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Symphony No. 5 in C minor
Symphony No. 6 in F major “Pastorale”
Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, conductor

Stanislaw Skrowaczewski is very much against all too much subservience when it comes to following Beethoven’s metronome markings. He quotes C.M. Weber: “Forget the markings on the paper; use your own judgment” as well as Debussy’s statement about metronome markings to the effect that these are “like a rose, closed in the morning, that opens with the light.” But he clearly sees his task as an interpreter who dares to release a new recording of the complete Beethoven symphonies: “The grandiose wealth of Beethoven’s music as well as its multifaceted aspects (…) demand a perfect balance not only between the main groups of the orchestra, but in the chords as well. Any recording must clearly express this balance.”
Volume four of the highly praised Beethoven cycle from Saarbrücken has just been released!

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. 5 in C Minor

Fate thus knocking at the door – it was Beethoven’s last secretary and first bio-grapher, Anton Schindler, who handed down these supposed words of the composer to posterity. But whether this elucidation of the Fifth Symphony’s opening measures was uttered by Beethoven or not, or whether it was only one of Schindler’s fables or notorious inaccuracies, is irrelevant. By now, the famous four-tone hammering motive at the beginning of the first movement is legendary: Beethoven’s “trademark”, if you will – possibly even of classical music itself. Generations of authors have further elaborated upon the myth of “Beethoven’s Fifth” and represented its composer as a titan struggling with every note. But not only did they related the opening motive to Beethoven’s personal fate, i.e. his well advanced state of deafness at the time of the work’s composition, they also understood the Fifth as a commentary on Europe’s political fate: these were the years when Napoleon was beginning to betray the ideals of the French Revolution.

“Symphony of Fate”

Whether one wishes to read programmatic meaning into the work or not, however, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has exercised unbroken fascination on listeners for nearly 200 years. The composer began his first drafts of the C Minor Symphony in 1803/04, although he did not complete it until early 1808. Its premiere in a “musical academy” on December 22, 1808 was not highly successful, but in the course of the next several years, its success became sealed. Numerous arrangement for the most varied instrumental ensembles popularized the work in the 19th century; when the phonograph record came into being in the early 20th century, Beethoven’s Fifth was the first symphony to be recorded for this new medium (with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1913).

Why has the Fifth in particular come to be seen as the embodiment of the symphonic genre? Possibly because of its great appeal to a broad range of listeners combined with its stupendous compositional quality. The lapidary and brilliant hammering motive at the beginning reveals itself to be the essence of the entire work. Its rhythmic energy dominates the first movement, and it is highly versatile as well. A melodic secondary theme, on the other hand, remains a much more limited episode that occurs only in the exposition and recapitulation.

Jubilation before the victory

The second movement is a slow sonata-form that uses variation elements. The melodic A-Flat Major theme in the cellos and violas contrasts with a fanfare-like C Major motive in the entire orchestra. The forward thrust of this component could even be interpreted as an anticipation of the Finale – premature jubilation before the final victory.

Beethoven originally conceived of the scherzo-like third movement in five parts (ABABA). But at the premiere, he found the movement’s 611 bars so long that he shortened the movement to the three-movement ABA-Coda form we know today. The Scherzo combines a rising bass motive with a four-tone horn motive that harks back to the symphony’s opening measures. The Trio is characterized by fugal themes. An attacca transition leads into the Finale, in effect uniting both movements into one monumental ending.

This Finale now clearly reveals itself to be the focal point of the entire work. For the first time in the symphonic genre, we have a last movement that is longer than the opening movement, as well as everything but the buoyant last dance audiences ever since Haydn had expected. It introduces another innovation as well: Beethoven has added three trombones, contrabassoon and piccolo to the orchestration – all instruments which had rarely been used in the symphonic literature. In addition, the movement exhibits several features which can hardly be interpreted as other than programmatic in the sense of “per aspera ad astra” (through hardship to the stars): for one, the key changes from a ominous C Minor to a radiant C Major. In addition, the overall character is indisputably that of a march, which is invariably tied to the idea of struggle and victory. And this victory is so colossal, that the final cadence is one of the longest in the history of music.

Symphony No. 6 in F Major “Pastorale“

Probably more derogatory articles and letters from [Vienna] will be published in the Musikalische Zeitung about my last musical academy concert; I would not wish the suppression of any statements against me. One can see [from these] that nobody has more personal enemies than I; this is all the more understandable since the musical circumstances here are becoming worse and worse…

The extent of Beethoven’s anger and disappointment can certainly be discerned from this letter to his publisher, Breitkopf und Härtel, dated January 7, 1809. The concert Beethoven was referring to had taken place on December 22, 1808 in the Theater an der Wien. That the composer could not easily bear the concert’s failure is understandable: after all, it had consisted almost entirely of premieres – of his Fifth and Sixth symphonies, Choral Fantasy op. 80 and Piano Concerto No. 4. And it was particularly the exceptional length of this program that played a great role in the Vienna audience’s reserved reaction.

On the other hand, Beethoven presented listeners at this memorable academy with abundant variety – not only of instrumental and vocal compositions, but within the concert’s symphonic portions as well. One can see the Sixth Symphony as the exact opposite of the Fifth: while the “Symphony of Fate” is characterized by systematic dynamics leading to a triumphant goal, a dramaturgical “through night to light”, the “Sinfonia pastorale” contains hardly any conflict whatsoever. Instead, it is the embodiment of the purely idyllic for long stretches at a time – the result, of course, of the work’s programmatic blueprint. But Beethoven did not want to write solely illustrative music. This is evident in his famous remark that the Sixth is “more an expression of feeling than painting”. The work’s subtitle “Impressions of country life” also points to the fact that it is not nature in and of itself that Beethoven wishes to represent in tones, but the impressions nature makes on the subject who is representing it.

Of course, the Sixth Symphony certainly contains some “tone-painting”: one can hear a coach rolling along in the first movement or the murmur of a brook in the second, and towards the end of this movement, the call of birds (Beethoven even noted “nightingale”, “quail” and “cuckoo” in the score). The third movement, which replaces what would normally be the scherzo, affectionately parodies village musicians and their playing: at the beginning, two village bands alternate – one playing in F Major and the other in D Major. Sforzati stand for energetic foot-stamping, and in the middle, the oboe seems to miss its entrance by two beats while the bass hobbles along even further behind. Rancorous cellos, contrabasses and tympani accompanied by tremolos and falling arpeggios in the violins illustrate the thunder and lightning of a storm in the fourth movement.

But Beethoven gives listeners something much more profound: musical analogies to what was in his eyes the essence of nature – the principle of constancy in eternal change. Particularly the first movement – often the arena for dramatic conflict – rejects all development and seems to suspend time with its countless motivic repetition. Devices of musical change such as leading tones, chromatics and noticeable modulations occur highly infrequently – major chords all the more. In the second movement, whose murmuring brook is nothing less than a symbol for movement and standstill, change and immutability, Beethoven finds the musical correspondence of variation: the theme remains ever the same but is constantly illuminated in a different manner. The concept behind the Finale is also plausible. No triumphant apotheosis comes into question, of course, because the natural force of the movement’s storm cannot be contained; it recedes of its own accord. The only remaining solution is thankfulness and the return of the idyll in the form of a wholly undramatic Rondo in a swaying, natural 6/8 rhythm.