The English version of the liner notes for this first volume of a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies succinctly communicates the principal aim of the project:

Performing Beethoven’s symphonies in the venues in which they were originally premiered or, where these no longer exist, in Viennese halls in which his orchestral compositions were performed during his lifetime, is appealing. The idea of recording them in these spaces may also seem attractive. Indeed, listening to this first disc in the series shows that the producer, Stephan Reh, has certainly managed to create the acoustic of a real concert hall rather than that of a recording studio; but of course, other aspects of the impression gained from attending a live performance in a beautiful historic setting must be left to the imagination of the listener. In fact, the premieres of the first two symphonies took place in Viennese theatres that no longer exist, and performance in the resonant acoustic of the Landeshaussaal of the Palais Niederösterreich, where this recording was made, probably creates a quite different aural effect from that which the audience at the premieres would have experienced in the acoustics of a theatre.

The aural experiences offered by this CD, therefore, can only ever be an idealized recreation of conjectural historical conditions. With regard to accuracy and impeccable ensemble, there can be little doubt that these performances by the Wiener Akademie, under Martin Haselböck, are very different from the unsatisfactory orchestral performances Beethoven and his contemporaries would generally have endured. In 1800, for instance, an observer commented on the Italian Opera Orchestra, which gave the premiere of the First Symphony:

Writing specifically about the performance of the first symphony, the reviewer remarked that there had been a dispute over who should lead the orchestra. He noted that Beethoven wanted Paul Wranitzky, but that the orchestra would not play under him; in consequence, the performance was given with their regular leader, Giacomo Conti. The reviewer continued,

It is not clear whether the ‘time beating’ was with the leader’s bow or feet, or whether Beethoven himself intervened. It is highly improbable that Beethoven conducted this performance, for a separate time beater in orchestral music would have been so unusual at this date that the reviewer would almost certainly have commented on it.

A few columns earlier he had identified inefficient direction from the violin as a contributing factor in the poor performance of orchestral music. His critical account of the direction of the Augarten Concerts by the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who worked closely alongside Beethoven for many years, vividly illustrates the situation; it also indicates that wholly accurate performances were not expected even from the best orchestras. Having described Schuppanzigh as lacking sufficient knowledge of composition, he continued,

Even in performances of well-known repertoire the orchestra of the German theatre, which was generally considered more disciplined than the Italian Orchestra, was far from reliable. As a reviewer in 1802 remarked,

The unsatisfactory state of Viennese orchestral performance at this time resulted to a large extent from a serious lack of the rehearsal time and rehearsal methods necessary to master the difficulties of contemporary compositions. Rehearsal in the modern manner was precluded by the nature of the material used; orchestral parts, mostly handwritten, contained neither bar numbers nor rehearsal letters, making detailed study of difficult passages almost impossible. A rehearsal usually consisted of playing a movement from beginning to end and, if it was really unsatisfactory, doing it again. It is noteworthy that surviving sets of parts known to have been used for performances of Beethoven’s music contain no indications of bowing, fingering or any other additional performance instructions added by players; this is the case, for instance, with the manuscript parts from which the premiere of the Fifth Symphony was given, which were also used for performances as late as the mid-nineteenth century).

We can therefore give a warm welcome to the Wiener Akademie’s performances of Beethoven’s first two symphonies, which from the point of view of accuracy and energy would undoubtedly have astonished and delighted the composer. Whether from the point of view of performance style he would have considered them satisfactory is another issue. The performing practices employed in these recordings raise a number of questions. As in many recent recordings of the symphonies, the conductor chooses tempos very close to those specified in Beethoven’s retrospective list of metronome marks for his symphonies, which was published in 1817. This is surely justified; relentless maintenance of those tempi throughout a movement, however, is highly unlikely to represent either what Viennese orchestras of the time did or, indeed, what Beethoven envisaged. It is not just a question of how constant the basic tempo remains throughout the movement, but also how strictly the notated rhythms and note lengths are maintained. In orchestral playing, of course, players would have been expected to maintain a greater degree of strictness and steadiness than in solo performance, but the principal wind players would certainly have been expected to employ stylish tempo rubato in solo passages (bending the rhythms against the basically steady pulse of the rest of the orchestra). Even the strings would almost certainly have played slurred pairs of equal-length notes and short slurred groups with the conventional rhythmic inflection – lengthening the first note and making up the time by shortening the follow note(s) – which Leopold Mozart regarded as an obligatory element of good style.Footnote ⁴ According to Joseph Joachim’s pupil Karl Klingler, this style of rhythmic flexibility was second nature to violinists until the early years of the twentieth century, and we can hear Klingler’s quartet using it in recordings of Mozart and Beethoven, which they made in 1911.Footnote ⁵ All the orchestral musicians of Beethoven’s time would also have shown a strong tendency to over-dot dotted figures, as recommended in many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theoretical texts and as musicians continued to do in orchestral recordings well into the twentieth century.

Another feature of the performances on these recordings that surely fails to represent the practice of Beethoven’s time is the use of very short staccato bow-strokes, executed at speed (for instance in the Allegro con brio of op. 21 at bars 15–16 and all similar places throughout the two symphonies), where the lower half of the bow is employed. Such bow-strokes, occasionally employed by late eighteenth-century soloists perhaps, were not part of the orchestral player’s repertoire of strokes; passages of that kind would have been played in the upper half or, more likely, upper quarter of the bow as described by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in his 1776 book Ueber die Pflichten des Ripien-Violinisten (pp. 9–18). According to the musical context, the stroke may either have been stopped short in moderate tempi, or at faster tempi, separated only by the change of bow. It is quite clear that staccato marks meant many different things and were often used only to clarify that the notes should not be slurred.

The use of vibrato only as an occasional embellishment in solo wind playing and its total absence in the string section certainly accords with the approved practices of Beethoven’s time. The absence of portamento in orchestral playing is also in keeping with the views of the authors of practical textbooks from Reichardt in 1776 to Louis Spohr (Violinschule) in 1833. In practice, however, it was already used in orchestral performances at the time of the premiere of Beethoven’s First Symphony. A reviewer in 1799 complained of the use of portamento by string players in the Magdeburg theatre orchestra and added that he had ‘noticed this embellishment, which is so disfiguring in tutti passages, in the orchestras of many places’; and it is clear that it became endemic in Viennese orchestras during Beethoven’s lifetime.Footnote ⁶ This is vividly demonstrated by Salieri’s public condemnation of the practice in 1811:

Whether Beethoven approved of this practice in orchestral playing is unknown, but he certainly appears to have wanted and expected it in his chamber music. According to an 1832 article on the great double bass virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti (with whom Beethoven played one of his Cello Sonatas op. 5 in the 1790s), which was probably written by Cipriani Potter (who studied with the composer in 1819),

Although much of this information is in the public domain and easily accessible, both through original sources and scholarly writing, professional musicians have been slow to make use of it. Many of the performing practices conventionally employed in this repertoire still reflect those largely unhistorical practices that were evolved for the performance of Baroque music during the second half of the twentieth century, which primarily reflected the stylistic revolution and evolving tastes of the early twentieth century.

Judged merely as modern performances on period instruments these recordings have much to recommend them. They are energetic and invigorating, they contain much committed musicianship of a high order, and the lively acoustic distinguishes them from most other recordings of this kind. Given these admirable qualities, it is perhaps regrettable that they do not engage more wholeheartedly with the challenges of rediscovering more of the expressive stylistic idioms of early nineteenth-century orchestral playing. If Martin Haselböck and his excellent orchestra were to strike out on a more adventurous path with the remaining symphonies in the series, responding boldly to what we know about the ways in which early nineteenth-century composers and performers understood and responded to the notation of their own time, they might create recordings that would advance our knowledge of historical performance into currently uninhabited territory that cries out for exploration.