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#MUSICAL INFORMATION ABOUT BEETHOVEN 7TH SYMPHONY FULL#

The brilliant energy of the central theme is still audible while it gets passed around and transformed by the orchestra.

Poco sostenuto: After a loooooong introduction, the main ideas of the first movement explode into our ears.

Your browser does not support the audio element. The composer crafted almost the entire symphony from simple dance-like rhythms, evoking wild celebrations and festivals: What made the seventh symphony so popular? I think it's the bright energy and powerful rhythms.īeethoven was known for relying heavily on rhythm to create his music, but the seventh goes further. Now it's definitely time to look at the music itself. At repeat performances in Vienna, listeners would cheer and clap their hands raw for the music which lifted their hopes and reminded them what was worth living for. They even demanded an encore of the beautiful second movement (still the most popular movement from the Beethoven Symphony 7).Īnd the piece never stopped stirring audiences into frenzies. The weary, miserable Viennese audience absolutely loved the symphony's fresh and positive energy. Beethoven himself, already Vienna's most famous composer, conducted (what a concert that must have been!), and the orchestra was packed with the very best musicians and composers of the era. The premiere had to wait until 1813 though, at a charity concert for soldiers wounded at the Battle of Hanau (fought against Napoleon's army).

#MUSICAL INFORMATION ABOUT BEETHOVEN 7TH SYMPHONY FULL#

This one would be full of the joy of life and dance. The rhythms are crisp and vital, the colours gorgeous, the expression intense and broad-ranging, and all is captured in superb recorded sound.Inspired by the tranquility and beauty of his holiday, he set about sketching a new symphony. Riccardo Chailly achieves the near-impossible, combining the classicising insights of period-style performers with the tonal richness and expressive gravity of old-school master interpreters such as Otto Klemperer or Carlos Kleiber. How did Beethoven cope with going deaf?.But ultimately, the Seventh Symphony is testimony to Beethoven’s enduring ability to find energy and hope amidst inner and outer desolation, and as such it’s indispensible. The voluptuous nocturnal world of the Allegretto opens on a minor-key wind chord which, after the glowing A major that ends the first movement, feels like the deft extinguishing of a light.īeethoven expands his tonal universe as never before in a symphony, allowing the bright A major to be continually undermined by a remote (and, in context, darker) F major – if that sounds technical, the effect in performance is fully visceral. Like TS Eliot, Beethoven realised that it is darkness that ‘declares the glory of light’. It isn’t all joyous assertion, of course.

There are times listening to this astonishing finale that one wonders if it wasn’t here that Stravinsky got the idea for the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ from the Rite of Spring – except that it is life, not death, that triumphs. Just before the end, for the first time ever in an orchestral work, Beethoven uses the marking fff – fortississimo: ‘louder than as loud as possible’. Beethoven’s Symphonies: What did the 9th century think?.The wonderful veiled Allegretto that follows is haunted by the same rhythm, the Trio of the scherzo repeats it like a playground game, while the finale is positively possessed by it, right up to the ferocious elation of the final bars. This same pattern pulses expectantly in the audacious sustained one-note transition to the Vivace, then springs to life in its main theme. Just over a minute into the substantial slow introduction, the woodwind intone a rhythmic pattern: DA de-de – in classical metric terms, a ‘dactyl’. Confronted with one particularly obsessive chain of repetitions (possibly the spine-chilling final crescendo in the first movement), Beethoven’s younger contemporary Carl Maria von Weber pronounced him ‘ripe for the madhouse’.īut there’s nothing mad about the way Beethoven draws together the seemingly diverse dance rhythms in this work. The key of A major is often associated with light and buoyancy (Mendelssohn’s Italian, Schubert’s Trout Quintet), but here the sheer physical energy – expressed in dancing muscular rhythms and brilliant orchestration – can, in some performances, border on the unnerving. 7 sounds like what Beethoven would later call a ‘return to life’. Composed after a much-needed restorative spa holiday in 1811, Symphony No.