In classical analysis of poetic meter, the basic rhythmic unit is a foot — a mix of stressed (or long) and unstressed (or short) syllables. A foot with one long syllable and three short syllables is called a paeon; if the long syllable comes at the end, it’s a quartus paeon.
Beethoven began sketching what became his Fifth Symphony in 1804 but he did most of the compositional work in 1807. By the end of that year, it was mostly complete. The final autograph was finished in March of 1808 and it premiered later than year on 22 December.
More than any previous instrumental composition, the Fifth Symphony has a teleological structure and drive. The triumphantly orgiastic jubilation of the C major finale would be hollow and meaningless without the journey that begins with the stark brutality of the C minor opening.
The Fifth Symphony knows. Beethoven doesn’t so much take the listener on the journey with him as return from the journey and start telling war stories. — Matthew Guerrieri, The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination, p. 104
In his Fifth Symphony,
Beethoven builds a work that seems to symbolically confront fundamental issues of life and death. It is no surprise to find that its performance history includes later occasions on which people living under conditions of mortal duress have felt in this work a revelation of tragedy that ends in a vision of hope…. It conveys meanings that lie beyond words yet are emotionally clear, meanings in which listeners have unfailingly responded from his time to ours. The mode of understanding that I am referring to is essentially visceral, spiritual, and deeply emotional, and it beggars all attempts to attach the work to a particular descriptive model or narrative. — Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven’s Symphonies, p. 96
Beethoven’s music induces terror, fright, horror and pain and awakens that endless longing which is the essence of romanticism. Beethoven is a purely romantic composer (and precisely for this reason, a truly musical composer). — E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of the 5th Symphony
Hector Berlioz wrote about the Fifth Symphony :
It is his own intimate thought which is there developed; and his secret sorrows, his pent-up rage, his dreams so full of melancholy oppression, his nocturnal visions and his bursts of enthusiasm furnish its entire subject; whilst the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and orchestral forms are there delineated with an essential novelty and individuality, endowing them also with considerable power and nobleness. (Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies, p. 62)
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Symphony No. 5 in C Minor (Opus 67), 1807–08
Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra.
The famous four-note motif that opens the Fifth Symphony is audacious in its simplicity, but in Beethoven’s hands becomes surprisingly malleable. It forms the basis of much longer melodic lines, as well as becoming even further fragmented and abbreviated.
Rarely had any work, by Beethoven or his predecessors, embodied such sustained emotional intensity throughout the [first] movement, or such extreme motivic concentration and integration; and never before had these two features appeared together to this extent. — Barry Cooper
Structurally, the second movement Andante of the Fifth Symphony is perhaps best described as a Rondo with Variations, effortlessly drifting between long lovely lyrical lines and louder marches, often dropping a reminiscence of the di-di-di-dum rhythmic motif into the melodies.
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Symphony No. 5 in C Minor (Opus 67), 1807–08
Sorry about the ad that might precede this video, but John Eliot Gardiner combines period instruments, authentic tempos (perhaps), and a five-part third movement.
The di-di-di-dum motif also shows up in the 3rd movement of the 5th Symphony. The structure and tempo suggest a Scherzo, but Beethoven doesn’t call it that. (Avoiding “playful” connotations?) The Trio section is highly contrasting, starting with a fugue but not getting very far.
Some confusion exists whether the initial Scherzo and Trio of the Fifth Symphony are supposed to be repeated for a five-part Scherzo rather than a three-part Scherzo. Of the two performances posted above, Gardiner takes the repeat but Dudamel does not.
Regardless of repeats, the final return of the Scherzo in the Fifth Symphony is much quieter, using pizzicato in the strings for a spectral atmosphere that only towards the end emerges from the foggy quiet to begin the most dramatic crescendo of all time.
In a fascinating article in Beethoven Forum (Vol. 8, 2000), musicologist Owen Jander explores the third movement of the Fifth Symphony as a realization of Beethoven’s enigmatic jotting in his sketchbook: “Let your deafness no longer be a secret — even in art.” Using what he calls “Beethoven’s own account of the progressive symptoms of deafness,” Jander interprets the concluding quiet and peculiarly foggy part of the Scherzo as a musical representation of Beethoven’s loss of hearing. The strings create a “persistent background noise, with it’s weird combination of pizzicato and arco” mimicking Beethoven’s tinnitus. Everything drops in volume — “the most protracted and persistent stretch of pianissimo in all this man’s music.” As Beethoven’s hearing declined, higher pitched sounds went first. In this movement, the flute drops out first, then the clarinet, then oboe, then horns, and then “the bassoons dropping through a range of an octave and a half before disappearing altogether.” Despite his deafness, Beethoven’s spirit transcends the affliction:
The C-Minor Symphony is arguably music’s most powerful universal declaration of spiritual triumph, and to my mind, this is precisely because the symphony is so profoundly and intensely personal.
In an article "I Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His Music", composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank relates her own experiences with hearing loss, and hypothesizes how Beehoven's diminishing hearing might have influenced the evolution of his music.
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Symphony No. 5 in C Minor (Opus 67), 1807–08
This historic 1913 recording is now closer in time to the composition of the Fifth Symphony than to the present day.
Before the Fifth Symphony Scherzo sinks into total silence and defeat, a crescendo begins building over its last eight measures that explodes into the C major Finale, bringing in trombones, piccolo, and contrabassoon.
There may be adversity, but there will be triumph!
The last movement of the symphony has three trombones and a piccolo — and, although, it is true, there are not three kettledrums, yet this combination of instruments will make more noise and, what is more, a more pleasing noise than six kettledrums. — Beethoven, March 1808
“There is one thing in which you are less fortunate than I. You cannot hear Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor today … while I can,” the 20-year-old Friedrich Engels wrote to his sister in 1841. He continued the next day:
What a symphony it was last night! … What despairing discord in the first movement, what elegiac melancholy, what a tender lover’s lament in the adagio, what a tremendous, youthful, jubilant celebration of freedom by the trombone in the third and fourth movements!
But wait. It’s not over. About halfway through that “jubilant celebration of freedom” in the Finale of the 5th Symphony, the creepy version of the scherzo unexpectedly returns.
What’s it doing here? Has something gone awry? Do the demons still haunt us? Can they be vanquished?
Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things. — E. M. Forster, Howards End, ch. 5
In his book on Beethoven, Jan Swafford compares the Third and Fifth Symphonies:
The Eroica adumbrated a story of a hero’s victory and the blessings he brings the world; it conveyed that narrative in complex forms and a welter of ideas. The Fifth tells a story of personal victory and inner heroism, painted in broad strokes on an epic canvas. The ecstasy at the Eroica’s end is humanity rejoicing. The ecstasy at the end of the Fifth Symphony is a personal cry of victory.
That journey from despair to victory was Beethoven’s own. … The Eroica exalts a conquering hero as bringer of a just and peaceful society. The Fifth proclaims every person’s capacity for heroism under the buffeting of life, a victory open to all humanity as individuals.
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Symphony No. 5 in C Minor (Opus 67), 1807–08
Prior to phonograph recordings, the only way someone could hear a symphony in their home was in a piano reduction, although Liszt’s transcriptions were not for amateurs.
In his memoirs, Hector Berlioz describes how Beethoven opened to him “a new world of music,” but that most other French and Italian composers of that time shared a contempt for Beethoven, or a complete ignorance. Berlioz’s teacher Jean-François Lesueur “considered instrumental music an inferior branch of the art, respectable certainly but of limited importance, in which Haydn and Mozart had in any case gone as far as it was possible to go.” In 1828, Berlioz (in his mid-20s at the time) told Lesueur that music had developed “a completely new style on an unprecedented scale” and convinced him to go to a concert to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for himself.
Afterwards, Lesueur was in a state: “Let me get out. I must have some air. It’s amazing! Wonderful! I was so moved and disturbed that when I emerged from the box and attempted to put on my hat, I couldn’t find my head.”
The next day, however, Lesueur was more circumspect. Although he confessed that Beethoven’s symphony had moved him, he had doubts: “All the same, music like that ought not to be written.”
“Don’t worry, master,” Berlioz retorted, “there is not much danger that it will.”
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Symphony No. 5 in C Minor (Opus 67), 1807–08
Just one more performance of this mighty work with some prefatory remarks.
“Anyone who listens to a Beethoven quartet or symphony and can’t hear soul is in trouble,” — Ralph Ellison, Conversations, p. 132