Short answers, pulled from the story.
Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 premiered on the 22nd of December 1808 at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. The concert consisted entirely of Beethoven premieres and lasted more than four hours, with Beethoven directing the performance himself.
Beethoven dedicated Symphony No. 5 to two of his patrons, Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky. Their names appeared in the first printed edition, published in April 1809.
The meaning of the four-note opening motif is contested. Anton Schindler, Beethoven's secretary, claimed Beethoven called it "Fate knocking at the door," but Schindler is widely considered an unreliable source who is believed to have forged entries in Beethoven's conversation books. Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny offered a different account, saying the pattern came from a yellow-hammer's song Beethoven heard in Vienna's Prater-park.
A typical performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 lasts around 30-40 minutes. The work is in four movements, with the first movement being the shortest of all Beethoven's symphonic first movements.
The finale of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 was the first time a piccolo and contrabassoon were used in a symphony. Three trombones also join the orchestra at the start of the finale, after being silent through the first three movements, though the Swedish composer Joachim Nicolas Eggert had used trombones in a symphony in 1807.
The BBC prefaced its wartime broadcasts to Special Operations Executives with the symphony's opening four-note motif played on drums, a practice suggested by intelligence agent Courtenay Edward Stevens. The motif corresponds to the Morse code letter V, which aligned with the Allies' "V for Victory" campaign that Winston Churchill began promoting in 1940.