In March of 1823, Ludwig van Beethoven sat down at his desk in Vienna not to compose a new piece, but to write a fan letter. The recipient was Luigi Cherubini, an Italian composer who had made his home in Paris since the 1780s, where he was a fixture on the city’s opera scene. What occasioned the letter was Beethoven’s own “Missa Solemnis”: he had just finished the work, and was looking for opportunities to have it performed abroad. But while he wrote a few composers and friends about this new mass that spring, to Cherubini, he added a personal message:

“True art is immortal; and the true artist finds full satisfaction and pleasure in the true and great creations of the mind. And so I too am enchanted every time I hear about one of your new compositions, and I am as interested in your works as I am in my own” (source).

Beethoven and Cherubini weren’t friends, but the two had met once before, in 1805, when Cherubini was in Vienna to premiere one of his operas. The meeting was brusque by all accounts, but this could have been due to some awkwardness on Beethoven’s part: at that time, Beethoven was struggling to complete his own opera, “Fidelio,” and he had been using Cherubini’s 1797 opera “Médée” as one of his models. Years later, when asked who the greatest living composer was, Beethoven reportedly offered Cherubini’s name. 

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This affection serves as the main jumping off point for this new album from conductor Enrico Onofri and the Munich Chamber Orchestra, which explores the parallels between Beethoven’s symphonies and the works of his Italian contemporaries — and particularly the Italians who had been active in France. It presents fresh interpretations of Beethoven’s Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies alongside works by Cherubini, Gioachino Rossini and Gaspare Spontini. 

On this three-disc set, Cherubini is represented by his only symphony, a work commissioned in 1815 by the same Royal Philharmonic Society in London that tried to commission Beethoven’s Ninth. It also includes the overture to Cherubini’s opera “Médée,” which had such a strong impact on Beethoven’s music — and may have even been the source of a theme in his “Pathetique” piano sonata:

As the most popular composer in Europe in the 1820s, Rossini was an unavoidable topic of conversation, although Beethoven tried to avoid meeting Rossini when the Italian paid a visit to his home in 1822. On this occasion, the praise went the other direction, with Rossini professing his love for Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony No. 3. On this album, Onofri brings out the Beethovenian fire in Rossini’s overture to his very last opera, “William Tell,” which premiered in Paris in 1829:

Gaspare Spontini was another in the long line of Italians who found success in Paris, moving there in 1805. But that success came to an end for Spontini with the 1819 premiere of his opera “Olimpie,” a vaguely monarchist work centering on the struggle to succeed Alexander the Great. Beethoven himself reportedly said the opera “made a lot of noise,” thanks in no small part to its expanded brass section, but it also had a certain Beethovenian intensity to it, as the overture shows: 

The Beethoven recordings on this album won’t appeal to everyone’s taste. These three symphonies became iconic during the romantic era, and the emotionally charged interpretations from that era, particularly of the Fifth, have held sway for more than a century. But Onofri tries to sweep all that away on this album, and place these symphonies within the same continuum as the Italian works from Beethoven’s time. The results will seem brisk, but this is a valid way to hear Beethoven without the baggage of the intervening years: 

The Munich Chamber Orchestra performs on modern instruments (mostly), but the lessons learned from the period instruments movement of the last half century are clearly in evidence. The orchestra also responds magnificently to the challenges of Onofri’s interpretations. “Beethoven and the Italians” is out now on the Harmonia Mundi label, and it’s collected as a playlist on YouTube.