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Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67
In a review of the Fifth Symphony published in 1810, E. T. A.
Hoffmann wrote that Beethoven "unlocks the marvelous realm of the
infinite," "awakens that endless longing that is the essence of
Romanticism," and "surrenders himself to the inexpressible." By
contemporary standards, the Fifth was a pathetic work, full of passion,
and a sublime work, unrestrained by conventional notions of
beauty, order, and good taste. This is no half-hour's pleasant
entertainment, but an elevated, edifying, sometimes disturbing,
ultimately uplifting musical drama-a quintessential expression of
Beethoven's world- view.
In all four movements Beethoven
plays fast and loose with Classical conventions, yet his forms are as
logical and organic as they are unpredictable. Note, for instance, his
near-obsessive developing of the famous four-note motif with which the
piece begins ("Thus Fate knocks at the door!" he supposedly remarked of
that motif); the result is a dense, driven first movement in which
tension accumulates steadily and finally explodes in furious
convulsions. The four movements form a unified cycle, with much of the
work's dramatic weight thrown onto the brassy, celebratory finale,
which resolves and transcends the musical argument of the previous
movements. (Militaristic episodes in the marchlike slow movement seem
to look ahead to the finale.) Beethoven links the finale directly to
the third movement (a scherzo in all but name) with a tense,
dramatically charged transition, and later inserts a ghostly
recollection of the scherzo in the middle of the finale, casting a
momentary shadow over the prevailing mood of triumph.
The
massive, often clangorous scoring of the Fifth was much indebted to the
"public" music of the French Revolution and to the operas of Gluck. The
woodwinds and brass often evoke band music, especially in the finale,
where Beethoven employs several instruments associated with the
military: piccolo, contrabassoon, trombone. It is perhaps no
coincidence that by the time the symphony was completed, in the spring
of 1808, Austria was at war with Napoleon's France (though admittedly
Beethoven began sketching it as early as 1804).
The Fifth had its première as part of a long all-Beethoven program, conducted by the composer, on December 22, 1808.
Inadequately
rehearsed and fraught with problems, the concert ran for four hours in
a freezing-cold hall, and not surprisingly the music, all of it new to
Vienna, had a mixed reception. Posterity, to say the least, has been
kinder to it.
Programme Note by Kevin Bazzana
© Copyright 2010 Toronto Symphony Orchestra