Beethoven Ninth Symphony – Karajan Berlin 1982

Karajan understood something about this symphony that many conductors, even great ones, have preferred not to face: that the Ninth’s terror lives inside its beauty, not alongside it.

The Berlin Philharmonic in September 1982 was the finest orchestra in the world, and everyone knew it, including the players. What Karajan drew from them in this live recording from the Berlin Festival wasn’t merely gorgeous — though gorgeous it emphatically is — but something more unsettling. He had spent weeks, by all accounts, pursuing a deliberately veiled sonority, a sound that hovers at the edge of audibility in ways the studio recording he made two or three years earlier never quite achieved. That 1979–80 account has its champions, but it also has an embarrassment: the E-flat clarinet jumping in a bar early in the third movement, a mistake Karajan, mysteriously, chose to leave in the finished product. No such lapse here.

Mahler wrote the Ninth knowing, or at least fearing, he was dying. He had already lost his daughter Maria to scarlet fever and diphtheria. His marriage to Alma was in ruins. His heart was giving out. The symphony circles around leave-taking with an obsessiveness that can make even sympathetic listeners fidget — and I’ve confessed before that the inner movements sometimes try my patience — but Karajan, working with an orchestra that could make almost any tempo feel inevitable, keeps the tension alive even in passages where lesser conductors simply let the music coast.

The first movement is where everything is at stake. Mahler’s opening, that halting, irregular heartbeat in the violas and harp, sounds here like something overheard through a closed door. Karajan resists the temptation — common enough among conductors who love this work almost too much — to luxuriate in the long melodic spans before the music has earned them. He drives toward the “Bewegter” climax with real ferocity, and when the tam-tam crashes through the texture it is genuinely shocking, not merely loud. The closing pages then arrive with the force of something genuinely relinquished rather than simply quieted. That distinction matters more than I can easily explain.

The second movement — the two Ländler and their satellites — begins at a pace that might alarm listeners expecting the grotesque exaggeration Bernstein brought to this music. Karajan is steadier, cooler. But listen to the low strings: they dig into the rhythm with a physical insistence that keeps the music from floating away into mere elegance. There is also, in the wilder episodes, something almost impish in the woodwind playing, a reminder that Mahler’s irony was never far from his grief.

Bernstein’s 1979 Concertgebouw disc — also live, also legendary — is the obvious rival, and the contrast is instructive rather than decisive. Bernstein weeps, essentially; you can feel him doing it. Karajan does not weep. He watches. Whether you find that more or less truthful depends on what you think this music is ultimately about. I’ve gone back and forth on the question for thirty years and haven’t settled it.

The sound, early digital but warm and spacious, serves the rendition well. A private tape of a performance from May of the same year apparently runs a couple of minutes faster and fits on a single disc, but the sonics are inferior and pitch questions remain unresolved — an academic curiosity at best.

This recording belongs in any serious collection of the Ninth. Not because it answers the symphony’s hardest questions, but because it asks them in a voice you won’t soon forget.