The Shock of the Old

By Michael Walsh

What did Beethoven's symphonies sound like to Beethoven? The composer was deaf for most of his creative life, so he heard his music in his head, but what sounds was he imagining as he wrote a score? And what did the music sound like to his listeners, before whose astonished ears Beethoven shattered the boundaries of the classical style and thus created the foundation of the modern orchestral repertoire?

In their splendid new recording of Beethoven's nine symphonies on the Archiv label, English conductor John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire & et Romantique aim to recreate the music of Beethoven as his audience experienced it. The brilliant and incisive Gardiner stands in the forefront of the original-instruments movement, whose adherents employ period instruments (originals and replicas) and the latest textual scholarship in order to play music as closely as possible to the way it was first heard. Having begun with the Baroque era, the movement has progressed to the 19th century. Gardiner already has a revelatory version of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (1828) to his credit.

The Beethoven symphonies are his most ambitious project yet. The nine -- which cover a technical and emotional range unmatched by the work of any other composer -- are the bedrock of the conductor's art, and rare is the maestro who has not committed the cycle to disk at least once. Gardiner, however, has set out to do something different with these familiar pieces.

We tend to hear Beethoven today as the precursor to the Romantics. Gardiner takes the opposite tack; for him, Beethoven is the natural successor to the classical school of Haydn (his teacher) and Mozart. After all, Beethoven did not know Bruckner and Mahler were on their way, but he certainly did know the music of his time, and Gardiner reveals (and revels in) Beethoven's links to it. In place of the weighty textures and stately pace that mark modern interpretations, Gardiner offers a Haydn-like sprightliness.

For the past 150 years or so, as steel-stringed fiddles and machine-tooled valve horns replaced their forebears, the orchestra has achieved a golden sheen but at the expense of clarity. Instruments that are perfect for late- 19th century music do not necessarily suit 18th century compositions, not even those of Beethoven, who straddles the two eras. "Later instruments have a way of blurring the edges of the music," explains Gardiner. With original instruments, he says, "what you lose in opulence, you gain in extra transparency."

Another result of the modernization of instruments is that tempos have become slower than Beethoven intended. The strings of his time simply could not sustain chords as long as the instruments of today can. Gardiner takes Beethoven's metronome markings -- once scorned as impossibly brisk -- at face value. The performances are therefore far nimbler than is typical, but such is the virtuosity of Gardiner's 60-piece orchestra that the music never seems rushed or scrambled. Listen, for example, to the famous finale of the Ninth / Symphony. The "Turkish march" usually sounds like an inappropriately comic intrusion in an otherwise profound movement. Gardiner takes the passage nearly twice as fast as most other conductors do, and as a result it sounds fitting, a natural outgrowth of the period's fascination with martial Janissary music.

This refreshing approach distinguishes the whole set. The Fifth Symphony speeds along inexorably, while the exultant Seventh, with valveless horns soaring at the top of their range, shouts its joy to the heavens. The more carefree, underappreciated even-numbered symphonies -- especially the gentle Fourth, the pastoral Sixth and the unbuttoned Eighth -- emerge as showcases for Beethoven's wit, erudition and command of his form.

The real winner, though, is the Third Symphony. Shorn of its "traditional" portentousness, the "Eroica" stands revealed as the innovative, avant-garde piece it really is. It has long been a cliche that in this work, twice the length of any symphony before it, Beethoven threw off the shackles of the 18th century. And he did. But the magnitude of his achievement is obscured if we view the Third simply as a primitive version of the full-blown Romanticism that followed. Gardiner forces us to compare this and all the symphonies with what came before them, not what came after. "I believe the use of period instruments helps us not only to hear more in ((Beethoven's)) symphonies," he says, but "serves also to reinforce the revolutionary side of his genius." We listen to the music as it was when it was new, in all its terror and wonder.