Toscanini’s 1930s Beethoven
seems to be arriving from all sides,
and I must say this Music and Arts 9th
is a lot harsher on the ear than the
Living Era transfer of the 1939 3rd
and 5th which so much impressed
me recently, with strident brass and
seemingly little in the way of softer
nuances. Maybe this has coloured my
reaction, for I have to say the performance
wasn’t quite the revelation I was hoping
for.
It’s a while since
I heard the "official" 1952
9th but Toscanini’s onslaught
on the first movement has always remained
in my mind as having a devastating impact
on account of the rigour with which
it is carried through. In the 1930s
he was more flexible and we are always
told this was a good thing. Unfortunately,
the impression I get in the first movement
was that sometimes he is not quite convinced
himself with his fast speed and drops
back, and then suddenly thinks this
will never do and spurts ahead again.
There are many impressive moments but
also many where the music seems to be
reduced to mere noise, an ironcast rhythmic
outline being all that remains of it.
Maybe if we could hear it better, it
would be another tale. He also, very
surprisingly, puts on the brakes as
the 32nd-note passage in
the violins comes up – a piece of consideration
for his players I neither expected nor
welcomed.
The scherzo has been
described as "demonic" and
I’d agree with that, but one does get
tired of being browbeaten unrelentingly
for nearly thirteen minutes. There are
performances of this movement where
you begin to think what a lot of repeats
it contains, but I never expected Toscanini’s
to be one of them.
The basic tempo for
the slow movement is not all that fast,
and there is certainly plenty of expressive
moulding, plus some soupy portamenti
I didn’t expect from this source. Toscanini’s
relentlessness shows here, however,
in the way he won’t leave the music
alone, with big expressive bulges creating
an overheated, Mahlerian effect. It
was interesting to read, in Christopher
Dyment’s notes, which are very detailed
and present the case for the defence,
that Toscanini always conducted the
change to E flat major "with his
eyes closed, so intense was his vision
of ‘bright lights, far, far away’",
and in this passage the pressure actually
comes off and the music momentarily
becomes very beautiful.
In the finale the basic
tempo is not so very brisk – Furtwängler
went faster in places – but how Toscanini’s
rhythmic "pom-pom" makes parts
of it sound like the village band playing
Verdi! When the "joy" theme
returns after the fugue it comes in
at a very good tempo – so right that
he evidently thought it was wrong and
whips it up after a couple of bars.
Then surprisingly, when the "joy"
theme and the "alle Menschen"
theme are combined he takes a good,
steady tempo and keeps to it. Towards
the end he is off again, and there are
some surprising rallentandos into the
slower "alle Menschen" statements.
Having recently (with the 3rd
and 5th mentioned above)
discovered myself to be a Toscanini
man, I am left wondering if this symphony
does not respond more to the Furtwängler
approach. Furtwängler could make
his forces sound truly "feuertrunken"
in the finale; here they sound cowed
into subjection.
The original length
of the CD (74 minutes) was chosen to
accommodate Beethoven’s 9th
without a break, but with Toscanini
there is room left for a fill-up, and
maybe this provides the most valuable
part of the present disc.
As it happens, the
two quartet movements are much more
warmly recorded. But even so, the Adagio/Lento
shows Toscanini in a quite different
light, patiently unfolding the great
melodic span. Here he and Beethoven
can be heard reaching humanity,
and not teaching it, a bad habit
to which both men were prone. Given
the warmer sound, the scherzo avoids
sounding obsessive, though here the
transportation to a full orchestral
body of strings blunts the effect.
As I have said, Christopher
Dyment explains in some detail why he
considers this to be the finest Toscanini
9th among those preserved,
and quotes several other authorities
in his support. So it looks as if Toscanini
in this work is not for me. Those interested
are warned that the sound is frequently
no help at all.
Christopher Howell
NBC Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Toscanini 
