Philharmonic Society of New-York Public Rehearsal: 13th

Event Information

Venue(s):
Academy of Music

Conductor(s):
Theodore Eisfeld

Price: $.50

Event Type:
Orchestral

Record Information

Status:
Published

Last Updated:
10 May 2013

Performance Date(s) and Time(s)

25 Mar 1865, 3:00 PM

Program Details



Performers and/or Works Performed

2)
Composer(s): Beethoven

Citations

1)
Advertisement: New-York Times, 24 March 1865.

2)
Advertisement: New York Herald, 25 March 1865.

3)
: Strong, George Templeton. New-York Historical Society. The Diaries of George Templeton Strong, 1863-1869: Musical Excerpts from the MSs, transcribed by Mary Simonson. ed. by Christopher Bruhn., 25 March 1865.

     “At Philharmonic Rehearsal 3 p.m. - Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (the Choral) of which I have not heard a note for about five years.  A rough performance.  Tho. Eisfeld was not extreme to mark what was amiss.  The raps of his baton in the repetition of an ill-rendered passage were many.  So many that the orchestra spent an hour and fifty minutes on the Symphony, tho they skipped all the long passages of melodic plain sailing that immediately precede the ‘Marcia’ subdivision of the 4th movement.  On the whole this great but unequal work gained on use.  Its demerits were more distinctly visible but its merits still more.  Never before did I fully recognize the vigor and dash of the second movement, or the noble gravity – the serious sweetness of the Third.  That movement is unmatched.  To use it seems to embody the sentiment of – ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of this past’ etc., etc.  Could Milton have heard it when he was writing the Penseroso, he would have made that poem even more precious than it is.  But had Mozart been resuscitated and sitting with me this afternoon, I think we would have shuddered and shivered and exhibited severe distress at certain times in the 1st and 2nd movements.  The introduction to the 4th would have given him an attack of cholera.”