Beethoven

By 1813, Beethoven had known for more than a decade that he was getting deafer and deafer. Despite it, he decided to conduct the premiere of his Seventh Symphony. Luckily, his orchestra was filled with some of the greatest musicians of his time – including composers Hummel, Meyerbeer, and Salieri – and it became one of the most successful concerts Beethoven ever produced. The second movement, in particular, proved so popular that it had to be encored on the spot; that movement went on to become his most well-liked orchestral composition, frequently performed apart from the symphony. Within the next 10 weeks, the full symphony was repeated three more times. One newspaper reported that the “applause rose to the point of ecstasy.”

The Seventh’s success persisted. Check out how Richard Wagner reacted: “All tumult, all yearning and storming of the heart, become here the blissful insolence of joy, which carries us away with bacchanalian power…The Symphony is the Apotheosis of the Dance itself: it is Dance in its highest aspect, the loftiest deed of bodily motion, incorporated into an ideal mold of tone.” That phrase, the “Apotheosis of the Dance,” has stuck because it’s so apt. More than harmonies or melodies, it’s the dance rhythms that draw us in.

But you may be confused when you start listening to the symphony. Here’s why: Beethoven craftily sets us up by writing a long, slow introduction; in fact, it was the longest symphonic intro ever written – at least three and half minutes. But then the movement proper kicks in with its lively dance-like rhythms, abrupt dynamic changes, and unexpected modulations.

Then comes the famous Allegretto that the crowds adored. A steady rhythm on the same note launches this serious, mesmerizing music, which gradually increases in intensity but eventually dies away, broken apart into different sections of the orchestra.

The third movement scherzo brings out the dance feeling even more with its spritely rhythms. For contrast, Beethoven interrupts it a couple of times with a section (the “trio”) that sounds at first subdued, then heroic. The finale zips along with Bacchic fury in a tour-de-force of whirling dance energy. Composer and author Antony Hopkins sums it all up: Beethoven’s Seventh gives us “a feeling of true spontaneity; the notes seem to fly off the page as we are borne along on a floodtide of inspired invention.”