There is bound to be a feeling that something special is afoot when, after an interval of more than twenty years, a musician of the eminence of Nikolaus Harnoncourt once again confronts the challenge of fathoming Beethoven's symphonies - for the first time with his own Concentus Musicus. The following introdution consists of excerpts from an interview the conductor gave in June 2015.

In 2013 the Concentus and I performed Fidelio in the Theater an der Wien, a theatre that could be described as Beethoven’s natural habitat. For us, these performances opened our eyes and ears and persuaded the Concentus that it was time to tackle Beethoven’s symphonies. We began by performing the First and Second Symphonies before moving on to the Third and now to the Fourth and Fifth. In other words, we are slowly groping our way forward and hope that we shall then be able to perform the whole cycle in Graz.
For me, it was clear from the outset that all the symphonies must be played without any retouchings. In my seventeen years as a rank-and-file musician I never once played a work by Beethoven that hadn’t been retouched in some way - not under Herbert von Karajan or Erich Kleiber or Carl Schuricht or any of the others. It was simply never done. It started with Mendelssohn and Wagner and continued with Mahler, and it is still the case today that people believe that they have to correct or in some way add to Beethoven.
But Beethoven knew exactly what each instrument was capable of, what it was almost capable of and what it was incapable of doing. At the start of the Fourth Symphony, for example, the second horn plays a low D. It could be played far more easily on the bassoon, but Beethoven wasn’t interested in ease or simplicity but with a specific sonority tied to the instrument in question.
Beethoven must be played on a hand horn. But this instrument has several gaps in its harmonic range, gaps that have to be filled by various tricks such as hand-stopping, and this in turn affects the sound. If Beethoven wrote in this way, it wasn’t out of ignorance but was entirely deliberate, since there were few composers as familiar as he was with the possibilities inherent in the different instruments. Valve horns and valve trumpets already existed in the 1820S, not least in Vienna. Indeed, there are even people who claim that a valve horn was used for the fourth horn in the Ninth Symphony. It is recognized, therefore, that Beethoven built into his works the characteristics of the instruments of his time. These technical questions affect practically all of the wind instruments. String instruments are affected only to the extent that they produce a different sound, which was the result of their different method of construction and their use of gut strings. I can still remember this sound, as gut strings were used at the Vienna Opera as late as the 1930s.
In short, one of the reasons for revisiting these symphonies is the instruments. I have also gone back to the sources and re-examined everything. Unlike other conductors, I don’t cultivate a particular repertory. For me, every performance is a première.
Of course, this applies to all truly great composers and, indeed, to all great artists, including poets and painters. There is no end to it all. You can never say: "Right, now I understand this piece, now I’ve finally made sense of it."
That’s simply not possible. Ultimately all truly great works of art will always remain a puzzle. They’ll always remain inexplicable. This is because the truly great artist draws on his imagination, which is something that is not accessible to ordinary mortals. Composers like Mozart and Beethoven are playing in a league of their own, which is to say in no league at all. And this means that, as long as I am a musician, I cannot repeat a performance. That’s simply not possible. Others may be able to do so, but I can’t. I think that the most I can hope for is to come a little closer to the mystery.
It also has to do with the question of whether it is possible to achieve your goals. I’m convinced that the only person who can achieve his goals is the one who doesn’t have any. If you have a goal that you achieve, what kind of a goal is it? And what are you supposed to do for the rest of your life? And so, at best, a goal is only ever just attainable. And that in itself is a lot. And if you tackle the same goal twenty years later, then it’s possible that you’ll get a millimetre closer to it. That’s why it will never be possible to present music definitively you’ll never achieve ultimate perfection. For me, the mere use of the word “perfection” means something is wrong, because nothing can ever be perfect.
Another important question is the one relating to tempo. Many of Beethoven’s scores contain metronome markings that have been handed down from one generation to the next, but Beethoven himself did not enter them in his scores. Beethoven was deaf. Yet it was important to him that his works should be played at the right tempo. The inventor Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who also made him his hearing aids - including a kind of cone for the piano, so that when he thumped on the keys as loudly as he could, he was able to hear a little of the sound - built a metronome for him. The few original metronomes by Maelzel that have survived are extremely accurate. It’s true that people later claimed that they were inaccurate and looked for a thousand excuses, insisting that Beethoven’s metronome markings are wrong. Beethoven held metronome sessions with his pupils. He would play through completed works at the piano and they adjusted the metronome accordingly. But questions remain: did Beethoven’s pupils take their readings from above or below the metronome’s adjustable slide? This makes a huge difference. If you look at the top edge of the slide, it indicates a much slower tempo than if you look at the bottom edge. In a number of passages, it is clear that the wrong edge of the slide was used.
And then there is another important point: Beethoven cannot have played a lot of his music in this way, since the piano’s ability to repeat a note is limited. The old pianos were very smooth-running in the manner of a well-oiled motor and could repeat notes with considerable ease, so if Beethoven went beyond this limitation in a theme where such repetition is necessary, then we’re forced to conclude that he can have meant only every second beat. Also, every tempo is dependent on the hall or venue. In a small room with a piano, a particular tempo may be absolutely logical and correct, but in a larger space, with a string quartet, the “same” tempo is between one  and two notches slower because any given tempo seems slower on a piano than it does with a string quartet. The larger the hall and the bigger the ensemble, the slower the tempo when measured by the metronome, even though the music gives the impression that it is being played at exactly the same speed. But Beethoven also said something that is only very rarely quoted, namely, that a metronome tempo can be valid for only the first seven bars. The big question, then, is how the rest of the piece unfolds. This question is answered, indirectly, by the slow movement of the Second Symphony. We have a very detailed account of Beethoven’s performance of this movement, which reveals where he became quicker and where he got slower and by how much. And when we return to the original key from the opening of the movement, we also return to the original tempo. I tried this out when we performed the Second Symphony at our first Beethoven concert. We couldn’t believe it. You sense that it’s completely logical and entirely natural. Before the concert I read out the relevant letter from Beethoven, because otherwise people would have said that I was simply being wilful. But it was Beethoven who was being wilful! And we are just trying to follow in his footsteps - always at the risk of misunderstanding him.
The Fourth Symphony continues to be very underrated. The First and the Second are simply different - they are the work of the young Beethoven. Starting with the “Eroica” you find the genuine, wild and eccentric Beethoven. I’m speaking now of contemporary reviews and reactions, some of which are really very harsh in the tone that they adopted. The only symphony that is said to be unlike the Third or Fifth or Seventh is the Fourth. Even at the time, it was felt that it was not so wilfully unconventional in terms of its structure not so determined to offend its listeners’ expectations - this, after all, is what Beethoven was criticized for. Thank God, I have to say. But this attitude also stems from the fact that people have never really understood this piece. It’s interesting, I think, that Schumann, who lived not long afterwards, felt that the Fourth was the most significant of Beethoven’s symphonies. Presumably it is simply a symphony to which Beethoven brought all of his musical knowledge and understanding. In terms of his compositional method, he could be said to have been charting his familiar course here, and one has the feeling that his inspiration was poetry, very poetic verse. I believe that the Fourth offers us an unexpectedly high number of associations and images. Here listeners will strike it lucky depending on their own understanding of art. The start of the symphony resembles the beginning of Haydn’s The Creation with its depiction of Chaos, and here Beethoven prescribes a course that we need to follow as far as the final movement, which a number of commentators have likened to Smetana’s Vltava - its precursor, as it were, as a great river flowing through lovely countryside, then suddenly passing through wild gorges and waterfalls. Interestingly this comparison was made not just by one listener but by several. This was the view of highly sensitive music-lovers for whom music was a necessity. For them, it was perfectly clear that with his Fourth Symphony Beethoven was tilling a completely different field from the one found in the Third. A century later, the strange, unorthodox symphonies were regarded as the great ones, and we have long since grown used to this idea. But it’s a completely different experience - to hear what you are expecting to hear. For example: "Today, I am going to hear the Fifth." I sometimes tell the audience that they simply don’t know the work. And I have to tell myself, too, that it is new, even though I know it very well, having been carrying it around inside me for almost sixty years. After my first Beethoven cycle in Graz, a woman in the audience said: "That was indeed Beethoven, but it wasn’t our Beethoven." The woman was right, she’d heard correctly.
In the case of the Fifth Symphony there is something grotesque about the way it has come to be regarded as the quintessential symphony. I say this because it is arguably the one non-symphony of them all. It is a symphony that starts off with no theme at all - the tatata-taa isn’t a theme, after all. Now, just imagine living in Beethoven’s day and this motif hits you in the solar plexus. And, what’s more, in C minor. You wonder what’s going on, what’s going to happen next. What can it be? "Fate is knocking at the door" - that’s so sweet! It’s believed to have been Beethoven’s secretary, Anton Schindler, who said this afterwards, but he said so many things that he didn’t understand. You shouldn’t believe every word that issues from the lips of those people who associate with men of genius. So, let’s have no more talk of fate knocking on the door. If fate knocks on the door, then the house collapses. But for me, the nub of the work is the shift from C minor to C major and the fact that it starts in C minor, leaving listeners to wander around in the tragedy of the first three movements and creating a kind of development before C major suddenly bursts out of it. This in itself is mysterious and incredible. At our concerts we placed great visual emphasis on the fact that Beethoven introduces a number of new instruments in this C major section. He scores the symphony for the usual orchestral forces, but then, in the final movement, which emerges from the third, he adds three trombones, a piccolo and a contrabassoon. Exactly what kind of a piccolo he didn’t say: he just expected you to know. With the exception of the contrabassoon, these are instruments associated with outdoor music. It was clear to me even as a very young man that in this symphony it is not a question of someone beating on the door from the outside but of a door being opened from the inside and allowing the occupants to go out on to a large balcony, taking the symphony outside with them. In short, it’s outdoor music. It’s interesting that, at the first performance in Paris, Napoleonic soldiers who were in the audience are said to have shouted: "Vive l’Empereur!" They immediately saw this work in a political light, as an act of liberation, a great victory. To that extent I have to say that for me this is Beethoven’s only political symphony. It deals with repression - it was a part of the age, of course: people felt a desire for freedom. The French Revolution had left the whole of Europe and America in turmoil.
For me, the second movement is a prayer, heard in multiple variations. And this movement allows you to see if the musicians playing it understand the language and whether they are saying anything with it. Here need is expressed in a language that includes commas and caesuras and that has highs and lows.
I am of the view that all of the repeats are essential for the work’s overall structure, which explains why we decided to include the substantial repeat in the third movement. Audiences no longer expect this repeat, this "How it was earlier". And, pow! I’m back there again. It is a case of being thrown back to an earlier point, like a
flashback in the cinema.
Today I have reached the stage where in works of this period I give special emphasis to every General Pause in the score. I have often been criticized for what is felt to be the excessive length of these rests in the whole orchestra, but the question is whether there is any good music in which tempi are ruthlessly maintained from first to last. This isn’t even the case in dance music. There is always something that recalls a speech or a conversation. In dances, too, there is always a reaching back - everyone who has ever driven a post into the ground knows that, in order to do this, you have to raise the mallet high in the air and that this takes a little longer. You can’t just bash it in - "wallop!" - but need a moment to prepare. This gesture of drawing back is an indication of the strength of the blow - in other words, if I have to include a particularly powerful blow in the music, I shall always draw back a little beforehand. The old theorists mention this, but unfortunately it is no longer taught, and most musicians now rattle through the music as if there were no caesuras in our language, no commas. Right up until Beethoven’s day and even later, an important chapter in any theory of music was the "doctrine of caesuras". And if I’m not in complete command of this doctrine - and Beethoven himself said that, without a command of musical rhetoric, he could not compose music - then I cannot understand it either. What does rhetoric mean in this context? It means: what is an upbeat? Where is the stress? If every note is stressed the same, nothing emerges from it. For a true jazz musician, this is perfectly clear. Now I often have to tell singers that they should study Sinatra because at present they are singing everything strictly in time - "in time" in the worst sense: that is, like a metronome.
This also means that the final chords cannot be taken metronomically, the forte blocks with the trombones, horns and trumpets - effectively the entire brass. Time and again it is three bars, one note fortissimo. Beethoven cannot have meant these blocks to be part of the dynamics of the piece. He always added an extra fortissimo, even if he had already included a fortissimo marking, so the result is a roar, a note that roars. This should shake the listener, it should seize the listener by the throat. Or, as E. T. A. Hoffmann put it in his famous review of the Fifth in 1810: "They act like a fire that is thought to have been put out but repeatedly bursts forth again in bright tongues
of flame." This is basically the opening-up of a future that we feel will be a glorious one. But how this future will actually turn out we don’t yet know.