Falling between Beethoven’s “Eroica” and Fifth symphonies, the airy Fourth might be expected to languish in their monumental shadows. Yet the very modesty of the Fourth, its freedom from strife and its focus on refinement of form, has made it a favorite among connoisseurs. Schumann compared the Fourth to a “slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants.” Alexander Wheelock Thayer, one of Beethoven’s biographers, called it “the most perfect in form of them all.” Musicologist Sir George Grove compared its movements to “the limbs and features of a lovely statue; and, full of fire and invention as they are, all is subordinated to conciseness, grace, and beauty.”
The joy that suffuses this symphony is often attributed to the circumstances of its composition. Beethoven wrote the Fourth in 1806 during a happy spring and summer spent as a houseguest in the castle of Count Franz von Oppersdorff, to whom it is dedicated. Beethoven premiered it in 1807 at a private concert in Vienna alongside the first performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto. According to Grove and critic Romain Rolland, this work—often dubbed a “symphony of love”—is secretly addressed to Countess Therese von Brunsvik, who was the subject of Beethoven’s affections. Although Maynard Solomon debunked this story in his 1977 biography of the composer, it is clear that the Fourth Symphony—especially since it was composed during the same period as the Violin Concerto, Fourth Piano Concerto, and “Razumovsky” string quartets—comes from an unusually serene period for a composer whose specialty was conflict and angst.
In this context, the mysterious Adagio that opens the Fourth, with its gloomy minor chord and portentous plucking, turns out to be a musical joke in which a surprise crescendo leads to an Allegro vivace of uninhibited high spirits. As Berlioz—one of the most passionate admirers of the symphony—has pointed out, the second part of the Allegro vivace is even more “astounding” than the first, offering another crescendo that is “one of the most skillfully conceived effects we know of in all music.” Yet the sternness of the opening never quite leaves our heads, and the constant rhythmic tension reminds us that the Fourth is from the same period as the Fifth.
Of the slow movement, which critic Richard Gilman believed is “unmatched in Beethoven’s scores,” Berlioz writes that it “eludes analysis. Its form is so pure and the expression of its melody so angelic and of such irresistible tenderness that the prodigious art by which this perfection is attained disappears completely. From the very first bars we are overtaken by an emotion which, toward the close, becomes overpowering in its intensity … Only among the giants of poetry can we find anything to compare with this sublime page of the giant of music.” Again, however, we get emotional complexity and counterpoint. Schumann, for example, cited the obstinate bass and timpani accompaniment in this otherwise lyrical movement as providing Falstaffian humor.
Regarding the sprightly cross-rhythms in the third movement, Berlioz commented that they make the melodic outlines “sharper and more surprising.” Berlioz was especially fond of the Trio, with its “delicious freshness.” So was Beethoven himself, for as in the scherzo of the Seventh Symphony, he asks for it to be played twice.
The moto perpetuo final movement is a final burst of exuberance—in Berlioz’s words, “one animated swarm of sparkling notes” interrupted by “the angry introspections which we have already had occasion to mention as peculiar to this composer”—a final reminder that Beethoven’s music is rarely free of emotional contrasts.
So much has been written about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—at once the most popular and revolutionary of symphonies—that it is safe to say the work has changed the way we think about music. No matter how much contemporary critics disparage Beethoven’s alleged “Fate knocking at the door” statement as inauthentic or belittle the popular assumed program of Beethoven’s defiant struggle against deafness, despair, and thoughts of suicide, thousands of people continue to hear the work this way. The Fifth represents a sea change not only in structure, rhythm, and musical emotion, but in what we conceive of as being possible in symphonic music. To be sure, many earlier symphonies (Mozart’s G-Minor, Haydn’s “The Clock,” Beethoven’s own “Eroica”) also have extra-musical associations, but no symphony before the Fifth carries so much portentous symbolic weight. Whether authentic or not, the program of Beethoven facing down Fate has proved irresistible: If Fate wasn’t knocking at the door, it certainly could have been.
Sir John Eliot Gardiner, though, believes the work has less to do with Beethoven’s personal struggles than with the incendiary political ideals of the French Revolution: The fiery four-note motif jolting through the symphony is “an alarm call, an incitement, a call to arms.” No composer before Beethoven, says Maestro Gardiner, would have invested a symphony with such formidable political resonance.
The sense of rightness and inevitability in the Fifth has been noted by every writer from Berlioz to Bernstein. “Not a note,” wrote critic Neville Cardus, “is uncharged with power of expression.” This rightness was not easily achieved. Beethoven conceived some of the basic ideas of the Fifth as early as 1800, but couldn’t begin to bring them together until 1807. “The fundamental idea never leaves me,” he once wrote of the composition process. “It mounts; it grows.” In this case, the growing pains were long and intense; with the exception of the serene Andante, this intensity is reflected in the amazing tension of the music itself. The terrible sense of struggle that the Fifth embodies was part of its very conception.
Given its overexposure, it is remarkable how much excitement and sense of occasion the Fifth still evokes. E. T. A. Hoffmann called it a “rhapsody of genius,” and it still sounds that way. Like a Bach fugue or a Schubert song, Beethoven’s Fifth communicates something basic and fundamental, a sense that Western music would not have been the same without it.
Paradoxically, this monumental work is famous for its revolutionary economy, achieved by Beethoven’s technique of having the opening four notes (so frequently compared to a germinating seed) generate both the entire material of the first movement and significant chunks of the succeeding ones. Equally stark and unadorned is the work’s single-minded emphasis on rhythm. Indeed, the relentless, driving pulse of the Fifth launched a revolution in rhythm, one carried forward in the Seventh and later taken up again (after stalling in the late 19th century) in 20th-century pieces such as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The first movement is close to pure rhythm, as are huge stretches of the exhilarating finale. The most subtle rhythmic stroke occurs in the transition between the last two movements, where a muffled drum tap (compared by writer after writer to a throbbing heartbeat) brings back the rhythm of the first movement while the orchestra, floating in a shadowy void, drifts ever further from tonality before struggling inexorably toward the C-major blast that opens the finale.
Berlioz once compared the spectral diablerie of the third movement to “the gaze of a hypnotist.” We might well extend this metaphor to the entire symphony, so completely does it continue to hypnotize us.
—Jack Sullivan
© 2020 The Carnegie Hall Corporation