This performance has become a legendary one, as much for the occasion of its happening as for the music-making itself. The re-opening of Wagner's Festival Theatre in Bayreuth in 1951 after the catastrophe of way was nothing if not symbolic. If anything could lay the ghost of Bayreuthhs immediate past, the years from 1930 to 1944 when the theate was run by the English-born, Nazi-worshipping Winifred Wagner, it might be a performance of the Ninth Symphony under the most celebrated of the German conductors who had lived through Nazi rule without being, in any real sense, morally or artistically party to it. Certainly, it is not difficult to think of the slow movement's second subject, unfolded here in a way I have never heard bettered, as an atonement and a benediction.
I wrote at some lenght about the performances in August 1978 when it was reissued on a two-LP set with the First Symphony (HMV mono RLS727—nla); and RL added a judicious note of his ''Quarterly Retrospect'' the following November (page 833). As he noted, not everyone will respond to this vision of the Ninth: as an interpretation it is broadly based, with some slow tempos and some quirky adjustments of pace; though beneath everythin—beneath the gear changes and failures in ensemble—a great current massively flows. The solo vocal and choral work in the finale is electric after the fugato but is breezily, bumpily Teutonic before that; Hans Hopf is his usual restless, hectic self, and Edelmann is no match for Hans Hotter, wisely engaged by Legge for Karajan's famous 1947 78 rpm set of the symphony. Indeed, from 1947 to the present day the finest accounts of the last movement of the Ninth, on and probably off record too, have been prepared and conducted by Karajan whose control of the music is superior to Furtwangler's. But, then, there are things which Furtwangler aims at earlier in the symphony which are not dreamt of in Karajan's, or Haitink's, philosophy.
The CD transfer, a splendid idea in itself, provides some added clarity of image for the generally excellent mono recording; and it also provides an all-important continuity. Instrumental bass frequencies are rather wooden but the recording reproduces higher frequency string, wind, and vocal sound more smoothly than was often the case at this time. Many collectors will be looking to a stereo, digital recording of the Ninth as a CD library acquisition; yet I would be prepared to argue that this performance has a prior, if not ultimate and absolute, claim on collectors' attention. There is no LP or cassette version available.'