How wonderful that such familiar pieces as Beethoven’s Fifth—the most famous of all symphonies—still “work” in performance, more than 200 years after its premiere in an unheated concert hall one cold night in Vienna in December 1808. Audiences of all kinds, occasional and frequent attenders alike, still enjoy its wonders—and even those few who arrive with trepidation at hearing an old warhorse one more time are inevitably drawn to the music’s opening drama, rousing ending, and innumerable discoveries in between.
Throughout this middle period of Beethoven’s life, the composer was routinely strapped for funds, and in 1808, he developed plans for a special evening “Akademie” concert to raise money for himself. For December 22, he was able to secure performers and the Theater an der Wien. Rehearsals were squeezed in on the previous days. Beethoven, perhaps sensing the difficulty of finding any future workable dates for upcoming concerts, kept revising the evening’s program to include more and more music.
The concert lasted more than four hours and featured the world premieres of the Sixth and Fifth symphonies, in that order; the Fourth Piano Concerto, with Beethoven as soloist; and the Choral Fantasy as a grand finale, assembling all of the evening’s performing forces at once. Unfortunately, the weather that night was colder than usual and the building was unheated, so while no one attending could possibly have complained about not getting their money’s worth of music, the conditions for comfortable listening and performing deteriorated as the hours passed.
From that chilly start, the Fifth Symphony’s reputation only increased, and by the end of the 19th century, it had attained its current status as a classical superstar. The association of the opening four-note motif, matching Morse code’s dot–dot–dot–dash for the letter “V,” came to be a shorthand to signify victory during World War II, pushing it further into public consciousness.
The idea that those four notes represent the composer’s mighty but victorious struggle with destiny was put into circulation by Beethoven himself, or at least by his fantasy-spinning amanuensis Anton Schindler, who reported the composer’s explanation of the opening motif as, “So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte” (roughly translated as “Thus fate knocks at the door”).
Fate struck Beethoven most cruelly in about 1802, when, still in his early 30s, he acknowledged his deafness and began the long process of coming to terms with a handicap that was less of a musical disability (it did not interfere with his ability to compose) than a social one. His standing as a virtuoso pianist with excellent connections at court was seriously threatened, and his relations with friends, and especially with women, were now forever circumscribed.
Beethoven may have—privately—felt inordinately sorry for himself, but there is no self-pity in his music. Defiance, certainly, although the sense of triumph expressed in the conclusion of the Fifth Symphony is surely more than a tongue-sticking-out, I-told-you-so addressed to fate.
Whether you choose to listen to this work with the idea of “fate knocking at the door” (something Beethoven probably never said); as a path from darkness to light, mystery to certainty, ignorance to enlightenment; or merely a well-crafted symphony, this piece in performance is sure to take you on a worthwhile, at times familiar—yet often exhilarating—journey.
The four movements are concise and focused. The first movement is built almost entirely around the four-note opening motif—stated again and again, as foreground, then background, upside down and forward again, in unison and harmonized.
The second movement takes a graceful line and works it through various guises, almost always with a sense of expectancy underneath and bursting forth toward a stronger and stronger presence.
The third movement continues in this confident vein, only to alternate between quiet uncertainty and forthright declamations. Near the end, a section of quietly forbidding darkness leads directly into the bright sunshine and C major of the last movement. Here, at last, Beethoven revels in the major key, then develops a strong musical idea through to an unstoppable finish, repeated and extended, emphatic and ... triumphant.
—Eric Sellen
Leoš Janáček was always obsessed by Russian literature and culture, and from Memoirs from the House of the Dead, the novel Dostoevsky wrote 10 years after his four horrifying years in a Siberian prison camp, Janáček crafted his own highly episodic libretto, in Czech, for his final opera—From the House of the Dead. Dostoevsky’s experience changed his attitude to many things, awakening him to the human capacity for tenderness in a world of unrelieved brutality.
The opera was first performed in 1930 at the National Theatre in Brno, Janáček’s hometown. In 1979, conductor František Jílek devised an orchestral suite from three sections of the work.
The first movement is the opera’s Prelude. Janáček’s characteristic sound world is immediately evident. Here, he employs short, pithy motifs—repeated but not really developed—extreme high and low sounds, rich chords on trombones and tuba, melodic timpani, and active percussion, which includes metal chains.
The second movement is music that accompanies a play within the opera in Act II. The prisoners are working outside on the construction of a riverboat. On an improvised stage, they perform two plays, mostly in mime. The first is the Don Juan story, with the Don being carried off by devils at the end, and the second is “The Miller’s Beautiful Wife,” based on a short story by Gogol about a wife who hides her lovers around the room while her husband is away. The last lover turns out to be Don Juan, who dances off with the miller’s wife before the flames consume him.
The last movement represents the original ending of the opera. Alexandr Petrovic, the leader of the group of prisoners, is to be released along with an eagle that the prisoners caught earlier. There is a sense of freedom and triumph, even though, at the close, the prison guards order the remaining prisoners back to work.
—Hugh Macdonald
Beethoven’s opera Fidelio brought him endless trouble and frustration, yet he loved the work dearly and attached great importance to its music and its message. Most composers of the time wrote operas in profusion and rarely wrestled with alternative versions. But Beethoven wrote only one, and he produced at least three versions of the opera and four versions of its overture. Even the opera’s title was changed, having been Leonore in its first two forms and Fidelio in the end.
To add to the confusion, the three Leonore overtures are incorrectly numbered, misnumbered when they were published, and not, as it turns out, in the order in which they were written. No. 2 was the first Beethoven wrote,
No. 3 the second, and No. 1 the third, all to some extent sharing musical material. The Fidelio Overture itself, quite different from the others, came last. (The exact dating and sequence of composition was finally determined by chemical analysis in the 20th century of the differing papers on which they’d been written.)
By common consent, No. 3 is the finest as a self-supporting concert work, although in the theater it is usually felt to dwarf the opening act musically and preempt the final act dramatically. No doubt Beethoven felt the same, for his replacement for it, No. 1, is shorter and much milder in tone. And the eventual final replacement, the Fidelio Overture, makes no reference to the opera’s music and serves simply as a curtain-raiser.
In composing No. 3 in 1806 for a revival of the opera in Vienna, Beethoven was flexing his symphonic muscles, building on themes that had served in the original overture in 1805 and expanding their reach and impact. The resulting overture became a match for any of the mighty symphonic movements that he composed in that same decade. Like the first movements of the Fourth and Seventh symphonies, this overture has a slow introduction and a main Allegro section that follows. In the slow section, the melody from Florestan’s Act II aria, when he lies in a dark subterranean dungeon in mortal despair, is briefly given out by clarinets and bassoons before the music winds itself up for the transition to the Allegro.
In this restless, dynamic movement, three passages stand out. These include the second main theme in the bright key of E major, which is another version of Florestan’s aria played by the flute over the violins. Then, in the middle of the action, everything stands still as a trumpet call is heard from the distance. This is the signal, in the opera, for the arrival of the Minister, who will intervene in time to stop Florestan’s murder at the hand of the evil prison governor. The trumpet call is heard a second time, confirming the prisoner’s rescue and the joy of his wife, Leonore, who has contrived to get into the dungeon disguised as a young man named Fidelio.
The third unforgettable moment in this thrilling overture is the rush of the violins, then gathering in the other strings in a headlong sprint to the coda, a celebration of triumph as brazen and positive as anything Beethoven ever wrote. For him, it was the ultimate affirmation of constancy, liberty, and human courage.
—Hugh Macdonald