Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven)

• 1. Introduction

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  Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, opens with four notes that may be the most recognized sound in all of Western music. Short-short-short-long. "Da-da-da-DUM." Whatever you call it, the moment those notes land, something shifts in the listener. People have been calling it "fate knocking at the door" for over two centuries. But is that what Beethoven actually intended? And how did a symphony that premiered under disastrously bad conditions, in a freezing concert hall, with an orchestra that had barely one rehearsal, come to be one of the most performed works in history? The answers run through a decade of interrupted composition, a composer going deaf in his mid-30s, a city occupied by Napoleon's troops, and a critic who would eventually change his mind and beg an orchestra's forgiveness.

• 2. Beethoven's Middle Period

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  Around 1803, Beethoven made a deliberate turn toward works of unprecedented scope. Musicologists call this his Middle Period, and it is marked by a sustained interest in musical heroism. The 3rd Symphony and the opera Fidelio both belong to this era, and the 5th was conceived in the same spirit.

  The first sketches for the 5th date from 1804, right after the 3rd Symphony was finished. Progress was anything but steady. Beethoven set the work aside repeatedly to complete other commissions and projects: the original version of Fidelio, the Appassionata piano sonata, the three Razumovsky string quartets, the Violin Concerto, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, and the Mass in C. The 5th Symphony and the 6th were eventually completed side by side during 1807-1808, and both received their premieres on the same night.

  Beethoven was in his mid-30s during this stretch of work. His personal life was shadowed by encroaching deafness, and the world outside was in upheaval. The Napoleonic Wars were reshaping Europe, Austria was politically destabilized, and Napoleon's troops occupied Vienna in 1805. Beethoven wrote the symphony at his lodgings in the Pasqualati House in Vienna, a detail that places this grand ambition in a very specific, very human address.

• 3. The Concert of 1808

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  On the 22nd of December 1808, Vienna's Theater an der Wien hosted one of the most exhausting concerts in the history of classical music. The programme consisted entirely of Beethoven premieres and ran for more than four hours. Beethoven himself stood at the podium.

  The evening went badly in almost every way. The orchestra had managed only one rehearsal before the performance. At one point during the Choral Fantasy, a performer made a mistake significant enough that Beethoven stopped the music entirely and restarted from the top. The hall was bitterly cold. The audience, worn down by the sheer length of the programme, was in no condition to absorb new and complex work. The critic for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung declined to issue a verdict at all, noting that the pieces were long and difficult, and that proper judgment would have to wait for future performances.

  Beethoven dedicated the symphony to two patrons who had supported his work: Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky. Their names appeared in the first printed edition, which came out in April 1809, a few months after the troubled premiere.

• 4. A Reputation Built Slowly

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  The critic E. T. A. Hoffmann was the first major voice to declare the symphony extraordinary. Writing in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, he offered both lavish praise and close analytical attention, aiming to show readers exactly how Beethoven produced his emotional effects. His essay "Beethoven's Instrumental Music," compiled from a 1810 review and a 1813 piece on the op. 70 string trios and published in three installments in December 1813, described the symphony as "indescribably profound, magnificent." Hoffmann wrote that the work "leads the listener imperiously forward into the spirit world of the infinite" and that "the soul of each thoughtful listener is assuredly stirred, deeply and intimately."

  Even among sophisticated musicians, the symphony's logic took time to register. The distinguished violinist and conductor Johann Peter Salomon, who had brought Joseph Haydn to England and commissioned his final twelve symphonies, famously called it "rubbish" when he first rehearsed it with the Society members. Then, after the first movement of a later rehearsal, he set down his violin and addressed the orchestra directly: "Gentlemen, some years ago I called this symphony rubbish; I wish to retract what I then said. I now consider it one of the great compositions I know."

  The first French performance was led by François-Antoine Habeneck around 1828, with the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. In the United States, it appeared in the inaugural concerts of the New York Philharmonic on the 7th of December 1842, and later in the opening concerts of the National Symphony Orchestra on the 2nd of November 1931. The symphony was first captured on recording by the Odeon Orchestra under Friedrich Kark in 1910. Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler, and Berlioz all acknowledged its influence on their own work.

• 5. Fate, Birdsong, and Mythology

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  Anton Schindler, Beethoven's secretary and personal assistant, claimed that the composer once pointed to the opening bars of the symphony and said: "Thus Fate knocks at the door!" That story, if true, would settle the question of the opening motif's meaning. But Schindler's reliability as a witness is deeply suspect. Experts believe he forged entries in the conversation books that Beethoven relied on after he became too deaf to follow spoken conversation. Schindler also had a well-documented tendency to romanticize everything connected to his famous employer.

  Carl Czerny, who was Beethoven's own pupil and who premiered the Emperor Concerto in Vienna, offered a completely different origin story. He claimed the four-note pattern came not from any idea about fate but from the song of a yellow-hammer Beethoven heard while walking in the Prater-park in Vienna. The music historian Antony Hopkins observed that Czerny's account is almost too mundane to have been invented.

  There is a third thread. Ferdinand Ries, another pupil of Beethoven, is identified in some accounts as the actual author of the "Fate knocking" interpretation, which Beethoven reportedly received with sarcasm when Ries shared it with him. Elizabeth Schwarm Glesner noted that Beethoven was known to say nearly anything to rid himself of persistent questioners, a habit that clouds the record still further.

  In 1954, Leonard Bernstein addressed the motif in his Omnibus television lectures, arguing that what Beethoven was doing was taking a conventional four-note musical coda and turning it inside out: instead of ending a work, the pattern keeps returning throughout the piece, driving the drama forward.

• 6. Architecture of the Four Movements

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  A typical performance of the 5th Symphony runs somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes, spread across four movements that differ sharply in character.

  The first movement, marked Allegro con brio, is built on sonata form, the structural inheritance Beethoven received from Haydn and Mozart. Nearly all of its themes derive from the four-note opening motif. The movement is the shortest of all Beethoven's symphonic first movements. One commentator described its opening as erupting "with alarming ferocity." A single remarkable interruption breaks the recapitulation: the entire orchestra falls silent except for one oboe, which plays a brief, mournful recitative marked adagio before the ensemble resumes.

  The second movement, in A major, is a double variation form, meaning two distinct themes are presented and then varied in alternation, with a long coda at the close. The third movement, a scherzo, returns to C minor and continues Beethoven's practice of replacing the older minuet form with a more vigorous, often abrasive dance. The scherzo does not end with a pause but flows directly into the finale through a long pianissimo sequence of repeated timpani notes that swells into a massive crescendo.

  The finale arrives in C major rather than C minor, a shift in mode that musicologist Lewis Lockwood identified as unusual for Beethoven, though precedents exist in Mozart and Haydn, and Beethoven himself returned to the device in his 9th Symphony and his last piano sonata. The finale also interpolates material from the third movement, a technique Haydn had used in his Symphony No. 46 in B, from 1772. Whether Beethoven knew that work is not recorded. Charles Rosen, writing in The Classical Style, argued that the finale's closing passage, 29 unbroken bars of C major chords played fortissimo, is necessary to resolve the extreme tension that has built across the entire work.

• 7. New Voices in the Orchestra

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  The finale of the 5th Symphony introduced three instruments that had never appeared before in a symphony: the piccolo, the contrabassoon, and the trombone. Three trombones enter at once at the start of the fourth movement, alongside the piccolo and contrabassoon, after having been entirely silent through the first three movements. Their arrival is one reason the finale sounds so dramatically different from what came before.

  One instrument creates a particular textual complication. In the first movement's exposition, Beethoven wrote a solo for two horns in E major. When the same passage returns in the recapitulation, it needs to be played in C major. The horns of Beethoven's day, lacking valves, could not reliably play the phrase in that key without muffling the bell with the hand, so Beethoven reassigned the theme to a pair of bassoons instead. Antony Hopkins noted in 1981 that the bassoons, playing high in their range, make a less imposing substitute. Valve horns capable of handling the passage were developed in 1814, close after the premiere, but it is not known whether Beethoven would have chosen to update the scoring had he the chance. Simon Rattle recorded the original bassoon scoring with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2003, as did Caroline Brown in her historically informed performances.

• 8. The Symphony and World War II

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  After the Second World War, the 5th Symphony acquired an entirely new layer of association. The Allied campaign of the early 1940s had adopted the phrase "V for Victory," a catchphrase Winston Churchill began using in 1940. The letter V is also the Roman numeral for 5. The opening motif of the symphony, in Morse code, is three dots and a dash, the signal for the letter V. The BBC used this coincidence deliberately: it prefaced its wartime broadcasts to Special Operations Executives around the world with the motif played on drums. The idea came from an intelligence agent named Courtenay Edward Stevens.

  The Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini drew on the same symbolism in a pointed act of timing. When Benito Mussolini fell in September 1943, Toscanini performed the first movement of the symphony and then announced he would wait to play the remaining three movements until Germany was defeated. He completed the performance in May 1945.