March 10, 2025
TOKYO – Scores used at the first full performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 “Choral” by Japanese musicians in late 1924 have been recently discovered in the Nanki Music Library, a collection of about 20,000 prized materials on classical music. The collection is owned by the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra and is currently deposited with Wakayama Prefecture.
This is an important discovery that sheds light on how Western music was received in Japan in the early 20th century.
Annotated pages
Items in the Nanki collection were gathered mainly in Europe by Yorisada Tokugawa (1892-1954), the 16th head of the Kishu Tokugawa family, using his own money. He is known for having worked hard to introduce Western music to Japan. Among the collection are many precious materials, such as manuscripts by Beethoven. During and after World War II, the collection changed hands several times before coming into the possession of the YNSO in 1977. In 2017, it was entrusted to Wakayama Prefecture, where it is now kept at the Wakayama Prefectural Library.
The first performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 “Choral” in Japan by Japanese musicians at the Tokyo Music School in 1924. PHOTO: CONTRIBUTED//THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN
The recent discoveries in the collection are scores for about 150 parts of the symphony, including the ones for the orchestra and the bass of the choir. Close examination of the parts, together with other materials, found that about 70 of the parts were actually used at three performances of the symphony at the Sogakudo concert hall of the Tokyo Music School (a predecessor of the Tokyo University of the Arts) on Nov. 29, Nov. 30 and Dec. 6, 1924.
The concerts were conducted by Gustav Kron, a German musician who taught at the school at the time. Members of the orchestra and the chorus were the school’s teachers, students and graduates. The concertmaster was Ko Ando, a sister of novelist Rohan Koda and a leading Japanese violinist before the war who honed her skills in Germany.
The concerts were much talked about and greeted with rave reviews. It was a big success for what is often regarded as Beethoven’s greatest work to be performed by Japanese musicians for the first time. The performances also led to the postwar custom of orchestras in Japan playing the symphony at the end of the year.
Among the scores that have been discovered are those Tokugawa ordered from a music publisher in New York and those that were copied by hand in Japan based on U.S. copies. The pages contain annotations, such as the names of the performers who used the parts and notes they jotted down during rehearsals, in addition to corrections of mistakes made during the copying process. Such writing reflects diligent and meticulous preparation for the concerts.
The symphony’s Japanese premiere in 1918 was played by Germans who had been prisoners of war during World War I. That performance took place at a prisoner-of-war camp in Tokushima Prefecture. Tokugawa, aiming to have the symphony played by his countrymen, visited the camp in August that year and listened to the Germans play the symphony’s first movement, which apparently renewed his determination for a performances by Japanese musicians.
Rare historical materials
“There are very few source materials that tell us about orchestral performances [in Japan] before or during the Taisho era [1912-26],” said musicologist Yoshio Miyama, a professor emeritus of Keio University who is involved in research on the Nanki collection. “The discovered scores give us an important clue as to what kind of performance it actually was when the Ninth Symphony was first played [by Japanese musicians] in 1924. They are also significant in that they will let us explore the origin of the popularity of the Ninth Symphony in subsequent years.”
Examinations and studies of music materials in the Nanki collection are still underway. Some of the materials are digitalized and can be viewed on the library’s official website (https://www.lib.wakayama-c.ed.jp/nanki/index.html).They are also regularly exhibited at the Wakayama Prefectural Library.