35 Complete Sets of Beethoven Symphonies on Spotify

Recordings are sorted chronologically, click links below for reviews:

Weingartner 1927-38, Furtwangler 1942-44,  Furtwangler 1948-54,  Scherchen 1951-54, Karajan 1951-1955, Toscanini 1950s,  Jochum 1950s, Krips late 1950s, Szell 1957-67,  Walter 1958-63, Karajan 1963, Bernstein 1960s, Jochum, 1967-69, Solti, early 1970s, Bernstein 1970s, Karajan, 1975-77, Ferencsik 1970s, Hogwood, 1980s,  Wand 1985-88, Muti 1980-1992, Karajan mid-1980s, Abbado 1986, Solti 1986-89, Masur late 1980s - early 1990s Harnoncourt 1991, Gardiner 1994, Haitink 1990s, Davis 1990s, Barenboim 1999, Abbado 2000, Abbado 2001, Hickox, 2004, Nelson 2006, Pletnev 2007, Tremblay 2010, Krivine 2011.

Spotify is silently making huge progress on converting their library to 320 kbps, 27 of the 34 sets (one is not available in the UK)  are already available in HQ. See log file here.

Here's the Spotify playlist: Beethoven Symphonies Box-sets (35 tracks, total time: 9 hours). It features the opening movement of the Eroica symphony from every set. Use Ctrl (CMD)+G to browse.

I left out some low-budget, outdated recordings, there's no point to spend time on them when you can get most of the other "full price" recordings on Spotify. There's also numerous individual recordings of outstanding Beethoven symphony performances on Spotify, like Kleiber's 7th and Casals' 8th, but we cannot include them here in this index for complete sets.

For American users, only 17 sets are currently available in your place, please uncheck "Hide unplayable tracks" in preferences if you want to browse the full list.

Lastly, a great free ebook: On the performance of Beethoven's symphonies (1900) by Weingartner.

Beethoven Complete Chronological Catalogue on Spotify

 "People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet." - Witold Lutoslawski

With more than 300 subscribers, Beethoven Op.1-138 is the most popular playlist on this site to date. Arranging works by opus numbers makes the playlist look neat, and it presents Beethoven's major works by publication orders. But it is nowhere near a satisfactory presentation of Beethoven's artistic development. Publication dates are not always consistent with completion dates - Op.103 was finished earlier than Op.1, and Piano Concerto No.2 is actually No.1, to name just a few. More importantly, hundreds of works, including most of his youthful compositions in Bonn, bear no opus numbers. Many of them are crucial to the understanding of how Beethoven found his own voice(no, he wasn't simply Born This Way…dressing like an idiot or becoming Beethoven are both lifestyle choices). Death of a hero, the prime component of his musical vocabulary, made it first appearance in a Bonn composition, the Joseph Cantata, WoO (Works Without Opus-number) 87, on which Brahms wrote:

"Even if there were no name on the title page none other could be conjectured—it is Beethoven through and through! The beautiful and noble pathos, sublime in its feeling and imagination, the intensity, perhaps violent in its expression, moreover the voice leading and declamation, and in the two outside sections all the characteristics which we may observe in and associate with his later works." 

The music played at Beethoven's funeral is a choir arrangement of the little known WoO 30, and, his "greatest hit" Für Elise is a WoO too.

In an attempt to chronologically order all of Beethoven's musical output in Spotify, I compiled another playlist based on the Biamonti Catalogue. Some other sources were also consulted, including Beethoven Reference Site's Works by Date page, and the books I have. The six quartets of Opus 18 are arranged as 3,1,2,5,4,6, according to Maynard Solomon's biography. Both versions of Fidelio are included, as well as various arrangements done the composer himself, and the "realized" Symphony No.10. The Op.130 string quartet ends with its original finale,The Grosse Fugue. And the new finale, the last finished movement of Beethoven is the penultimate track of this playlist.  The end result is a fascinating journey from 1782 (Dressler Variations WoO 63 by a 12-year-Beethoven) to 1826 (surviving piano score of a unfinished string quintet, his last musical thought). Not every piece is a masterwork, but, excepts for a few dances and blockbusters written just for the money, all the pieces matter.

Here's the Spotify playlist: Beethoven: Complete Chronological Catalogue (1155 tracks, total time: 4 days) It may work better in Album view (easier to tell one piece from another). I will keep on updating it as I continue reading on Beethoven, and if you find any error or omission, please leave a comment. For beginners, there's a helpful Naxos audiobook on Spotify: Life And Works: Beethoven.

Update (2011/12/16):  Playlist has been updated, now most tracks are also available on Spotify USA.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Opus 1-138

Update: I compiled a more comprehensive Beethoven Complete Chronological Catalogue, and stopped updating this one.

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I made my Spotify playlist of Beethoven last week. It's great to see Spotify offers so many great recordings of LvB's works, and I had to restrain myself to selecting only one interpretation for every composition, otherwise the playlist would stretch for miles. Here's the principles that shaped this playlist:

1, The diversity. There's no such thing as the definite Moonlight sonata, and I hope this playlist could also function as a Beethoven index on Spotify, so I tried to include as many excellent interpretations as possible. For example, for Symphony No.1 I chose Wand's RCA recording for the vivid young spirit, Harnoncourt's No.2 for its thought provoking manner, Walter's Eroica for its sublime humanity, Gardiner's 4th for the blazing energy, Klemperer's 5th for the heaviest sound of fortune's wheel ever captured on wax, Karajan's Pastoral for the sheer beauty, Solti's 7th for its swing, Vänskä's 8th for the dynamics and buoyancy, and Furtwängler's 9th for it's the second coming of Beethoven himself. For the piano sonatas, we've got, among others, Gilels's Hammerklavier, Arrau's Appassionata, Pollini's Moonlight, Horowitz's Waldstein, and, IMHO the greatest recording of Op.109-111 from Richter.

2, The sound quality. Personally I listen to a lot of mono recordings from old masters like Edwin Fischer and Cortot, and if you want to know the Beethoven piano sonatas you really should know Schnabel's recording from the 1930s. But the aim of this playlist is mainly to present Beethoven's works in descent sound quality that will please most classical listeners, so I chose mostly stereo recordings. Only one sonata by Schnabel so that you can find his complete set at ease.

3, The opus numbers. You can find many complete sets of Beethoven's symphonies, chamber works etc. on Spotify, so I didn't sort this playlist by genre, but simply followed the order of the opus numbers. And I didn't include any of the WoOs here, so no Für Elise:) All the WoOs might be another playlist someday.

OK, here's the Spotify playlist of Ludwig van Beethoven: Op. 1-138 (632 tracks, 2.8 days) And this is the wiki page for the list of works.

I hope it will help you to enjoy LvB's music. To me, I absolutely adore him, but also afraid to come to him too close. He is like the Kurosawa of music, the man of men with incomparable genius, moral integrity and the earth-shattering power. Every time I put on a Kurosawa film, I carefully prepared to be knocked down beforehand. Beethoven is the same for me, only more frightful because he was deaf:)

András Schiff: Complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas and Lectures

"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years." - William F. Buckley, Jr

Life is even better when you can get access to hundreds of different interpretations of Beethoven sonatas through Spotify:)

Schiff's complete piano sonatas on ECM, together with Paul Lewis's magnificent set on Harmonia Mundi (which is sadly not available on Spotify at this moment), are among the very best Beethoven recordings I've ever heard. Temperamentally Schiff is close to Edwin Fischer, who made the first, and still my favourite complete recording of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and Lewis more close to, of course, his mentor Alfred Brendel, whose fourth(!) complete Beethoven piano sonatas on Philips in the late 90s is perhap the best stereo set. The sound quality of Schiff and Lewis' sets is admirable.

Here's the playlist, to be more precisely, the search result for Schiff's set on Spotify:

http://open.spotify.com/search/label%3aecm+schiff+beethoven+piano+sonatas

Here's Schiff's 32 lectures on the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas, available on the Guardian:

http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/page/0,,1943867,00.html

Happy listening:)