For classical music lovers, being able to stream live concerts on social media platforms is a welcome convenience in a busy world. But nothing beats the in-person experience. For city dwellers, a night out to see the orchestra is a relaxing and relatively inexpensive outing. Those living in New York, London, or Paris are lucky in having easy access to top talent.
Few orchestras employ better talent than the Vienna Philharmonic. Consistently ranked as one of the very best in the world, after more than 180 years of existence it is also one of the oldest. Its legendary “Viennese sound” has been analyzed to death: Is it the particular instruments that make it so unique for listeners? Or the special training its musicians receive? Or the acoustics of its main concert hall, the Vienna Musikverein? Theories abound, but the answer remains mysterious.
A City of Music With No Orchestra
In the early 19th century, Vienna was already associated with a disproportionate number of the greatest composers who ever lived: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, to name a few. But it had no standing professional orchestra devoted to symphonic music. This meant that the “City of Music” could not satisfactorily perform the works of its own homegrown geniuses.Mozart’s operas were an exception. At this time, operas were still better known than symphonies; the art form had developed earlier and was enormously popular. Symphonies were performed far less frequently. When they were, as the Romantic composer Hector Berlioz noted, amateur players tended to subject their audiences to bad first impressions.
A Conductor of Genius
Enter Otto Nicolai. In him, Vienna found a conductor whose skills could match the best then in France and Germany. Like Mozart, Nicolai had shown great musical promise as a child. Berlioz regarded Nicolai as one of the greatest orchestral leaders he ever met, saying, “He is one of those men whose influence alone suffices to bestow a marked musical superiority on the town in which they live.”
What exactly made Nicolai so good? Berlioz noted a number of qualities: He was “learned” and “enthusiastic,” with a strong rhythmical instinct, showed great attention to detail, and was “exact” in his conducting method.
After coming to Vienna to lead the city’s Court Opera, in 1842 Nicolai helped assemble instrumentalists from the Opera’s orchestra to form a separate group that would be devoted solely to symphonic music. To this day, members of the Philharmonic orchestra also perform in the Vienna State Opera from which they are drawn.
Nicolai even wrote a “Founders’ Decree” that admonished Vienna to awake from its performative slumber:
“Trin tin tin! Hark! Hark! The time has come, no more for musicians just to sleep, or play their violins in bed! Ye sons of Apollo, all together, unite, put your hands to work, on something great!”
Succeeding Where Others Failed
A year after its founding, Nicolai prepared the Vienna Philharmonic for one of its most historic moments: performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
The “Choral” Symphony had made its public debut in 1824. Beethoven, by this time completely deaf, conducted the piece so clumsily that a second conductor had to stand behind him to direct the players. Though the amateur orchestra had been ill-prepared to play the piece, having been allowed only two rehearsals, it came off well enough that the contralto Caroline Unger, had to tap Beethoven to notify him of the standing ovation occurring behind his back.
For almost the next 20 years of its existence, no conductor had succeeded in adequately performing the work. If Beethoven’s earlier symphonies had been challenging, the Ninth was considered almost impossible, requiring the largest orchestra ever assembled up to that time as well as a full choir with vocal soloists.
The piece’s exceeding difficulty affected its early critical appreciation. When first performed in London in 1825, The Ninth Symphony was not well received. A critic writing for the Harmonicon panned it as “wearying,” its length inadequate “to fix the attention of any audience.” The final movement containing the now-famous “Ode to Joy” chorus was too “heterogeneous,” lacking in “intelligible design,” and seemed to bear no relation to the first three movements. The critic proposed that the piece be shaped into a “produceable form,” more akin to that of a Haydn symphony.
Viennese critics agreed about the Ninth Symphony’s insufferable length. Musicians complained that it was too hard to play. Because it had never been adequately performed, some thought it was unperformable.
Otto Nicolai sought to change this perception. The huge number of instrumentalists and vocalists presented a problem for getting all his musicians in sync. How did he succeed in doing this?
Success and Legacy
Nicolai’s performance of the Ninth Symphony was a tremendous success. It was the first public interpretation of Beethoven’s magnum opus that could satisfy its creator’s original intentions. But the glory was not to last.During these years, Nicolai composed the work for which he is best known today: an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” But the directors of the Vienna opera refused to produce it. Though Nicolai was the Court Opera conductor, he did not have total authority over what his musicians played. He resigned his position in 1847 and left Vienna for Berlin, where his great work premiered two years later. His triumph was short-lived though, as he died of a stroke shortly after being named the conductor of the Berlin State Opera.
Nicolai’s absence left no one of equal merit to replace him, and the Vienna Philharmonic suffered a decline that lasted more than a decade. Then in 1860, its low fortunes began to change. The cause of its revival? None other than a hit performance of “The Merry Wives of Windsor”! Appropriately, the homage that the orchestra belatedly paid to its visionary founder initiated a golden era of great performances.
The Vienna Philharmonic boasted a number of famous conductors during this time, from visiting ones like Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner to resident directors like Gustav Mahler. After Berlioz guest-conducted the Philharmonic in 1845, he opined that it “might perhaps be equaled by other orchestras, but exceeded by none.” Berlioz’s judgment continues to stand today.
