How fast should Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony be performed?
NEW YORK >> Benjamin Zander is convinced Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony should sound far different than most people are accustomed to hearing it, and the soonto-be 84-year-old conductor will race through it in about an hour during performances in Boston and New York this week.
Nearly two centuries after the composer’s most famous work premiered on May 7, 1824, in Vienna, Austria, there’s disagreement over what tempi the fourmovement masterpiece should be performed.
“There’s so much information from Beethoven and so little information about how to interpret it,” Zander said during an interview in the midst of rehearsals.
A two-time Grammy Award nominee, Zander will lead the Boston Philharmonic in performances on Friday night at Boston’s Symphony Hall and on Sunday afternoon at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Both were planned for 2020, the 250th anniversary year of Beethoven’s birth, but were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Zander said the second performance required $650,000 in fundraising to mount.
“The hardest thing is just to keep an open mind about it. Fortunately, in my old age of 60, I’m not that dogmatic that I’m going to insist on a certain tempo,” oboist Andrew Price said. “All the stuff I learned as a 20-year-old student, I had to go back and relearn it all, just have a completely different approach.”
Zander studied cello and is music director of the Boston Philharmonic, which he founded in 1979, a far less acclaimed ensemble than the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He consulted with violinist and scholar Rudoph Kolisch, who wrote an influential paper published posthumously in the spring 1993 issue of The Musical Quarterly discussing the markings of Beethoven, who used a metronome built by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel.
“I have long been thinking of abandoning these nonsensical terms allegro, andante, adagio, presto,” Beethoven wrote in an 1817 letter to Hofrat von Mosel, “and Mälzel’s metronome gives us the best opportunity to do so.”
Zander’s 1992 recording
with the Boston Philharmonic on Pickwick International came in at 57 minutes, 51 seconds. His 2018 recording clocked at 58:39, part of a three-CD package that contains two discs of the conductor discussing
tempi decisions.
“For the recording, I really set out to be a devoted servant,” Zander said. “I had a little statue of Beethoven up in the balcony, and I looked at it occasionally to see if it was smiling.”
“Ben is hypervigilant to the wishes of the composer,” timpanist Ed Melzter said. “Many other conductors decide that they like the way it’s going to sound, and so they choose to play it that way.”
Among the most renowned interpretations, Arturo Toscanini took 65 minutes for RCA Victor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1952; Wilhelm Furtwängler needed 74 minutes at the postwar reopening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, which was released by EMI; and Leonard Bernstein stretched for a languid 78 minutes during his 1989 concert with members of six orchestras at Berlin’s Konzerthaus to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, a recording issued by Deutsche Grammophon.