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After a delay of several months, volume 1 of the eagerly awaited Saarbrücken Beethoven cycle is now available. The complete recording of Bruckner’s symphonies by the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra under Stanislav Skrowaczewsky was first treated as an insider’s tip. Now, it enjoys a legendary reputation (12 CDs, OC 207). Skrowaczewsky’s Beethoven cycle is the epitome of his work in Saarbrücken and has catapulted the ensemble into the circle of top international orchestras. In the thickly sown field of Beethoven interpretations, an outstanding production of lasting value will be emerging during the next several years – one that upholds the artistic credo of one of the last great old-school conductors.

Special Package: 2CD-Duobox including complete OehmsClassics Print Catalogue wrapped in O-Card.

Stanislaw Skrowaczewski on this Recording

Recordings of Beethoven Symphonies represent probably to every orchestra and conductor a special challenge not only from technical point of view, but also stylistic and purely sonic.

The great richness and complexity of a Beethoven score, with its secondary and tertiary inner voices require a perfect balance not only between main orchestral groups, but even within chords. This must be clearly presented in a recording.

There has been since a long time a controversy regarding Beethoven metronome tempos. In the last 30, or more years some conductors almost blandly followed Beethoven’s metronome markings, often, in my opinion, to the detriment of the music, its content, message, majesty, or power.



One could sometimes suspect that a sheer ambition to bring a novelty – pour épater le bourgeois, which often has brought fame and financial gains – played there a certain role. We will know that Beethoven put metronome markings of the first six symphonies many years after these symphonies were written. The precision of his metronomes was questionable – he complained in a letter to his publishers Schott & Söhne: My metronome is sick and needs a watchmaker to recover its equable, regular pulse. In other letters, within the compass of several years, he put different metronome markings for the same piece.

Finally, we the composers and conductors well know how much our feeling for a right tempo can change with time, especially if the composer happens to be of a compulsive, passionate character, as Beethoven was. In the 1820ies C. M. von Weber wrote in the Berliner Musik-Zeitung: Never mind about marks on paper, use your brain. Debussy speaks poetically about metronome figures that they are like a rose, closed in the morning, opening with the light. Thus, respecting fully Beethoven metronome figures, I still take them sometime „cum grano salis“, while the music itself, its character, content, message has been for me always in the tempo of prime importance, and a sort of guide.

Then comes the problem of performing Beethoven’s music on modern instruments. This has to be solved by the conductor, along his knowledge, taste, feeling and understanding the music.

I am fortunate that to face these problems I have with me the excellent Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra.

After the success with our recent recordings of all eleven Bruckner symphonies, I know that these fine, dedicated musicians will help me to meet these new challenges successfully.

Ludwig van Beethoven
* 16. Dezember 1770 in Bonn
† 26. März 1827 in Wien

A free artist in Vienna

Pure coincidence in history, a matter of a lucky historical moment? In any case, Beethoven was just the person needed. And was as fortunate as should be. Of course, he placed himself in the right place at the right time. When the revolution of 1789 signalled the turn of an era from Paris, the 19-year-old could already look back on a short, colourful career as a child prodigy and especially on a solid basis as a piano talent and promising young composer. He furthermore had already completed several years’ serious work as a court organist in Bonn in the services of the prince-elector of Cologne. At the age of 22, however, he left the tracks which would have seemed thoroughly satisfactory to others for various reasons, also because of his family. Indeed, Beethoven fulfilled the considerable requirements for a musician’s career in one of the more than six hundred independent political units found on the area of the German Reich.

But he wanted more. He started to create works of a grand and magnificent style. Under the influence of rock-solid Christian Gottlob Neefe, he had not just increased his dexterity to an enormous degree, but also, and more importantly, had extended his tastes in music, had developed a more acute consciousness of compositional technique and an emphatic ideal of education. The latter was mainly fuelled by the rhetoric of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the poetry by the members of the Göttingen Hainbund and by young Goethe as well as by Schiller’s dramas – all of which was just about to become “classical”. In January 1793, Professor Bartholomäus Fischenich from Bonn sent a lied composition to Charlotte von Schiller written one year before: I am including a composition of the colour of fire and wish to hear your verdict on it. It was executed by a local young man whose musical talents are generally acclaimed and whom the Prince-Elector has now sent to Vienna. He is to work on Schiller’s Joy, too, on each single stanza. I expect something perfect, for as far as I know him, he is one for matters grand and magnificent. For the time being, the Schiller family were in vain waiting for mail including the Ode to Joy, although Mrs Schiller, handling some of her husband’s due correspondence, answered in a friendly letter asking for it to be sent. It is likely that Ludwig van Beethoven started work at that time – but the results have not been handed down to us. They were probably assimilated in later stages of the work and eventually disposed of. The end product was only brought to public light long after Friedrich Schiller’s death and started its triumphal journey around the world as the final movement of the 9th Symphony.

32 years before that academy at the Kärtnertor Theatre that was the crowning moment in Beethoven’s meteoric rise – the programme listed the Overture op. 124, some parts of the Missa solmenis and the 9th Symphony with the final cantata Ode to Joy – the young musician from Bonn was granted a sabbatical to pursue his study. Determined, he went to Vienna and sought out Joseph Haydn as his teacher. He was on the threshold when the doors opened onto a new era in society and aesthetics. Admittedly, he had to knock on the doors strongly and move the door-handle himself. He soon discovered that he needed almost superhuman performance and great moral strength for his lofty mission and high-flown goals: He sent a note to Nikolaus von Zmeskall, his friend and “favourite Baron Mud-driver” including details on their next pub appointment as well as his life maxim: Energy is the moral standard of people who are distinguished from the rest, and it is mine, too.

Struggles of self-assertion

Ludwig, the student from Bonn, realised soon after he had arrived in the capital that the main point was to become original, as his teacher Haydn put it. I would have never arranged anything like that, he wrote soon after his arrival in Vienna – it was to become his station in life once and for all, something he surely could hardly imagine at that time. He asked Eleonore von Breuning, whom he admired and to whom he dedicated variations for violin and piano which he sent to Bonn, to show some leniency on given occasions for remarkable difficulties in instrument technique: … I had frequently noted that there were certain individuals in V. who usually, after I had improvised one evening, wrote down many of my unique stylistics and boasted about them. Since I then anticipated that such things would soon be published, I set out to forestall them.

Original and brilliant

Beethoven, soon known all over town with his wild hairstyle, was quickly swamped with business, as he proudly informed publisher Nikolaus Simrock from Bonn (also intending to liven up business and raise the fees in his favour). In our democratic times, a short Viennese spring, he set himself up as a free artist, still an exceptional procedure – and remained a freelancer even when the democrats’ arrest and the “Jacobine trials” in the Habsburg Reich’s metropolis put paid to all further Republican endeavours. He kept to his path as a composer headed towards new ideas, increasingly finding respect and being presented as a musical author: Beethoven’s performance was magnificent, powerful and stirring, wrote the Journal for Theatre, Music and Fashion in Vienna in a review of the first works. Novelty and wealth, a lightness in employing the means of harmony, a certain uniqueness of style and arrangement made one expect an original and brilliant composer in this young man, and his great instrumental compositions, some of his symphonies and concerts confirmed these hopes. Those references to the “divine sparks” run through the reviews of the instrumental works like a lighted path. A heroic fire is the main characteristic found in them. Admittedly, there were complaints about the rather too bizarre manner, the extreme length of some movements and works as well as the profusion of ideas – the tendency to wildly heap thoughts on top of each other. Nevertheless, he grew ever more successful and the prices increased.

Grand – solemn – sublime

The fact that the bourgeois concert received such remarkable impetus in Central Europe during the 19th century and that instrumental music was held in such great esteem and had such a high status, was to a crucial extent due to the symphonies – the genre that distinguished itself during the second half of the 19th century starting from the court in Mannheim-Schwetzingen and was treated with that particular mastery by Mozart and in Haydn’s later works in Vienna, and that allowed Beethoven to climb Mount Parnassus. Beethoven thought along the lines of those principles that J.A.P. Schulz had developed in Sulzer’s General Theory of the Fine Arts, remaining almost completely untouched by the beginning discussion about Classicism or Romanticism in music: The symphony is ideally suited to express the grand, the solemn, the sublime. To make the works of this genre turn out well, they should not just move deeply and elevate, but also distinguish themselves by a particularly high degree of composure.

The symphonies symbolise Beethoven’s “breakthrough” – together with the piano compositions and the chamber music. For those audiences of people not especially interested in it, and indeed in the history of reception in general, they soon occupied a key position – on the way to the idolisation of the “titan” as well as in vehement defensive reactions that were to come.



Sinfonie Nr. 2 D-dur op. 36



Symphony No. 2 in D Major, op. 36

Beethoven’s Second Symphony was subjected to an earful after its premiere on April 5, 1803. For one critic, it was a crass monster, a bloodied dragon writhing uncontrollably that did not wish to die, which – bleeding to death in its departing throes (in the Finale) – still angrily thrashed around in vain with its tail. Others called it ultra-artificial or simply too bizarre, wild and garish. Even in 1811, a Paris reviewer heard only a heap of barbaric chords. It sounded to me as though doves and crocodiles had been locked up in the same cage.

All of these judgments are a big surprise to today’s listeners, who lump the Second Symphony together with those of Haydn and Mozart, only considering the “new era” to have dawned with Beethoven’s Eroica. But the citations above remind us of the innovative and strong-willed traits that the work – seen in its own times, on its own terms, without knowledge of Beethoven’s later compositions – proffered. Although the slow introduction in the first movement could have been thoroughly influenced by that in Mozart’s Prague Symphony, the nervous energy of the following Allegro con brio surpasses anything previously heard in the first movement of a symphony. The Larghetto’s cantabile melody offers the listener a relaxed interlude; the Scherzo, however, (the first movement in Beethoven’s symphonic oeuvre to be called this) is full of bizarre schemes: crass dynamic contrasts turn the phrasing on its head. But Beethoven’s contemporaries always reserved their sharpest criticism for the Finale. It was primarily the unusually wide-ranging modulations that were the source of annoyance and bafflement – a view that is very difficult to comprehend today.

But modern listeners do not only wonder about the contradiction between contemporaneous criticism (“bizarre”) and their own impression (“traditional”). The discrepancy between the underlying mood of the symphony – usually perceived as buoyant – and Beethoven’s gloomy state during its composition is also amazing. We hear his despair in the famous “Heiligenstadt Testament” from 1802, but it is also evident one year earlier, when he writes to a friend from his youth, Wegeler, in Bonn: You can hardly believe how empty and sad my life has been these past two years: My weak hearing has appeared everywhere – like a ghost, and I have fled the company of people. I must seem like a misanthrope, though this is the last thing I am. Why is nothing of Beethoven’s depression audible in the symphony? Countless 19th- and 20th-century authors have tried to interpret Beethoven’s work as a representation of his personal, extra-musical drama, but apparently, a composer’s works and external situation do not always fit together as biographers would like.

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, op. 55

Like the Second, Beethoven’s Third Symphony after its publication (1805) was criticised as bizarre, shrill and erratic. At the same time, many contemporaries realised form the start that they were experiencing something new, something exceptional in this work. The special importance of the Third is found on two different levels. On the one hand, there is the textual-programmatic aspect: the composer, himself of Republican conviction, had originally intended to dedicate the symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, the general of the French Revolution and First Consul of France. When he was informed of Napoleon’s high-handed coronation as emperor in 1804, he (as his student Ferdinand Ries reports) ripped the title page apart, saying: So that one, too, is no different from ordinary men! Now he shall trample on human rights, too, and only gratify his ambitions; he will place himself higher than all the others, and become a tyrant. Eventually, the work was printed under the title of “Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d’un grand’uomo“ (Heroic symphony, composed to commemorate the memory of a great man).

This anecdote passed on by Ries is, if not true, at least well thought out, for some suggestions of the music from the French Revolutions can hardly be ignored in the Eroica – e.g. in the signal-like motifs, in the great dynamic range, the heightened importance of the wind instruments or in the funeral march of the second movement, inspired by François-Joseph Gossec’s Marche lugubre written in 1793. One can also take the references to the character of Prometheus as a political statement: Beethoven took the main theme of the finale from his own “heroic-allegorical ballet” titled The creatures of Prometheus. As is well known, Prometheus, the titan from Greek mythology, was the one who fetched fire from Olympus for mankind – also in a figurative sense: sensibility, culture, the light of enlightenment. And Napoleon for many of his contemporaries was the “Prometheus of the epoch”, an enlightened saviour of mankind.

However, the music itself is also revolutionary, as can especially be seen in the outer movements. The first movement is already astonishing in its dimensions: in contrast to earlier works of that period, the development – the part of the motivic-thematic work, of struggles and conflicts – is longer than the exposition. Furthermore, Beethoven upgrades the Coda to a true second development. Such a substantial head movement naturally demands an equal counterpart at the end, and thus, Beethoven did not select a traditional form for the finale, but an individual solution combining different types of form and compositional technique to a very complex structure. The sonata main movement and variation forms, passacaglia and fugue, German counter- dance and Hungarian verbunkos (a dance often used during the recruitment of soldiers) all play a role in it.