There is a moment near the end of the fourth movement — the choral explosion, the one you’ve heard in a hundred films and half as many commercials — where Karajan simply gets out of the way and lets the Berlin Philharmonic become something larger than itself.
Most conductors fight that passage. Karajan surrenders to it.
The 1963 Recording
This is the one. Not the 1962 studio sessions alone, not the various live Salzburg broadcasts, but the 1962–63 Deutsche Grammophon recording made at the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin, the same Dahlem church where DG captured so much of the Philharmonic’s golden-era catalog. The hall’s long, warm reverb tail suits Beethoven in a way that a drier acoustic never quite can — you need that bloom, that sense of the orchestra occupying real physical space, breathing in a real room.
Balance engineer Günter Hermanns placed the microphones with the kind of restraint that was already going out of fashion. What you hear is an orchestra, not a collection of sections. The strings don’t leap out at you. The brass don’t crowd the picture. Everything sits in relation to everything else, the way Beethoven actually wrote it.
The soloists — Gundula Janowitz, Hilde Rössel-Majdan, Waldemar Kmentt, and Walter Berry — were drawn from the Vienna orbit, which is to say they understood this music from inside the tradition rather than approaching it as repertoire. Berry’s bass-baritone on the Freude theme still sounds like a man announcing something he personally believes.
What Karajan Actually Did Here
He was forty-four at the time of these sessions, still physically conducting — the spinal problems that would later force him to conduct with minimal arm movement hadn’t yet closed off that vocabulary. You can hear the physicality in the orchestra’s response. The first movement has genuine menace in it, that long orchestral buildup from near-silence not played as atmosphere but as structural argument.
The Scherzo is taken faster than you expect and held together tighter than you think possible. Timpanist Werner Thärichen, who was famously difficult with Karajan on philosophical grounds and eventually wrote a book criticizing him, plays those opening rhythmic cells with a precision that borders on aggression.
The slow movement — Adagio molto e cantabile — is where the argument about Karajan either wins or loses for you. He takes it broad and warm, the strings playing with a cushioned, unified tone that some find gorgeous and others find too comfortable. I find it gorgeous. The movement is marked molto cantabile for a reason, and Karajan sings it.
And then the finale. The double basses opening with that recitative, the orchestra cycling through fragments of the earlier movements and rejecting each one, and then the Ode to Joy theme arriving so quietly you might miss it the first time. Karajan understood that the joke of that passage is the understatement — the most famous melody in Western music introduced like an afterthought.
The RIAS Symphony Chorus was prepared with the kind of discipline that made West Berlin choral culture what it was in those years. They don’t push. They don’t grandstand. They simply sing at the level the music requires, which turns out to be enormous.
This recording has been remastered several times, and the 2022 Eloquence reissue is worth tracking down on vinyl if you can find it. On streaming, the Original Masters DG version sounds cleaner than you have any right to expect from 1963 tape.
Beethoven wrote this symphony completely deaf. He never heard a note of it in performance. Whatever Karajan did or didn’t do in his life — and there is plenty on the ledger on both sides — he understood that obligation, and here he honored it.