Symphonie Nr. 9 d-Moll op. 125

The Ninth Symphony was actually commissioned by the London Royal Philharmonic Society, but this did not prevent it from receiving its premiere at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna on 7 May 1824. The last symphony Beethoven completed is a watershed for the genre as a whole, as the composer proceeds to exhaust the possibilities of the orchestra, and then to transcend them by adding a new instrument in the form of the human voice. The soloists and chorus sing sections of Schiller’s famous ode “An die Freude” (The Ode to Joy), which is superimposed on the movement’s main theme.

This recording by the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, under Austrian conductor Karl Böhm (1894–1981), was probably made in late May or early June 1941. Böhm had been the orchestra’s operatic director and director of music since 1934, and started making records at the opera house at the very beginning of his tenure. The soloists on the recording were members of the Staatskapelle’s own ensemble: soprano Margarete Teschemacher (1903–1959) and tenor Torsten Ralf (1901–1954) were members of the Semperoper from 1935 to 1944, while baritone Josef Hermann (1903–1955) joined the opera house in 1939, and contralto Elisabeth Höngen (1906–1997) arrived in Dresden in 1940. Anyone who wanted to buy the recordings, which were released on nine ‘78’ records, had to hand in some of their old records for recycling in addition to paying the purchase price.
(Constanze Köhn)