Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 - Abendroth

These six discs are from a collector in Dresden who found them in a flea market. If this recording spent its early time in the city in which it was found, this means that it likely survived the 1945 firebombing of Dresden. The discs are well-preserved; but, they appear in a few places as though they have a past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing... In a parallel sense, the surviving witnesses for what actually happens in "total war" on the unimaginable scale of a conflict such as World War II have become very few at this point in time. And this also applies to those nameless individuals who produced a remarkable recording such as this one in a time which had much the opposite to do with the "life-force" present in Brahms' remarkable work. But Brahms' First Symphony is remarkable in the history of music only because it falls into a category of artworks which have been called "autonomous art"; that is, such works stand completely apart from the time and culture from which they came ... and the "life force" of what has been called autonomous art IS an entirely different entity from that of the material, everyday world around us. The proof of what I'm saying lies in the fact that anyone continues to devote any attention to "useless" artworks which don't necessarily coincide with whatever "present" holds most of the focus – especially in a mass society such as we now inhabit. Perhaps the "usefulness" of autonomous art is that it embodies what true "freedom" comes down to: unconditioned being-in-the-world; a state which relies not on what society with its political / economic leaders conceive – but one which solely bases itself on its own laws of being true to its own nature. At any rate, it is not for nothing that fundamentalist and / or myth-driven societies such as ours and political dictatorships alike have always profoundly mistrusted a thing such as autonomous art (... and in this regard especially, nothing ever really changes in our social / cultural / political worlds completely independent of how sophisticated we become, for example, in realms such as technology and science). An autonomous artist once summed it up in these words: "The leaders professed to be a good god and misused artists to dance for the entertainment of the people [...] and woe to the art that will not be prepared to put the image of their leader in their mirror. This leader most of all fears that the mirror does not reflect him." – Kazimir Malevich from the essay: "Art" ["Iskusstvo"], 1924. (my translation) [Note: a "leader" can be a single "individual at the top," but – to an equal extent – a social and / or democratic majority.] These are only a few of the reasons why we should think twice about throwing away things from the past as "outdated" such as this recording of Brahms' First Symphony; discarding things either literally OR figuratively according to the myth of progress or an unswerving allegiance to the "ever-new"; things we have difficulty "relating to" due to the unsparing thoroughness of our immediate social / cultural / technological conditioning. There may well come a point when we need these unfashionable relics in the event that fortune takes a turn in an unforseen direction in which our "modernity" is finally not as useful for us as we'd hoped it to be; a place where we need a different perspective from the one our culture has handed to us. Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (1876) I. Un poco sostenuto – Allegro II. Andante sostenuto III. Un poco Allegretto e grazioso IV. Adagio – Più Andante – Allegro non troppo ma con brio – Più Allegro Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Hermann Abendroth (Odeon, recorded 1941) 78 rpm transfers