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Symphony No. 1 in C major op. 21
Symphony No. 4 in B flat major op. 60
Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, conductor

The Saarbrücken Beethoven cycle has been greeted by the press with outstanding reviews: “An impulsively energised reading, full of life and a finely formed dramaturgy” (Musik&Theater)
“The RSO Saarbrücken under Stanislaw Skrowaczewski has scored a success with one of the most unusual recordings of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. In no other recording is the beginning of the symphony to be heard so gently floating and at the same time so incisive …” (Schwäbische Zeitung)
“A miracle! Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, a conductor with more than 60 years of experience on the stage, has begun a Beethoven cycle with the label OehmsClassics, the first instalment of which has succeeded in awakening the greatest of expectations.” (Crescendo)

Stanislaw Skrowaczewski on this Recording

Probably for every orchestra and conductor, recording Beethoven Symphonies represents a special challenge, both from a technical and stylistic point of view as well as in terms of pure sound. The great richness and complexity of a Beethoven score with its secondary and tertiary inner voices require a perfect balance – not only between the main orchestral groups, but within chords as well. This must be clearly presented in a recording.

There has been controversy regarding Beethoven’s metronome markings for many years. In the last 30 or more years, some conductors have almost blindly followed these markings, often, in my opinion, to the detriment of the music, its content, message, majesty or power. One could sometimes suspect that the sheer ambition to present a novelty – pour épater le bourgeois, which often has brought fame and financial gain – has played a certain role here.

We know that Beethoven added metronome markings to his first six symphonies many years after he wrote them. But 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, written within a time span of several years, he put different metronome markings on the same piece.

Finally, we composers and conductors well know how much our feeling for the “right” tempo can change with time, especially if the composer happens to be of a compulsive, passionate character, as Beethoven was. In the 1820s, 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, with full respect for Beethoven’s metronome markings, I still take them sometimes cum grano salis, letting the music itself, its character, content and message be in the tempo of prime importance, and a sort of guide for me.

Then comes the problem of performing Beethoven’s music on modern instruments. This has to be solved by the conductor, who must use his knowledge, taste, feeling and understanding of the music. I am fortunate to face these problems with the excellent Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra at my side. After the success of our recent recordings of all eleven Bruckner symphonies, I know that these fine, dedicated musicians will help me successfully meet these new challenges.



Ludwig van Beethoven
* 16 December 1770 in Bonn
† 26 March 1827 in Vienna
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 “Feuerfarbe” 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 Kärntnertor 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.



Symphony No. 1 in C Major

Beethoven’s first symphony, which he composed almost entirely in 1799, had its premiere on April 2, 1800 in Vienna’s “Kaiserlich Königlichen National-Hof-Theater nächst der Burg”. The program of this “musical academy”, the net profit of which all went to Beethoven, included many other pieces, including one of the composer’s piano concertos (probably the second), the Septet in E-flat Major op. 20 and a piano improvisation by Beethoven himself – as well as a symphony by Mozart and two songs by Haydn. Compared to today’s concert programs, it was extraordinarily long, and demonstrates the amazing concentration as well as enthusiasm for music that audience members of the time must have had. The quality of the performance was only fair, due to quarrels concerning the direction of the orchestra, but audience and critics responded positively.

Conventional and revolutionary

The success of the “First” with conservative Vienna audiences certainly had to do with the fact that – in contrast to Beethoven’s later symphonies – it occupied a solid position within the conventional framework. Its length, instrumentation and form resemble the known Haydn and Mozart models; the work’s motivic and harmonic structure could well have been influenced by Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony. But numerous sections of Beethoven’s first symphonic work, however, must have made tradition-conscious listeners shake their heads in dismay. The beginning of the first movement, for example, is a seventh chord, i.e. a dissonance, which resolves to the subdominant of F Major. The symphony’s main key of C Major isn’t reached until after a series of further dissonances and deceptive cadences.

For those times, this was absolutely a revolutionary beginning, a “coup d’état in instrumental music”, as musicologist Peter Schleunig puts it. And then, listeners are confronted by a passage close to the end of the exposition in which the second theme – now in minor – suddenly appears in a secretive pianissimo variant.

While the idyllic slow movement is repeatedly disturbed by Beethoven’s typical sforzati accents on weak beats and occasionally by chords foreign to the harmony, the tempo marking of the “Menuetto” completely contradicts the essence of what a minuet should be: a minuet entitled “Allegro molto e vivace” is no longer a minuet! The movement’s stormy, rushing motion is reminiscent at the most of a caricature of the courtly dance; much more, however, it reminds today’s listeners about scherzi in the composer’s later symphonies. Like the first movement, the Finale begins with a highly disconcerting Adagio introduction. After the entire orchestra has played a fortissimo “G”, the first violins gradually feel their way up to the seventh above (“F”) – a motivically trivial, possibly pathetic-sounding introduction – but one that proves to be a musical joke in the style of Haydn in the lively Allegro theme that follows.

A study in the Haydn-Mozart style?

For a long time, however, Beethoven’s First Symphony was preferred to his later ones, which listeners of the time considered to be too “difficult” or “bizarre”. But it is indicative for the reception of Beethoven’s works that this ranking was turned almost entirely on its head in the later 19th century and 20th century: the respect for and renown of his later symphonies grew proportionately the more Beethoven was perceived to be a “titan”. And the First Symphony quite unjustly acquired the reputation of being “only” a study in the Haydn-Mozart style – only a preliminary work to the major, heroic, “true” Beethoven symphonies.

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major

Even today, Beethoven’s Fourth is still his most seldom performed symphony. It is easy to see, however, why this work never really became popular: it is actually quite modest in comparison to its predecessor and successor. It has neither the extensive length of the Eroica nor the heroic posture of the Fifth. And in the course of the 19th century, the Fourth lost even more of its attraction as the image of the “titanic” Beethoven became even more one-sided. Many criticized the Fourth as a relapse into past ages – after all, it uses the smallest number of winds of all the Beethoven symphonies and remains lighthearted throughout. The comparably effortless composition process in summer and fall 1806 also fits this picture as well. The few extant sketches we have of this work show nothing of the experimentation and revision so often found in Beethoven’s drafts. Evidently, we have here a work of classical simplicity, easily served up by Beethoven.

Classical simplicity

But was the Fourth received by Beethoven’s audiences in this manner as well? Contemporaneous reviews suggest the opposite. Take, for example, an article written by Carl Maria von Weber in 1809, in which Weber uses the Fourth to rail against the grotesque in that era’s composition standards. He sarcastically recommends composing students the following: First, a slow tempo full of short, separate ideas that should have no relationship to any of the others: three or four notes every quarter of an hour! – that is exciting! Then, a somber tympani roll and mysterious noises in the violas, all embellished with a suitable portion of fermatas and stops; finally, after the listener has arranged himself with the fact that no Allegro is in sight due to all this tension, a furious tempo – in which, however, pains must be taken to ensure that no main theme appears and that it is up to the listener to search for such himself. Grudgingly, Weber admits that Beethoven has a fiery, yes almost unbelievable wealth of ideas, but adds that these are completely lost in the confusion of organizing them. Left over is chaos, from which only individual heavenly bursts of genius come through. A lighthearted, unproblematic work? Despite his negative assessment of the symphony, Weber’s commentary gives us insights into what was considered new, exciting and unheard of.

Secrets and surprises

The first movement begins with a harmonically indeterminate, minor-sounding Adagio introduction that suggests that a heavy work full of tension and secrets will follow. But Beethoven does not fulfill this promise: a fast, ascending scale breaks through the dark mood like fireworks and leads to the first theme in the first violins, which like the second theme (with bassoon, oboe and flute), is much more playful than it is heroic. The second movement is characterized above all by its persistent rhythmic pattern (dotted figures, at first in the second violins), which underscore a flowing melody above. Beethoven structured the movement as a type of rondo (ABACABA), although he varies the main thought at every recurrence. Although the third movement is labeled a “Menuett”, it has little to do with the classical courtly-elegant dance. With its Allegro vivace tempo, irrepressible energy and rhythmic complexity, the piece is actually more of a scherzo than a minuet. The Finale of the Fourth has often been called a “perpetuum mobile”. It is chock full of surprises: in the development, for example, the expected recapitulation is not performed as expected by the tutti orchestra; no, one lone bassoon plays the breakneck sixteenth- note theme. And at the end, the orchestra seems to lose all its power. Some instruments play the theme only hesitatingly, in pianissimo and at half speed – before a last burst of energy precipitously ends the work.