FOREWORD

by Jan Swafford

(author, “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph”)

If Beethoven’s symphonies are monuments of the art, that is what he intended them to be, and he had the genius and the discipline to realize that intention. From the beginning he was called a musical revolutionary, but that was not his aim. Beethoven was a traditionalist, basing everything he did on models in the past –above all Mozart, Haydn, and Bach. At the same time he was a new kind of composer, determined not to be merely an entertainer, but part of history.

From his mentor Joseph Haydn, Beethoven inherited the idea of a symphony as the crown of instrumental music. From his lifelong playing of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, he inherited the sense of a synoptic body of work: music in a single genre or medium that explores the depth and breadth of what that genre or medium can do, and in some degree the depth and breadth of what music itself can do. On the foundation of these models, Beethoven shaped his own singular art. Rather than a revolutionary, call him a radical evolutionary.

Listening to these performances of the symphonies by Gábor Takács-Nagy and the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra, one recalls the old metaphor of a mountain peak for works that occupy towering positions in our culture. They are monuments to be scaled, and each generation and each aspirant has to find their own way up them. Some performances lie within a broad tradition, such as the big-orchestra, lush-unto-creamy Beethovens of the mid-20th century. Other performances take paths from idiosyncratic to eccentric, ones of recent years often showing the hurried tempos that rose from the original-instrument movement.

None of these descriptions apply to Takács-Nagy’s performances, and that is one secret of how fresh they are. Hearing these passionate but direct and plainspoken renderings, one is not surprised to hear from the conductor: “I never say to the orchestra: ‘Play it more beautifully.’ But instead: ‘I think the character is this; I think the spirit is this.’ We’re always trying to find the right approach from that perspective. But not fixated on socalled beauty. In the end, it should be human. It should be honest.”

There is an intimate communication between orchestra and conductor in service of a vision of the works as individuals and as a whole. “These nine symphonies are like nine brothers of the same father,” says Takács-Nagy. “They all have the same blood group and similar genetics, but completely different personalities.” That is one of the essences of Beethoven: an artist who refused to repeat himself, who never stopped searching, who was at once steeped in tradition and absolutely himself. He demands the same from his interpreters.