Nikolaus Harnoncourt's musical thinking was always on the move, looking for contradiction and correction.
A sentence that the conductor actor and genius simulant Teodor Currentzis pounded on the head of the journalist Susanne Benda in an interview for the Stuttgarter Nachrichten - "I conduct Tchaikovsky the same way, I conduct him correctly" - would never have crossed his lips .
Eleven years after his stunning complete recording of all nine Beethoven symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in 1990, Harnoncourt had become restless again in 2011.
In Beethoven's Fifth, the “Fate Symphony”, he had discovered some things that he wanted to communicate to the public through several orchestras.
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the features section.
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When he conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker in autumn 2011, the audience was paralyzed by shock afterwards. Instead of a triumph of liberation in the finale, instead of bright jubilation, it had heard something else: The victory of the tortured over their tormentors did not justify a new humanity, but turned into an explosion of barbarism. The violence itself radiated from this Gleissnerian C major. Harnoncourt had gleaned the dynamic of the revolution from Beethoven: the turning from shine into terror. The repeated confirmation of the ending, often satirized, also by Erik Satie in his “Sonatine bureaucratique”, was no longer ridiculous in Harnoncourt's work. He staged the chords, prepared by frantic acceleration, as a choreography of the intoxication of blood - like jumping with both feet on the head of the loser: “Dead!Dead! Dead!"
Never before had one heard so terrifying what Siegen can mean, particularly because everything seemed to be derived with compelling evidence from the music itself. Harnoncourt had also succeeded in uncovering the gruesome dimension of Beethoven's much-vaunted logic of consequentiality.
About the concert with the same piece at the Philharmonia Zurich, also in autumn 2011, writes Peter Hagmann, formerly music editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, that after the concert there was a "shocked silence". "An earthquake had struck, the tremors had gone through the bone." The text can be found in the booklet of an unusual double CD entitled "Farewell from Zurich" (Prospero / Note 1). It offers a recording of this last concert by the conductor, who died in 2016, at the Philharmonia Zurich, the orchestra of the local opera house, to which he had been associated for almost four decades and where his wife Alice had actively helped as concert master, Harnoncourt's research into playing technique and performance practice for the musicians to convey.
In addition to the Gran Partita, the wind serenade KV 361 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the recording also contains this gripping, monstrous reading of Beethoven's Fifth. In Mozart's introduction you can hear a wonderfully breathing, completely free rubato of the wind solos between the tutti chords. In the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth, on the other hand, there is panic of the unpredictable constant hail of events against which the oboe solo stands as a respite for pain in the midst of breathlessness. Suddenness as a quality of aesthetic experience, as the recently deceased Karl-Heinz Bohrer had described it, the sudden attack is increased to a state of emergency here.
The CD also offers excerpts from Harnoncourt's rehearsals for the second and third movements of Beethoven's Fifth. "With the long notes, you have to look at me," he tells the musicians. “I make umpteen different tempos in these bars. There is a real danger with this sentence that it will slow down where it shouldn't slow down. ”He hated metric rigidity, which is alien to natural speech. He felt - abruptness! - about the recovery of the unpredictable in an all too well-known piece: "One shouldn't prepare what happens."