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 soon-to-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 four-movement 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 led the Boston Philharmonic in performances on Friday night at Boston’s Symphony Hall and this 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-yearold 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.”
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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.
“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.
Zander’s performance at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 10, 1983, was considered revolutionary. “If Mr. Zander is right,” Andrew Porter wrote in the New Yorker’s issue of Oct. 24, “we have been hearing the music of the greatest composer only in misrepresentation.”
Beethoven had been deaf for nearly a decade by the time of his death in 1827, cited by some as a reason to ignore the metronome markings. “This polemic resists any dogmatic answer,” said conductor James Conlon, music director of the LA Opera and principal conductor of Italy’s Orchestra RAI. “There are powerful arguments on both sides. I am not against performing Beethoven at the speeds suggested by the metronome. But I would say categorically: If the resulting performance is bereft of expression, emotional weight, and nuances of phrasing and dynamics, the hoped for virtue of the presumed `correct’ speed, is nullified.”