Last week the Berlin Philharmoniker came to Carnegie Hall and played all nine Beethoven symphonies in the course of five nights. Two of the Times’s critics—Anthony Tommasini at the beginning of the cycle, and David Allen in his review at the end—announced their feeling that this was, essentially, a boring and uninstructive program to inflict on New York audiences, that we had no need to hear yet another Beethoven cycle, and that they expected more interesting programming from Simon Rattle, the Philharmoniker’s charismatic conductor.
My conclusion is that professional music critics should hereafter be excused from covering Beethoven cycles. For them, it is merely an onerous occupational chore, yet one more tedious hill to climb. But for the rest of us, it is—and especially was, in this particular case—an opportunity for startling, repeated experiences of life-transforming transcendence.
Music is not a piece of knowledge you acquire once and possess forever. It is an experience that you need to and, luckily, can undergo over and over, with new layers adding themselves in every time. And the better the music, the more complicated and varied will be the spectrum of one’s experiences. Beethoven, like Shakespeare, potentially offers us something new each time—not only new to each generation that hears him, but also new to each individual listener, and even to each separate encounter an individual may have with these works over a lifetime. To me, saying that we have collectively heard enough Beethoven cycles seems akin to saying we have already seen enough Shakespeare plays—a self-evidently silly remark.
But then, I have never attended a full Beethoven cycle before. That too tells me something: they cannot be all that thick on the ground, for I am a fan of full cycles and attend them frequently. I have been to one or two full Ring Cycles and had the opportunity to attend many more. I have been to at least five full cycles of Shostakovich’s string quartets (in which, admittedly, I take a professional interest) and at least three full cycles of Beethoven’s. I have twice heard the same great violinist, Christian Tetzlaff, play all of Bach’s partitas and sonatas for solo violin in a single long concert, and have also heard Yo Yo Ma perform all of Bach’s unaccompanied suites for cello in the course of a single day. I have been to the Philharmoniker’s own cycles of Brahms symphonies (immensely satisfying) and Schumann symphonies (somewhat less so). But I have never before had a chance to hear a world-class orchestra, and particularly this world-class orchestra, play all nine Beethoven symphonies at once.
One facet of great orchestras—I might broaden this and say great musicians—is that they are only as good as the music they play. Because they are honest performers and not tricky prestidigitators, they cannot transcend what is given to them. As a result, some of the Philharmoniker’s Beethoven symphony performances were naturally better than others. Both the Fifth and the Seventh were absolutely outstanding; if I ever get to hear a better performance of either, I will be amazed. The Ninth was great, too, but it was also delightfully strange: as a friend said to me when it was over, “I never realized what a demented piece this is!” The Sixth was weird too, in ways I had forgotten, and it fully earned its “Pastoral” title in the slowness and quietness of its unfolding. (If I was mildly bored at times, I suppose that can be attributed to my feelings about the pastoral in general—the countryside is really not for me.) Everything else had its moments and also its longeurs. The last movement of the First Symphony stood out as especially fine; the repeated excitements of the Fourth foreshadowed some of the even greater excitements in the Seventh, with which it had been paired; and the Eighth formed an appealing, frothy introduction to the more pensive moments of the Sixth. If the Third struck me this time as excessively bombastic, that seemed more attributable to the music than to the players. And in any case, the next time I hear it, I will probably feel differently about it. That is the nature of Beethoven, if he is well enough played.
Part of what a conductor does is to select a program, and even here, with all nine symphonies available, choices had to be made about the order in which they were played and whether anything else should be played with them. But a large part of what he or she does, with an orchestra this good, is to steer extremely competent, massively experienced players—musicians who have played the symphonies hundreds of times before—toward a performance that is something other than routine. The danger may lie in pushing this interpretive capacity beyond the bounds of the reasonable, but Simon Rattle didn’t do that. We did not feel (or at least I did not) that the sudden shifts in dynamics were excessive, the silences too prolonged or dramatic, the drumrolls and bass notes too emphatic. In every case, Rattle’s aesthetic decisions, transmitted through the magic of rehearsal to his dozens of performers, helped us make sense of Beethoven.
But never complete sense. David Allen praised Barenboim’s relatively recent Beethoven cycle for its “didactic” quality, but this is the last thing I want in my conductors, especially when they are dealing with material as rich and strange as Beethoven’s symphonies. Despite their evident power, these are delicate works, easily ruined by excessive force. Rattle and his players gave them their heads and let them run, with only the most gentle guidance exerted on the reins, and the result was one of the deepest, most sustained musical pleasures I’ve had in years.