Judge Dennis Davis
Beethoven: The Revolutionary 6th and 9th Symphonies
Judge Dennis Davis - Beethoven The Revolutionary 6th and 9th Symphonies
- Welcome back, Dennis.
Thank you.
I love it when you wear your different hats. So talented. The psychologist hat.
It’s a very different hat, Wendy, I assure you, absolutely.
The cultural hat. It’s fun.
But I’ll tell you something, I enjoy doing these more than anything else because I learn more, in preparation than I could possibly give. And I’m so grateful for that. It’s just a fantastic thing.
It’s is, me too.
Part of the fact that I have to tell you and I see people listening, some of the comments I get back are just fantastic. I mean, you know, I look so much from the observations people have because there many people certainly know more about music than I do and I just feel I learned an extraordinary amount from the interchange. It’s just a pity we couldn’t be in one big room.
Well, you know, William Tyler spoke earlier, you know, he presented a style in Roosevelt and Churchill.
Yes, I listened to it.
You heard that, and there were so many questions and of course one’s just skimming the surface in one hour, so you know one-
Yeah, ‘cause he’s are very, very complicated people. Absolutely.
Yeah. So I’ve just spoken to him now about, you know, about adding to the programme and also doing presentations on some of the questions. So, which is-
That’s what happens. I mean you get questions that are lines of inquiry all on their own. Absolutely right.
I think when you keep things quite general and you don’t give the specifics, you also, it’s less contentious. So, you know what I want to say to all the presenters, we can get into more contentious issues because it’s up for discussion. Life’s complicated and issues are complicated and people are complicated and choices are complicated and there are consequences to everything. So, you know, we have a- Yeah, you know, to have these different presentations up for debate is very, very interesting. As long as people know that we are complete, we are looking at, we have an impartial.
I think idea debates are fantastic if we can do that. I think, you know, respectful engagement is incredibly useful. Particularly because as I was saying to Shawna beforehand, I can’t engage with people directly, which I would normally do in a lecture, which means that debate takes place between an audience and me throughout my lecturing career. Here, I can’t do it. So the idea of having somebody else as an interlocutor taking a different position, I find fabulously useful and I think it’s much better for presentations in some cases, not all, but some.
And interesting to spur debate. Alright, Dennis, thank you very, very much. So today we are looking forward to Beethoven, the Revolution with the 6th and the 9th symphonies. Thank you so much.
Visuals are displayed and audio is played throughout the performance.
- Pleasure, Wendy. Thank you. And thank you to everybody for attending who’s attending. You may recall that I did a presentation a little while back, it seems just months ago, but I think it’s about month or so before in which I discussed the Beethoven third, the “Eroica” and the 5th symphony. I will say a little bit about them in a moment. I never managed to get to the 9th because in my usual fashion I overestimated, or underestimated, should I say, questions of time and therefore I ran out and I decided now to do the second part. There’s so many parts you could do if you wanted to, but I have chosen to do the 6th and the 9th. And I’ll explain in the moment why. The 9th, for obvious reasons. 'Cause I was going to do it anyway, I’ll explain the 6th in the moment. But I was wondering about tonight and I spoke to my son who said, “What are you lecturing on this evening?” And I said, “I’m lecturing on Beethoven.” To which he put his nose or I was on the phone to him up in the air and said to me, “Why don’t you realise Beethoven is passe, why don’t you Schoenberg or Shostakovitch or something of that kind?” And I said to him, “Well actually you’ve got it horribly wrong. Beethoven is absolutely crucial, oddly enough to everybody.”
And indeed, I hope to show in a subsequent lecture that the Shostakovich symphonies particularly symphony five, which I want to canvas in great detail, that that particular symphony draws so much inspiration from aspects of the 9th Symphony, as do many others. And so the proposition that I’m advancing this evening is that Beethoven was a revolutionary and that whilst I have submitted to you in the previous lecture that the third and the 5th were absolute ruptures from the tradition. Or if you don’t want to go that far, you don’t want to phrase it that strongly. You could say that he really reconfigured the tradition in a way that music was never going to be the same again. Now what I want to do tonight is to show you that the 6th Symphony, as well as the 9th fit into my argument about Beethoven as a revolutionary. I get, as I think many of the presenters on this lockdown university receive amazing amount of incredibly thoughtful and incisive emails. And in my case, after the last session on Beethoven three and five, I got a whole range from people who probably definitely know more music than I do.
And that’s fine. I learn enormously from you all and thank you very much for that. That’s what education’s really about. But during the course of one of the exchanges, of course somebody raised the fact about the even symphonies of Beethoven’s, in particular symphonies four, six, and eight. And were they as revolutionary as symphonies three, five, seven, and nine, the odd symphonies. And I want to submit that in fact, the six is revolutionary. It may well be the ying to the 5th’s yang or the other way around, might have got that wrong. But what I mean is they are reflections of different components of the Beethoven musical personality, but that the six in itself has equal salience and claim to be part of this revolutionary theme, which I’ve been speaking about. So let me take you to where we going to go. We are now in December 22nd, 1808 and we’ve all togged up in a major way to go in Vienna to listen to Beethoven’s concert. I hope you are all warm and suitably dressed because it’s going to be a very long night. Because during this particular evening, we are going to hear Beethoven conduct the premiers of both the 5th Symphony and “The Pastoral”, the 6th Symphony.
He’s also going to play his Fourth Piano Concerto, which he’s going to conduct from the keyboard. He’s also got the “Gloria” and the “Sanctus” from the “Mass in C”, the concert aria, “Ah! Perfido”, certain improvisations at the keyboard and a discussion. And finally he’s going to round of with the “Choral Fantasy”, which was written in a couple of days beforehand so that you could have a grand finale. It’s going to be an incredibly long night and we are going to hear all of this music for the very first time. Now think about it, we are now going to hear the 6th Symphony having heard the 5th. So we, we’ve heard the 5th, we’ve been confronted with that extraordinary theme of the three Gs in E Flat, those four notes that I spent a long time talking about when we spoke about the 5th, which constructs the whole symphony. And we now are going to say, well what is the same composer going to do in relation to the 6th Symphony? Are we going to have the same dramatic, heroic, assertive music that we had in the 5th?
Because remember we don’t know we are here, we are at the premier and we sitting there very cold, I might add, but we going to sit and listen to the 6th and while we don’t have a printed programme, because there are no printed programmes for concerts at that point in the early 19th century. But if we were lucky in retrospect, we would’ve known because Beethoven actually did write a brief guide unusually to the 6th Symphony. And this is what he said. “Pastoral Symphony, more an expression of feeling than painting.” I want to emphasise that, “More an expression of feeling than painting. Then he says this, "The first piece, first movement, a pleasant feeling which awakening men on arriving in the countryside.” The second movement is seen by the brook, the third movement, “Mary gathering of country people interrupted by the fourth movement, which is the storm and thunder, which then breaks finally and we get the 5th piece.” He says, “Salutary feelings combined with thanks to the deity.” So we’ve now, that’s our programme and that programme is very different to the 5th, as we shall see.
Now, Beethoven wasn’t the first to deal with pastoral questions. And indeed, when he was 14 years old in 1784, an obscure composer named Justin Heinrich Knecht, advertised his new symphonic creation, “Le Portrait Musical De La Nature”, excuse my terrible pronunciation, a musical portrait of nature in five movements, including a depiction of the peaceful countryside, the approach of a storm and general thanksgiving to the creator. Once the storm had passed, you only have to listen to that music to realise what a genius Beethoven was. But there it was, he had, as it were, at least access to this earlier attempt at a pastoral symphony. But you only need to listen to the beginning of the symphony to realise what a genius Beethoven was. So let’s start with the opening Allegra. There are a number of issues that I’d like to just draw your attention to as we listen to the music. The first it’s an incredibly quiet first movement. In 500 measures of music, Beethoven in a musical sense never raises his voice. It is extraordinary. When you contrast that to let’s say the opening movement of the third, which we’ve already discussed, the opening movement of the 5th, which I’ve alluded to again this evening.
The music opens with the celli and the violin, sorry, the celli and the viola. The first violins play a melody, the second violins for harmony. The music observed will go for a few seconds. It sort of stops almost as if like it halts. And then it essentially continues developing upon the opening which has been developed by the celli and the viola and the first violin’s melody and the second violin harmony. And what is remarkable then, and I’m only going to play the first four minutes of it for you, what is utterly remarkable is just the extent to which the notes are almost the same. So as musicologists have pointed out, if you look at the, at bar 16 to 25, they’re all the same notes. But the dynamics change. And because the dynamics change, what is remarkable is what we’re hearing changes. So in the hands of a composer a lesser genius than Beethoven, it probably would be boring, but it’s the same notes because of the dynamic variations sounds slightly different. And what Beethoven is seeking to achieve here, bearing in mind the fact that he’s trying to express something, which is as he said, what he was trying to do was express certain feelings about nature.
And he was very, very keen on nature, spent long time walking. It’s interesting that Mahler some 80 years later was very much in the same metre. But Beethoven, as we’ve discussed earlier, and of course when we spoke about some of the Mahler symphonies, Beethoven essentially is taking the same notes and with the variations he’s reflecting this, that as we walk in nature, it remains on one level the same. We see the same piece of grass or trees, but some are given light, given the wind just given the atmosphere. It changes, changes all the time. And what he’s trying to reflect, I think through the first movement is the way we are in nature. And even if we’re in the same part, it changes before our eyes. So that even if the notes are the same, the dynamics change and in a sense, therefore the scenery begins to change. So I’m going to play for you and I’m make no apology about the fact that you will listen to quite a bit of music this evening 'cause it is much better listening to Beethoven than me. But in the first movement, I’m going to play the first four minutes for you and you’ll see exactly what I’m trying to say in relation to what I’ve sketched already.
This particular performance is conducted by one of my favourites of the contemporary conductors, Ivan Fischer, with the great concert Gebouw Orchestra. So we going to listen now to the first four minutes of the “Pastoral” opening movement.
Audio plays.
Okay, Shawna, I think we can stop that one. Thanks. So you get the point that I’m making is that the notes are the same. If you look at the beginning, there’s first couple of notes and essentially the whole thing is constructed through the variations of dynamic, dynamic variations. And as I indicated to you and I electro on the third and the first, the key to Beethoven is this extraordinary combination between simplicity and complexity. That on one level it’s so simple and on the other hand it takes a genius to be able to basically do the dynamic variations and circumstances where we don’t get bored and something changes all the time. As we listening to this music, if I played the whole of the movement, it also changes in key in a very dramatic way. But I don’t have time for that 'cause I’m going to run out of time then I’ll again be in trouble. So let me move on. Now, the second movement, which I’m not going to play for you, but I’m sure many of you know, and those of you don’t go and listen to is quite extraordinary because it begins with this gentle babbling brook. And why this becomes interesting is because of the bird calls at the end of the movement where Beethoven himself uses names of birds and indicates the appropriate instrument.
So the Nightingale is played by a flute and the quail by an oboe and the cuckoo two clarinets. And it’s quite hard to sort of say this is not just painting, he’s gone from feeling to painting, one almost can see the cuckoo and the nightingale when that occurs. But it is remarkable that he took such detail in this particular instance. And the same with the third movement, which is essentially a parody of a local rustic band playing a dance and essentially revellers on the common as it were listening to this band play on a lovely midsummer’s afternoon or evening as the case may be, again, incredibly rustic and extraordinarily crafted to reflect the idea of a band slightly out of tune, which he remarkably captures. But the reason I’m going fairly quickly through this is 'cause I have to play the full three or four minutes of the storm scene, which is really quite, it’s probably the great storm movement in music as it were. And you’ll notice it’s the coming of a storm in which the entire orchestra really is shaking as it were, as it reflects the storm. And for the first time in the entire symphony, Beethoven then introduces trombones and uses the trombone and the piccolo to reflect a downpour. And then the tympany come in for the first time to reflect the thunder of the occasion of the, and it’s only about three or four minutes, but here, and it’s not necessarily as it were a direct literal depiction of a storm. But again, I think in terms of what Beethoven was saying, this is what one would feel if one watched a storm. We now going to listen to the famous storm scene again conducted by one of my heroes, which is Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Audio plays.
Okay, Shawna, we can turn that off. I’m sorry the sound wasn’t great, I do apologise, but you get the picture I have. Perhaps I should play it a better version. I’m sorry, I thought it was better than it was. But now the storm ends and then comes something utterly extraordinary, the final movement of exquisite beauty. It’s the triumphant sunburst comes out, the storm is over. And there are some who say that it wasn’t just pastoral that he was talking about, but in fact his own search for existential existence. Beethoven by now was in fact deaf, certainly very, very deaf, not fully. And he had really troubled. And the real question is, was the storm scene really himself, the storms within himself that he could no longer have? Certainly most of this music by now was only as it were being heard in the inner ear. And then somehow comes this extraordinary last bit, which is the sunlight bursts out, the storm is over and we give thanks. And indeed that’s exactly how he transcribed the final movement with the Latin, “We give these thanks.” That’s what he said. And I just want to play the first two or three minutes of this, I hope the sound is fine. It is truly one of the most, for me, every time I hear it, I almost want to cry. It’s so beautiful. And maybe this is himself having resolved the crisis in his own existence as it were, and feeling there is hope at the end or otherwise, simply the idea of the relief that the storm has passed, we have survived and here we are now in calm and sunlight weather.
Audio plays.
Okay, Shawna, now I think we can move on. Thank you. Again, sound isn’t as great as it should be, but I hope you get the picture of just that exquisite music coming through. And therefore I do think that the “Pastoral” in its own way is as unique as the 5th. It really is the most remarkable construction. If I could again emphasise the way in which Beethoven uses the same notes with slight variations, sometimes a change of key just to get a picture, which is extraordinary when you think that in the hands of a lesser composer it would sound repetitive. And with that, and I could speak so much more about the the 6th, let me move on because time is flowing, to the 9th. Now here we have, well as Nicholas Cook said in observing the 9th, “Of all the works in the mainstream repertory of Western music, the 9th Symphony seems the most like a construction of mirrors reflecting and refracting the values, the hopes, and the fears of those who seek to understand and explain it. From its first performance in Vienna in 1824.” Which is by the way, three years before Beethoven died. “Up to the present day, the 9th symphony’s inspired diametrically opposed interpretation. And that indeed is true and as Beethoven’s biographer, Jan Swafford has said, "How one views the 9th depends on what kind of Elysium one had in mind, whether all people should be brothers or that all non-brothers should be exterminated.” And that brings me on to something that Patrick said in one of, you know, a series of extraordinary splendid lectures.
And those of you who heard him on Sunday night, would’ve actually heard Patrick talk about the extraordinary performance of the 9th Symphony in 1942, where Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at Hitler’s birthday, and Patrick’s point, which is really interesting and it kind of, I was grateful to him because it allows me to develop a point, which is the different interpretations of the Beethoven 9th, was such that everybody was somewhat or musicologists had been very bemused and intrigued by this demonic 1942 performance by Furtwängler, which contrasted markedly differently to a famous 1937 performance and then an equally compelling 1951 performance, not in a Stockholm, but actually with the Berlin Philharmonic, which I still think is an utterly remarkable recording of the 9th and puts him, in my humble opinion, far superior league to many others, including Toscanini, whom I add Furtwängler regarded as nothing more than a timekeeper, which is rather unfair, but be that as it may. But the question was, what about the '42 one? And I’m very indebted to a book by John Ardoin called, I’m probably pronouncing his name wrongly.
So let me just give it to you, A-R-D-O-I-N, who is a music critic for the Dallas newspapers. And I wrote a really interesting book called “The Furtwängler Record”, which was published in 1994, and he makes the point about the following, he says, “For Furtwängler, the ultimate foundation of not only the 9th Symphony, but of art in general, is out of love. The artist is the man of love. Excuse the sexist language. Art does not express a nation’s hate, but it’s love it portrays man when he is himself harmless, trusting, simple, proud, a member of a happy, all embracing humanity. And what Ardoin says is that Furtwängler realised well that he was producing music in a climate where there was no love, where there was only hate. And that the way he responded to this was to drain the music that 9th Symphony on that 1942, to drain that music of all notions of love, humanity, so that these concepts would not be associated with the Nazi regime. In other words, the point that he’s making is that Furtwängler deliberately went on to produce a performance of psychotic fury and demonic characteristics because he could not bear the idea that the 9th Symphony, which was a reflection of humanity and of love, could be associated with the Nazi regime. Now, that may be a too generous interpretation, but I offer it to you. And it’s not just one author who said that. I also offer the other, which is by 1942, the war was clearly in serious trouble. And in fact, what Furtwängler was reflecting was the desperation. Totally different interpretation of the German condition at that time.
But whatever they are, it’s really interesting that if you look at that '42 performance compared to the '37 and '51, I invite you to do that. They are available on YouTube. They are incredibly different. But having said that, let’s just look a little bit at some of the components which make up this utterly remarkable piece of music, the 9th Symphony. Now, if we start with the first movement, I’m going to play a the '51 first three minutes, the sound is not great, so let me assuage you immediately. But I wanted to do it for a reason that I’ll explain in a second. It starts, it’s an extraordinary start. This is not a start like the third with those chords. It’s not a start with the three G’s and the E flat, the 5th, it doesn’t have any of that particular moment. And of course it’s an odd symphony as opposed to the evens. It is very, very different. It starts with a what musicology would call the perfect 5th. There is no mood as it starts, it’s empty, it’s a barren landscape. And this 5th is played by the horns and then the celli and the violins play a 5th slightly faster, but in a very repetitive way. And this considerable amount of tension at that early moment as they play. And then all of a sudden the music explodes into this melody, as it were, which is going to dominate the first movement, and suddenly the orchestra is in unison.
And then there’s a retreat from that explosion and then back to the explosion. And here is Beethoven. It seems to me through the technique of constructing the music in this way, doing two things. Firstly, it seems to me that the music has to start almost as it were, like creation ex nilo. That’s why the perfect 5th is used in this particular way, this barren, stark start and then some tension, which is exhibited as it moves through this first few seconds of the entire work before you get the explosion, there’s a question of almost the music being created ex nilo from nothing. It’s almost an act of creation. And the second which prefigures from that is that out of this kind of almost chaos, this way in which the world is created comes a level of unison. But we can’t have unity to start with. So there’s really great tension as Beethoven treats and move forward and back all the time, right through the movement. But he’s prefiguring something quite dramatic, which is the idea of unity.
And we will see that this comes, but you can’t really understand the symphony, which it seems to me, without understanding this commencement, now I’ve chosen the Furtwängler, the '51 recording. It’s not a great, the the quality is not great. But what I’d like you to grasp on this is just how he probably more than any other conductor I know, seems to grasp those two points, the ex nilo, the tension and then the explosion. I’ve never heard a recording, which seems somehow not to rush it, just to basically capture that perfect 5th in a way that almost no other conductor I’ve ever heard does. So why don’t we listen just to the first few minutes. I’m not going to do more than three of the opening movement of the 9th Symphony conducted by Furtwängler.
Audio plays.
Okay Shawna, I think we can leave this now, thanks. Well of course it’d be lovely to carry on. But we must move on. I’m not going to play the second movement. But it’s very interesting that Beethoven puts the scherzo before the slow movement, movement two, very unusual to do that. And basically he picks up from the rhythm at the end of the first, if we played that into the second movement. And there’s a real linkage between these two extraordinary sort of reflections of rhythm in the second movement are remarkable. There’s a trio which gets us into a rustic atmosphere. The music then as it were, is interrupted. We come back to the beginning of the second movement. But what is interesting is the rustic atmosphere of the trio prefigures the third movement. Now the third movement, which I do want to play a little bit, is absolutely remarkable because it really is a hymn. It is, I think recapturing what Beethoven felt about the 6th Symphony. It is the idea that we do and should live in nature. That if we are going to live in a world of any unison, it is important that we understand nature. And he of course, was particularly fond of long walks in the rustic areas around around Vienna. And so you have this incredible hymn-like quality to this movement.
He himself marks the score mezzo voce covered voice. I’m talking with a covered voice. You mustn’t play full out. You must play to reflect the natural quality of what I’m trying to portray, the beauty of life. We should savour it. What is so fascinating is Beethoven can’t hear it, but in his inner ear he can and he hears the beauty of life that we should celebrate. And so the third movement explains us magnificently, let us listen just to the first three or four minutes of it. I should say that this particular performance is done with Daniel Barenboim and the West East Divan Orchestra, which as you know, is made up of young musicians from all of the Middle East, which I suppose in many ways is reflective of this idea of the brotherhood and the sisterhood of humanity that we can all get together and music can unite us. Let us listen to Barenboim really in a beautiful rendition of just two or three minutes of this hymn-like quality of the third movement, which is at one point interrupted by trumpets prefiguring what is going to happen in the fourth, it’s all interconnected, but then it comes back to the hymn again and to a celebration of nature.
Audio plays.
Right Shawna, I think we have to move on. Thank you. What can I say about something as beautiful as that? It’s just utterly extraordinary, and you know, perhaps you can understand now maybe the music culture that Furtwängler understood perfectly well that this music wasn’t for Hitler. I don’t know. But I have to come to the fourth movement, the last movement. And of course, what is interesting, it breaks out a quite a great deal of fanfare, et cetera. And then suddenly the celli and the basses, they play a dominant role at the beginning because there’s a recall of all three movements. That’s why it’s so interconnected. That’s why you have to understand the beginning that they de novo to understand the scherzo. So, and then into this beautiful natural music, the music celebrating nature. And all three movements then are kind of partly replayed. And then the celli and the basses intervene in each occasion. And we suddenly realise the integration of these movements, even though they’re being interrupted by the celli and the basses until we come to the "Ode to Joy”.
And if you think about it, what is remarkable of about this is it starts, remember if you were in 1824 and you’d never heard this, you know, this wouldn’t be the kind of European anthem or goodness knows what, you would’ve never heard it before. And just think of the impact it made. Look at poor old Brahms, who battled the way for years to finish his first symphony. And in the fourth movement, basically repeats in some ways the “Ode to Joy”. So it starts very slowly in a low register, very quietly. And then we suddenly start getting the coalescence until there’s this eruption of unity, right throughout. And of course for the first time, Beethoven uses the human voice because it’s not enough just to use the instruments. And there’s no doubt about it. I’m going to play the last, just the “Ode to Joy” itself. 'Cause you can’t not in a lecture like this. And I remember so distinctly that every year as a student in Keaton, in the June, just before the June sort of holiday for the orchestra, they always had two performances of the Beethoven nine. And I remember, you know, even then as a young person thinking, you got to get on your feet now, this, we’re all together. This is a unification of everybody, the musicians and the audience. There is something about it even after all of these years as we listen now to just a small clip from the “Ode to Joy”, Okay, Shawna.
Audio plays.
You know, it’s extraordinary that that whole, I mean that symphony again revolutionary in the sense that well certainly influenced Brahms, it certainly influenced Mahler. There are all sorts of Mahler symphonies where you can attribute references to the 9th. And certainly when we look at the 5th Symphony of Shostakovich, it had a very, very interesting reference there as well. I want to finish with the following. I always think it’s so sad when you think of the premier on the 7th of May, 1824. If we’d all gone to it, perhaps we would’ve been slightly warmer than the famous premier of the 6th. But Beethoven by now, if not completely deaf, was very, very, very hard of hearing, to put it mildly. But he insisted with his score that he would sit there and essentially follow in the score and conduct. But the conductor, Michael Umlauf, who was the official conductor, basically instructed the orchestra who only had two rehearsals beforehand, not to follow Beethoven, to follow him in the performance, which he dutifully did. And at the end when the music ended, Beethoven was still basically conducting with his score. And a woman in the orchestra called Karen Unger had to pick, basically go to Beethoven and turn him around so that he could finally listen to the applause of the audience. It seems to me the most poignant reflection of this extraordinary creation that the man who created it was deaf, that he had to be turned around to face the applause of the audience. That he could only hear the music in his inner ear, music that really inspires us even to this day and is utterly remarkable and I think makes my case that Beethoven was truly a revolutionary composer. And I haven’t even spoken about the fourth, seventh, and eighth symphonies. Thank you very much for listening.
Q&A and Comments:
I’m happy to answer questions to the extent that there are, not that many, thank you for the compliments, but I there is one here from, with a number.
Q: Would you compare the feelings of agitation in Beethoven’s third movement versus Vivaldi’s winter scene in “The Four Seasons”?
A: es, to some extent, although I should tell you that Beethoven was quite contemptuous of Vivaldi and that was why he wanted to do something entirely different. And then you say, I’m become more interested recent now we all experienced and says, yeah, without realising it,
Could you perhaps say something around how this may play with Beethoven? Not entirely sure what you mean by that. I’m sorry.
Q: You write about Michael, the unusual seating in the concert orchestra.
A: That’s the conductor’s choice, which he decided to use. And obviously it’s quite interesting our conductors do that in different ways. Well, Beethoven was, sorry, anonymous, was particularly influenced by Schuyler and he chose that because he was well influenced by the words and because he was seeking clearly to write a symphony, which was going to embrace humanity as a whole. And that’s why he used it. And he wanted the voices to emphasise it, which is why it’s so remarkable.
Q: Roberta, is it my imagination or is it being played and sung faster than it used to be.
A: That’s a really interesting question, because there’s no question about it that some conductors now do play it much quicker than certainly what I was used to. I know that Benjamin Zander has a view that it is played far too slowly in the past because it’s not, again, a meeting with the Beethoven markings to which I made reference previously, but I really, it’s the question of choice. I like the slightly slow version to be honest with you. And I certainly think, I still think the '51 version of Furtwängler and I might add also one of my other heroes Claudio Abbado’s version are just absolutely fabulous.
Yes, when you say, Elaine, would that the world live by those immortal words, “All men are brothers.” How interesting it is. That’s not just them. We Jews say, . That we should be blessed. That all men, all people should live in harmony and love, all brothers and sisters should love in harmony and love, the idea of the “Ode to Joy” is no different, .
Thank you very much for all of the compliments, so kind of you all. Well, Juliana, I will try, I am going to do I think two lectures on Shostakovich in May. So Wendy, I think that’s about it. I’m sure what Hitler thought of the 42 performances, Goebbels was there and I think Patrick explained that wonderfully on Sunday night, Wendy, I think I’ve accommodated everybody.
Thank you very much, Dennis. That was brilliant, really excellent. Thank you. And yes, you’re quite right to challenge your son, fathers, brothers-
I said to him, you’ll have to come and listen when I do Shostakovich, but I, okay.
The joys of a tactical and romantic period.
Take care everybody, stay safe.