10 - Wagner's Ninth: Reading Beethoven with Faust

Summary

The expression ‘Wagner's Ninth’ has become commonplace in the reception history of Beethoven's choral symphony. Nicholas Cook devotes an entire section of his Beethoven: Symphony no. 9 to this concept. A contemporary indication of the regard in which Wagner's interpretation was held by performers during much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is provided by Richard Strauss's handwritten remark at the head of his personal copy of the Eulenburg edition of the score: ‘Alles Wesentliche über diese Symphonie ist von Rich. Wagner’ [Everything significant on this symphony comes from Richard Wagner].

The main textual evidence for the concept of ‘Wagner's Ninth’ is Wagner's essay of 1873, Zum Vortrag der neunten Symphonie Beethovens [The Rendering of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony], which offers detailed advice on the issues facing performers of the work. Wagner's approach involves an attempt to discern the composer's intentions in order to arrive at a musical interpretation that is not only accurate, but faithful to the spirit that inspired the score. Less well known, however, is the programmatic description Wagner produced in 1846 for the benefit of audiences in Dresden hearing the work for the first time. The essay was printed as a programme note without a title; we will refer to it as the Programm. This essay uses quotations from Goethe's Faust in an attempt to provide verbal illustrations of Beethoven's music and reveals the foundations on which ‘Wagner's Ninth’ – his interpretation of Beethoven's work – was built.

It is surprising that the Programm has not received detailed attention. Although there are references to it in many important secondary texts, notably Kropfinger's Wagner and Beethoven, Grey's Wagner's Musical Prose and Dahlhaus's The Idea of Absolute Music, full critical examination of the text itself has been cursory. Grey even describes the Programm as ‘relatively obscure’. This lack of critical interest presumably results from contemporary scholarship's rejection of poetic association as an acceptable methodology for the elucidation of musical works.