The Scherzo’s dances would and could jollily repeat into the infinite were it not for the Storm, which interrupts these “Merry Dances of the Countryfolk”, and cuts across the rest of the symphony both dramatically and temporally. That’s nothing, though, next to the slow movement, the Scene by the Brook (the movements’ titles are all Beethoven’s own), in which Beethoven starts to spin what becomes a nearly continuous stream of semiquavers over a hypnotically repetitious harmonic background and collection of melodic motives in the woodwind and strings – until, that is, the stream reaches a still pool, and a chorus of birds attract our attention, as wanderers through Beethoven’s symphonic stream-scape. (Compare this central section with the hell-for-leather momentum of the similar place in the Fifth Symphony).
#Beethoven 7th symphony mickna full#
That’s a remarkable reversal of symphonic polarity: this place in the first movement of a big symphony is supposed to be full of driving drama and incident, not static contemplation. It’s like looking at a landscape that changes slowly with the lengthening of the shadows and the deepening of the light, in which time is virtually suspended. Take the central section of the first movement, for example, a passage that’s dominated by a single rhythm – the one you’ve originally heard in the second bar of the piece. They’re both wildly different, but they’re still only two sides of the nine-sided coin that is Beethoven’s symphonies.īut in lieu of (m)any other metaphors to riff on, I want to show how Beethoven creates a new kind of symphonic rhetoric in the Pastoral, a universe in which lulling repetition rather than teleological development is what defines the structure, on the small and large-scales, and in which the patterns, continuities, and disturbances of the natural world that Beethoven knew (above all in music’s most violent storm, up to this point of world history, in the Pastoral’s fourth movement!) are transmuted into the discourse of a five-movement symphony. On one hand, there’s the scowling man-of-the-people fomenting musical revolution and purging his inner demons through proto-minimalist compression and white-hot energy (that’s the Fifth, by the way!), and on the other, there’s the composer content to luxuriate in an early kind of musique concrète by transcribing birdsong into a symphony, who has time to allow his imagination to flow and fly, apparently unfettered by the constraints of formal convention or symphonic concision (that’s the Pastoral). The realisation that Beethoven was composing both symphonies at the same time is simultaneously baffling and astounding – and it’s proof that there ain’t just one Beethoven.
I think both pieces are experiments in symphonic extremity, because both are pushing completely different musical boundaries to their limits, and beyond. It was premiered at the same, over-ambitious concert in December 1808, and as the symphonic yin to the Fifth’s yang, the Sixth Symphony is just as “radical” as the Fifth – in some ways, more so. Yet Beethoven wrote this F major Symphony in tandem with the Fifth. And whatever its veracity, the image of Beethoven the nature-loving hippy has proved a much less enticing idea for historians to appropriate than Beethoven storming the gates of revolution in a blaze of C major glory, as he does at the end of the Fifth. It’s as if the Fifth Symphony is the “real” Beethoven – Beethoven as all-conquering hero – whereas the Pastoral is a sort of musical and biographical cul-de-sac. The conductor’s fascinating explanation takes you straight to Beethoven’s time.But that’s only because history, and music history in particular, likes its battles to be epic, its progress to be heroic, and its most important leaps of imagination to be noisy, radical, and aggressive. You can watch the performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony with or without Iván Fischer’s commentary. Fischer’s way of working, which is as unusual as it is committed, and the musicians’ enthusiasm and virtuosity always result in very special performances. Iván Fischer has been a welcome guest conductor with the Concertgebouworkest since 1987. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony has remained popular ever since. The second movement, which the audience interpreted as a funeral march for the fallen, had to be repeated. This irresistibly rhythmical symphony, later called the ‘apotheosis of the dance’ by Richard Wagner, radiated such enormous vitality and energy that all present were immediately won over. 7 during a benefit concert on 8 December 1813 in Vienna for the soldiers who had been wounded in the Battle of Hanau. Ludwig van Beethoven himself conducted the premiere of his Symphony No.
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