Sunday Classics preview: Otto Klemperer makes us ponder how fast Beethoven's peasants dance

Last night we saw and heard Zoltán Kocsis (better known to most of us as a pianist) conduct this orchestra identified as the Hungarian National Philharmonic in the second-movement "Scene by the Brook" from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Here are the third and fourth movements, the "Merry Gathering of Peasants" and "Thunderstorm."

by Ken

In last night's preview we listened to the nature rambles from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and its hallucinatory offspring, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Tonight we move on to the "Gathering of Merry Peasants" that follows Beethoven's "Scene by the Brook."

There's a wonderful story concerning Otto Klemperer's recording of this movement, as part of his EMI stereo Beethoven symphony cycle. I would have liked to find a better recollection than mine, but the ones I turned up are notably worse, so I'll have to go with mine. When it came to this third-movement scherzo, at the first run-through producer Walter Legge in the control room was taken aback by Klemperer's slow tempo, and asked the maestro -- as I recall it, into his headset -- if he didn't think it was too slow.

(For those who are just coming in at this point, Legge, who was EMI's a&r director as well as the working producer to whom EMI's a&r director assigned many of the label's most prestigious artists and projects, had a habit of second-guessing the celebrated artists he engaged --ostensibly to record "their" interpretations -- using a whole bag of tricks to enforce his will, to the point where many of the recordings he produced seem to me more his than those famous artists'. Naturally, many of these drained-of-life, cookie-cutter performances have been hailed as phonographic landmarks, by peopleI have to figure either don't listen or don't hear.)

Klemperer, unfazed, replied, "You'll get used to it." Anyway, much later in the recording process -- maybe when they were listening to playbacks? -- Klemperer asked, "Have you gotten used to it yet, Walter?" For once Legge didn't get his way, though listening now, and hearing how un-extreme the tempo is in the finished version, I have to wonder whether Klemperer hadn't at first taken an even broader tempo and then been unwillingly ground down.

Even more now than ever this speaks to me of the predictably middlebrow, drearily humdrum narrowness of the celebrated Legge vision of musical "perfection," which he imposed so ruthlessly on artists with way better musical credentials and infinitely more musical life and imagination. The tempo isn't even that slow, but it opens up the movement, and consequently the rest of the symphony, in a way that I've never heard anyone else manage. (And this is by no means a fair representation of the sound that can be gotten from this recording. I made this dub from a late German LP reissue that has jam-packed sides.) The actual sounds Klemperer could coax from his players, something that rarely comes through in even the best CD transfers, often made a significant difference in the way the music was filled in and filled out when he took unconventionally slow tempos.


TO HEAR BEETHOVEN'S "MERRY GATHERING," BY ITSELF AND
THEN WITH ITS BRACKETING MOVEMENTS, CLICK HERE.

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