Beethoven’s Fifth did not immediately become the world’s (or even the composer’s) most famous symphony. During his lifetime, the Third—the mighty “Eroica”—was performed more often, and the second movement of the Seventh (movements were often heard separately) deemed “the crown of instrumental music.” But over the course of the 19th century, the Fifth gradually came to epitomize both Beethoven’s life and musical style. It often appeared on the inaugural concerts of new orchestras, such as when The Philadelphia Orchestra first performed in November 1900. The Fifth Symphony picked up further associations in the 20th century, be they of Allied victory during the Second World War or through its frequent appearances in popular culture.
It is not hard to account for both the popularity and the representative status of the Fifth. Celebrated music critic Donald Francis Tovey called it “among the least misunderstood of musical classics.” With the rise of instrumental music in the 18th century, audiences sought ways to understand individual works, to figure out their meanings. One strategy was to make connections between a piece of music and the composer’s life. In this regard, no life and body of work has proved more accommodating than Beethoven’s, whose genius, independence, eccentricities, and struggles with deafness were already well known in his own time.
In the fall of 1801, at age 30, Beethoven revealed for the first time the secret of his increasing hearing loss and stated in a letter that he would “seize Fate by the throat; it shall not bend or crush me completely.” It has not been difficult to relate such statements directly to his music. The struggle with “Fate” when it “knocks at the door,” as he allegedly told his assistant Anton Schindler happens at the beginning of the Fifth, helped endorse the favored label for the entire middle period of Beethoven’s career: heroic. The Fifth Symphony seems to present a large-scale narrative. According to this view, a heroic life struggle is represented in the progression of emotions, from the famous opening in C minor to the triumphant C-major coda of the last movement. For Hector Berlioz, the Fifth—more than the previous four symphonies—“emanates directly and solely from the genius of Beethoven. It is his own intimate thought that is 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, while the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and orchestral forms are there delineated with essential novelty and individuality, endowing them also with considerable power and nobility.”
Beethoven composed the Fifth Symphony over the course of several years during the most productive period of his career. Among the contemporaneous works were the Fourth and Sixth symphonies, Fourth Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, Mass in C Major, three “Razumovsky” string quartets, and the first two versions of his opera Fidelio. Large-scale pieces like the opera, or commissions like the Mass, interrupted his progress on the Fifth, most of which was written in 1807 and early 1808.
The symphony premiered later that year on December 22 together with the Sixth (their numbers and order reversed) at Beethoven’s famous marathon concert at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. This legendary event also included the first public performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto (the composer was soloist), two movements from the Mass, the concert aria Ah! perfido, and the Choral Fantasy. Reports indicate that all did not go well, as the under-rehearsed musicians struggled with this demanding new music, and things fell apart during the Choral Fantasy. But inadequate performance conditions did not dampen enthusiasm for the Fifth Symphony, which was soon recognized as a masterpiece. Novelist, critic, and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote a long and influential review in which he hailed “Beethoven’s Romanticism … that tears the listener irresistibly away into the wonderful spiritual realm of the infinite.”
Another reason for the great fame and popularity of the Fifth Symphony is that it exemplifies the fingerprints of Beethoven’s heroic style. One of these identifying features is its “organicism,” the notion that all four movements seem to grow from seeds sown in the opening measures. While Beethoven used the distinctive rhythmic figure of three shorts and a long in other works from this time (Tovey remarked that if this indeed represents fate knocking at the door, it was also knocking at many other doors), here it unifies the entire symphony. After the most familiar of all symphonic openings (Allegro con brio), the piece modulates to the relative major key and the horns announce the second theme with a fanfare using the “fate rhythm.” The softer, lyrical second theme, first presented by the violins, is inconspicuously accompanied in the lower strings by the rhythm. The movement features Beethoven’s characteristic building of intensity, suspense, a thrilling coda, and also mysteries. Why, for example, does the oboe have a brief unaccompanied solo cadenza near the beginning of the recapitulation? Beethoven’s innovation is not simply that this brief passage may “mean” something, but that listeners are prompted in the first place to ask themselves what it may signify.
The second movement (Andante con moto) is a rather unusual variation form in which two themes alternate, the first sweet and lyrical, the second more forceful. Beethoven combines the third and fourth movements, which are played without pause. In earlier symphonies he had already replaced the polite minuet and trio with a more vigorous scherzo and trio. In the Fifth, the Allegro scherzo begins with a soft ascending arpeggiated string theme that contrasts with a loud assertive horn motif (again using the fate rhythm). The trio section features extraordinarily difficult string writing, in fugal style, that defeated musicians in early performances. Instead of an exact return of the opening scherzo section, Beethoven recasts the thematic material in a completely new orchestration and pianissimo dynamic. The tension builds with a long pedal point—the insistent repetition of C in the timpani—that swells in an enormous crescendo directly into the fourth-movement Allegro, in which three trombones, contrabassoon, and a piccolo join in for the first time in the piece. This finale, like the first movement, is in sonata form and uses the fate rhythm in the second theme. The coda to the symphony may strike listeners today as almost too triumphantly affirmative as the music gets faster, louder, and ever more insistent. Indeed, it is difficult to divest this best-known of symphonies from all the baggage it has accumulated through two centuries, and to listen with fresh ears to the shocking power of the work and to the marvels that Beethoven introduced into the world of orchestral music.
Most of the familiar titles attached to Beethoven’s works were first applied by someone other than the composer. Critics, friends, and publishers invented the labels “Moonlight,” “Tempest,” and “Appassionata” for popular piano sonatas. Prominent patrons’ names—Archduke Rudolf, Count Razumovsky, Count Waldstein—became wedded to compositions they either commissioned or that were dedicated to them, thereby winning a sort of immortality for those who supported the composer.
Beethoven himself crossed out the heading “Bonaparte” from the title page of the Third Symphony, but later wrote in “Sinfonia eroica” (“Heroic Symphony”), and it is his only symphony besides the Sixth to bear an authentic title. To be sure, stories about “fate knocking at the door” in the Fifth and the choral finale of the Ninth have encouraged programmatic associations for those works, beginning in Beethoven’s own time. But in the end, it is the Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral,” that stands most apart from his others, and indeed from nearly all of Beethoven’s instrumental and keyboard music, in its intentional, publicly declared, and often quite audible extramusical content. Beethoven’s full title is “Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life.”
And yet the Sixth Symphony does not aspire to the level of musical realism found in a work like Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique or in Richard Strauss’s tone poems. Beethoven famously noted that the “Pastoral” contained “more an expression of feeling than painting.” He had earlier objected to some of the musical illustration in Haydn’s oratorios The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801), with their imitations of storms, frogs, and other phenomena. He might not have cared much for what the “New German School” of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner would later advocate and create.
Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony belongs to a tradition, going back to the previous century, of “characteristic” symphonies. Indeed, the titles for the movements that Beethoven provided closely resemble those of Le portrait musical de la nature, written nearly 25 years earlier by Rhenish composer Justin Heinrich Knecht. (It is doubtful Beethoven knew the music of the piece, but he may have known the titles.) Scattered comments that Beethoven made in his sketches for the symphony are revealing: “The hearers should be allowed to discover the situations / Sinfonia caracteristica—or recollection of country life / All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far / Sinfonia pastorella. Anyone who has an idea of country life can make out for himself the intentions of the composer without many titles / Also without titles the whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds.”
Regardless of the musical and aesthetic implications that the “Pastoral” Symphony raises with respect to program music—a key issue for debate during the 19th century—the piece unquestionably offers eloquent testimony to the importance of nature in Beethoven’s life. He took walks often in Vienna’s parks and in the large field just outside the city walls. For part of each year, he moved to a suburban village or retreated to a spa. (“To stay in the city in summer is torture for me,” he once remarked.) As Beethoven wandered about, he would not only soak in nature but also compose. While he worked out his most detailed ideas for compositions in large-format sketchbooks at home, he typically carried around small pocketbooks as well. Artist August von Kloeber undertook a portrait of the composer in 1818 and later recalled observing Beethoven strolling around the country: “It was most interesting to see him, a sheet of music paper and a stump of pencil in his hand, stop often as though listening, and then write a few notes on the paper.”
Being amidst nature was crucial to Beethoven’s existence. In the summer of 1809, when Napoleon’s troops occupied Vienna for the second time, he was unable to leave the city and wrote to his publisher: “I still cannot enjoy life in the country, which is so indispensable for me.” Booming cannon fire caused particular distress to his ears. By the following May, he was eagerly anticipating leaving Vienna: “How delighted I will be to ramble for a while through the bushes, woods, under trees, through grass, and around rocks.”
The idea of Beethoven communing with birds and flowers may seem somewhat at odds with the eccentric genius shaking his fist at fate, but the two images are complementary sides of his personality, traits he powerfully evoked in the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. These works are so different in many respects and yet might be considered as twins, albeit unidentical ones.
Not only did both have the same period of genesis around 1808 and the same dedicatees (Count Razumovsky and Prince Lobkowitz), but they were also published within weeks of one another in the spring of 1809. They premiered together (in reverse order and with their numbers switched) at Beethoven’s famous marathon concert of December 22, 1808, at the Theater an der Wien. Despite their overall contrasting mood, there are notable points of musical convergence, such as the innovations in instrumentation (the delayed and dramatic introduction of piccolo and trombones in the fourth movements) and the splicing together of the final movements.
Beethoven’s descriptive movement titles for the “Pastoral” were made public to the audience before the premiere. The first movement, “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arriving in the Country,” engages with a long musical tradition of pastoral music. From the initial drone of an open fifth in the lower strings to the jovial coda, the leisurely and often repetitive pace of the movement is far from the intensity of the Fifth Symphony. The second movement, “Scene by the Brook,” includes the famous birdcalls: flute for the nightingale, oboe for the quail, and two clarinets for the cuckoo (Berlioz copied the effect for two of the birds in the pastoral third movement of his Symphonie fantastique).
This is Beethoven’s only symphony with five movements, and the last three lead one into the next. The third is entitled “Merry Gathering of Country Folk” and suggests a town band of limited ability playing dance music. The gaiety is interrupted by a “Thunderstorm” that approaches from afar as ominous rumblings give way to the full fury of thunder and lightning. The storm is far more intense than other well-known earlier depictions, such as by Vivaldi and Haydn. Just as the storm had approached gradually, so it passes, leaving some scattered moments of disruption before the “Shepherd’s Song—Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm” brings the work to its close. Regardless of Beethoven’s declared intentions, this music seems to function on both descriptive and expressive levels, which has helped to fuel arguments about program music ever since his time.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
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