A Conductor Brings Nearly a Century of Experience to Beethoven

Herbert Blomstedt just keeps on going. The Illinois-born, Swedish conductor is 94, and he maintains a schedule that musicians half his age might blanch at.

At the start of February, Blomstedt was in San Francisco, where he was the music director from 1985 to 1995. A week later, Cleveland. Then Boston, conducting Mozart and a new edition of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony that is dedicated to Blomstedt himself. Next week, he repeats that program in Chicago.

This week, Blomstedt leads the New York Philharmonic in two symphonies that testify to the strength of the human will: Nielsen’s Fourth and Beethoven’s Fifth.

Blomstedt’s service to Scandinavian music has long been lauded, and his recordings of works by Berwald, Nielsen, Sibelius and Stenhammar still repay repeated listening. If his Beethoven has been a little less prominent, that is only because its virtues are not of the flashy or radical kind.

Although slightly different in tempos and textures as a result of Blomstedt’s adoption of the new editions of Beethoven’s scores that came out in the 1990s, both symphony cycles he has recorded — with the Staatskapelle Dresden from 1975 to 1980 and the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, Germany, from 2014 to 2017 — remain beacons of good taste, with a distinctive spiritual power shining through the music. In both sets, that’s particularly true of the Fifth, which may be less brutally violent than under other conductors but has a merciful empathy to its relative restraint.

Asked to choose a page from the Fifth’s score, Blomstedt went for the first, which announces the four-note motif that dominates the symphony’s passage from darkness to light. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

This is probably the most famous opening in all of music. But is it deceptively difficult to conduct?

It’s very difficult. We are all haunted by this saying of Anton Schindler’s, that fate is knocking on the door. Of course, we cannot knock on the door so fast, so it becomes [singing slowly] “baaam-baaam-baaam baaaaaam.” That’s obviously not what Beethoven wanted. On the top of the page it says “Allegro con brio.” If the first bar is like that, it’s not con brio at all; it’s allegro comodo or allegro pesante or something like that.

It’s also strange that there are no staccato dots there. Some of my colleagues are very conscientious; they play it [singing smoothly] “duhduhduh duhhh” because there are no dots. So that’s also another subject that can get heated.

The new Bärenreiter score now has a metronome mark, in parentheses, because he wrote the marking some years later. The marking is quite shocking for those who were used to listening to Wilhelm Furtwängler or his followers, who are about twice as slow.

Then, the second fermata is longer than the first one, tied over to an extra bar. The question is, why is that? So, there are many things to discuss.

What are you aiming for yourself, then?

The first point about the tempo is that in earlier editions of the symphonies, there were no metronome marks, so that authorized slow tempos. Of course, there were books; you could go to the musicological literature in the library and find out. Now, it is right at the top of the page, even if it is in parentheses. It’s part of the composition. And that makes a difference.

When I was young — and it’s almost a hundred years ago now — the attitude toward the scores of Classical composers was much more casual than it is today. It cannot go so far that we are put in a straitjacket; that does not help the music very much. We know that Beethoven was himself very differentiated in tempos. He might start in one tempo, and after a few bars there was another tempo. Schindler reports on this; in that case, he’s quite a reliable source.

Before I started conducting, I was a musicologist, so I’m trained to think like this. I’m sure Beethoven wanted the tempo as it stands. I heard so many crazy theories about what he meant with this. Some say that his metronome was going too slow, but I don’t believe that, because you can check the metronome by looking at your watch. Since the new editions have come, I’m convinced that he meant the metronome markings as they stand.

Of course, I’m not alone in that. With a couple of exceptions, I think the markings are ideal. You just have to change yourself and not do what you find from tradition. You had heard Furtwängler or Bruno Walter do it, so that must be right. No, it is not right. The right thing is what he wrote.

What we think Beethoven actually wanted has changed dramatically over the course of your career, with new research and shifting tastes. How do you reconcile that?

That’s normal. I don’t have to apologize for that. My first ideals were what I heard Furtwängler do. I heard him many times, in rehearsal and in concerts. It shaped my musical world; it was magic. But, little by little, I discovered that there are other ways to interpret Beethoven’s music that are at least equally motivated in what he wrote.

It’s not easy for a conductor, or any musician who has the task of interpreting this music, to get onto Beethoven’s wavelength, because you have so many memories, so many ideas about the music from what you have heard. You have to free yourself of that if you are looking forward. It requires that you change your mind, but I think that is what we must do. Once you are accustomed to that, you discover new expressions in the music that perhaps were not so evident a hundred years ago.

What about the fermata over the last of the four notes in the motif?

From a musicological standpoint, the fermata shows that the tempo does not exist anymore. What really says how long a fermata is, in this case, is how long the bow is. When the bow is at the end, you have to stop, unless you want to do two bows, which some people do. I think that misses the point, because to hold the fermata with a single down bow requires great control of muscles. If you do two, you don’t have to have that tension in your arm; it’s too easy.

Why do you think Beethoven remains such an obsession for so many of us?

One could write a whole book about that, but one thing to me is characteristic. We know that Beethoven was a sufferer, but he never expresses his suffering in his music, like Mahler does. You can hear it in every bar of Mahler — I’m suffering, I’m suffering, I’m suffering — and it’s wonderful, the way he does it.

Beethoven was another type of person. He doesn’t put his emotions on display, and that makes it more objective. It can represent the suffering of everyone, not only his, but mine, the suffering of the whole society. The suffering of today, in Ukraine for instance. It could symbolize anything. That helps it to outlive the personal situation of the composer, or the personal situation of the interpreter. It’s something that we go through, as humans.