Symphonies Nos 4 & 5

Klemperer and the Beethoven Symphonies:
'I have very often conducted Beethoven cycles in the course of my long life', wrote Otto Klemperer in his Minor Recollections (London, 1964). The result was that, as time went by, I found myself wearing a sort of identity tag marked "Beethoven specialist". In my earlier days in Berlin,
was able to present a great deal that was new and even experimental. In those days, therefore, I was called a "modern conductor". Neither description is accurate. My aim has always been to conduct competently in all musical styles. There are no specialists in the field of music. Here, as elsewhere, the maxim is "all or nothing".

'Much might be said about the instrumental retouching of Beethoven and the conflict between fidelity to the original and the reverse. Both schools of thought are at once right and wrong. Both Richard Wagner and Mahler subjected Beethoven to extensive retouching. Today we feel this to be unnecessary. Besides - "let each man see to his own, see where he stands and, when he stands, see that he does not fall". The essential point is not Beethoven's themes, but their so-called development - although, as Joseph Joachim said, this is a question of perception rather than performance.'

Klemperer's interpretations of the 'revolutionary' Beethoven and his symphonies ('four-handed affairs, to say the least', he called them) began at an early stage of his career. The works - especially the Third and the Fifth - became calling cards for important local débuts (Vienna, Moscow, New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm), touchstones of progress and maturity in regular relationships with orchestras (the Philharmonia cycles in the 1950s and 1960s) and marked recovery points after illness or crisis (the
performances with less than front-rank American orchestras in the 1940s and 1950s). Already in Cologne in 1920 Klemperer's Fifth, played with doubled wind and horns and nine double basses, provoked controversy. It was not the usual smooth, classical Beethoven, but embraced the
revolutionary as well as the man of feeling. It was heaven and hell, death and resurrection', wrote one spectator. In Vienna (1921), the Neue Freie Presse wrote, 'He has the dynamic, energy-laden movements of the young Mahler… in the Fifth dynamics were pushed to extremes and beyond. Every ounce of power was extracted from each sforzando. Every drum beat heralded a calamity'. The Russian press (1925) found the Fifth stupendous' and 'of colossal intensity', although New York critics (1926) complained of a lack of polish in a reading that was nonetheless 'on a scale of sonorous tonal grandeur, as yet not surpassed'. And in Hamburg 1933), the last time he conducted the work on German soil before the 1950s, the H a m b u rger Fremdenblatt called his reading 'a soul-shaking experience. Without lapsing into sentimentality and emotional
indulgence, it illuminates a sense of personal declaration in the music, even projects an ideal figure of Beethoven himself'.