Beethoven: Symphony no. 3 in E-flat Major, Eroica
Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester; Günther Herbig, conductor.
Berlin Classics. Recorded 1982, Christuskirche, Berlin. CD.
There’s something to be said for conductors who don’t court the spotlight—who simply do the work, night after night, with intelligence and craft. Günther Herbig belongs to that vanishing breed. This 1982 Berlin recording of the Eroica, made when he was still chief conductor of the Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester (before the GDR bureaucrats intrigued him out), reminds us what we lose when we confuse celebrity with substance.
The opening movement gets it right from the first bar. Those two E-flat chords land with proper heft—not the bloated grandeur some conductors affect, but the weight of structural necessity. Herbig understands that this movement is architecture, not rhetoric. His tempo (he takes a full two minutes more than his later RPO performance) allows the development section to breathe, to argue with itself. Listen to how the cellos dig into that grinding passage at measure 284—you can hear the rosin dust. The Christuskirche acoustic wraps around the strings without blurring them, a rare feat.
But it’s the funeral march that reveals Herbig’s particular gift. He doesn’t wallow. The tempo is steady, almost relentless—this is grief observed, not indulged. When the fugato erupts (measure 114, if you’re following along), the Berlin strings attack with a ferocity that still startles. These East German musicians, products of a system that valued technical excellence above all else, possessed a unanimity of attack that their Western counterparts rarely matched. The oboe solo in the recapitulation, vulnerable and exposed, nearly breaks the heart.
The "scherzo" gallops without hectoring. Herbig’s horn trio—genial, yes, but also slightly tipsy, as it should be—provides exactly the relief Beethoven intended. The recording captures the natural hall resonance beautifully; you can hear the horns bouncing off the far wall of the Christuskirche. Small detail, perhaps, but it matters.
Now, the "finale". Here’s where many Eroicas collapse into note-spinning. Not this one. Herbig plays it attacca (as he would again with the RPO), maintaining the tension, and then proceeds to treat the Prometheus variations not as a series of episodes but as a cumulative argument. The tempo is spacious enough to let each variation register, yet forward-moving enough to avoid the deadly sin of meandering. When the horns finally thunder out the theme in full (measure 277), it arrives not as bombast but as hard-won triumph.
One could quibble—the final Prestissimo could press harder, and some might find Herbig’s approach too sober, too lacking in surface excitement. But that misses the point. This is Beethoven for adults, played by serious musicians who understand that the Eroica isn’t about theatrical gestures. It’s about transformation, about moving from darkness to light through sheer force of compositional will.
Berlin Classics’ remastering serves the music well. The sound is warm, detailed, and refreshingly free of digital glare. You can hear the double basses growling in the lower registers, the violas cutting through in the inner voices—details that matter in Beethoven.
Herbig remains criminally undervalued. Not flashy enough for the jet set, not eccentric enough for the critics who mistake idiosyncrasy for insight. Just a superb artist doing what he does best: making great music make sense. This Eroica stands proudly alongside Schmidt-Isserstedt’s, alongside the best of Wand. It deserves your attention.
