From doing research from the previous pieces of music, Handel’s Messiah and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, I have discovered that both pieces seem to have a common theme, which is they both have had composers that rearranged or did something different from the original that might not have been done before. It is as if composers have the desire to want to do something different with the original. In this blog post I would like to discuss how Beethoven’s 9th was “reexamined” by composer, Roger Norrington. Although Norrington wasn’t looking to turn Beethoven’s 9th into a different genre, however he wanted to “reexamine” Beethoven’s 9th in a different way by using the same instruments that were used in the 19th century when the piece premiered. In the article Beethoven’s 9th Symphony Reexamined written by Herbert Glass and published on January 3rd, 1988, in the Los Angeles Times, Glass states, “What Norrington has done is take the music apart and put it back together.” He continues with “The listener might question whether the conductor and his co-editors have been too attentive, too intent on toppling old notions.” My takeaway from these quotes is that Norrington seemed to have had a goal of wanting to preserve the old elements of the piece, such as the instrumentation.
One might ask, isn’t the instrumentation the same as today as it was back then? Well, yes, however the instruments that we might be used to seeing in an orchestra today did not look the way they did when the piece was premiered. Not to mention the slight changes in sound, more specially the color and timbre of the instrument. Below I have added a video from a performance of Norrington conducting. Although it is a little hard to tell due to poor quality of the video, there are instruments that would have been used when the piece premiered were used during Norrington’s performance. These are 19th century instruments. I have listed a picture of an oboe, a flute and a clarinet.
The questions that came to mind when first reading about Norrington’s “reexamination” is, how did these 19th century instruments affect the overall timbre and color of the piece as opposed to modern day instruments? How would the piece be different if Norrington just used modern day instruments? Although these questions might be a little challenging to answer just by listening to recordings, due to the fact that the Norrington recording is older, but regardless, here is a recording of a newer version of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (see below).
