Nothing can be more contradictory to this heading than the tempo marking of 60. This is probably a case of “my tempi are valid for the first bars, as feeling and expression must have their own tempo”, or “Why do they annoy me by asking for my tempi? Either they are good musicians and ought to know to play my music, or they are bad musicians and in that case my indications would be of no avail”. Anyway, Furtwängler adopts a real adagio molto (Hermann Abendroth is even slower) without losing sight of the melodic line. Thus, he can draw from the strings’ half-notes of the first variation (4/4), or the dotted-half of the 2nd variation (12/8), the wonderfully unique cantabile requested by Beethoven, which only sounds much too fast if one conforms to the markings of 60, unless he puts on a lot of mannerisms and false sentiments, which makes the matter only worse…

In the 1942 version, the listener is struck by the incredible slow tempo of the exposition (bars 2 to 18). Later on, for the 16 bars on the first variation, as well as for their equivalent in the second, his tempo moves on slightly faster. By 1951 (Bayreuth) Furtwängler seems to have re-thought his vision, and delivers all three passages at almost exactly the same pace. The quasi-religious meditation of the Berlin performance is replaced by a perfect coherence of tempi in the more lyrical Bayreuth one. This example is proposed by the overlapping of the theme and the two variations, and again variation 1→ 2.

A comparison, by fade-ins and fade-outs, is made here between the master’s beautiful cantabile and the mannerisms of a “sentimental” conductor.

We come now to the Andante, where the general characteristics proper to each performance are unmistakable. I would advise the listener to make a personal comparative audition of all three performances of this celestial theme. For beauty’s sake, here is the 1942 Berlin andante, where Furtwängler seems to pray as he has never prayed before.

In this “Sehnsucht” or quest for an object or deity worthy of worship, there comes the great moment of the movement. Where most people see a divine apparition, Schenker merely points out this passage as being only the entrance into the subdominant! (“Bedeutet also nichts weiter als die in den Kadenzen übliche Wendung zur Unterdominante”). Subdominant let it be!, but this is where Furtwängler has the courage to request from the low strings that they play their D-flat fortissimo. Yet again another visionary foreshadowing of the deity with the same chord progression underlining the “Und der Cherub steht vor Gott!”

Anyone desirous of having a perfect idea of Furtwängler’s vision of the third movement has only to turn to the following passage in the coda which recapitulates wonderfully the “Sehnsucht”  and the necessary return to humility and love.