Ninth Symphony but also sections of the Missa solemnis, was Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, an official in the Esterházy household. His impression of the occasion was rather more succinct: “Overture and three Hymns with Kyrie and Ode to Joy; lovely, but tedious.” Altogether annihilating was the verdict of the composer, conductor and violin virtuoso Louis Spohr: the symphony was “monstrous and tasteless”, while Beethoven’s grasp of Schiller’s Ode was “so trivial that I cannot even now understand how a genius like Beethoven’s could have written it. I find in it another proof of what I had already remarked in Vienna, that Beethoven was wanting in aesthetical feeling and in a sense of the beautiful”. Even Wagner was ambivalent: in his Artwork of the Future, he extolled the Ninth as marking “the redemption of Music from out her own peculiar element into the realm of universal Art”, but in a letter to Liszt he described the final movement as “the weakest part” ofthe symphony.