The "Nicolai Concert" (named after the orchestra's founder) is the highlight of the Vienna Philharmonic's symphonic season. And traditionally, Furtwängler would perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony there. The concert on 12 February 1950 (preceded the day before by a public dress rehearsal and a concert for the Young Musicians) took a completely different turn. The programme he chose could have been that of any other concert: Beethoven's Eroica following Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, preceded by the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor (BWV 542), performed on the Musikverein organ by Franz Schütz. The reason for this is clear: the Bach Year was just beginning.
Why did it come to this? A very serious incident occurred between Furtwängler and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the influential association that also owned the Singverein, Vienna's finest choral society, which supported major musical events, notably Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It would take too long to explain here the reasons for the quarrel between the conductor and the Gesellschaft, in which Karajan's name is involved.
Nevertheless, from that day onwards, concerts featuring a choir will be performed by the conductor with the services of the rival ensemble, the Singakademie. This choir can be heard in several of Beethoven's Ninth (1951, 1952, 1953), in Brahms' Deutsches Requiem (1951) and in Saint Matthew Passion (1952 and 1954).
Here is a PDF facsimilé of the programme, one of the 75 programmes now available.
