- Speaking about Beethoven is hard because his name is so famous. And the romantic image of Beethoven is so ingrained in our memory. Some of it is pretty true. That he was quite eccentric and mad and impolite and unpredictable. He was also, and that's
very important, deaf. And he was deaf when
he wrote this Symphony. This is very important to remember because a musician who is going deaf, is losing his purpose for life. And the Symphony is very closely related to thoughts of suicide that the composer had, which he confided in a
famous private letter. He was also a great virtuoso which means he expected
to have a brilliant career and he came from a pretty tough family with a drunken father, who was a musician. And the important thing is to realize that he came to Vienna in 1791, the year Mozart died. And he studied with Haydn but he wanted to become the heir, as in any dynasty. He wanted to be the next big star in this world of classical music, which was dominated by
patrons, king and queens, and counts and royalty and an aristocracy. And they were all amateurs. So he was writing for his patrons. They were really the public. There wasn't really a
large public out there. People who subscribed to music magazines. But there was no public
concerts, in the ordinary sense. He put on concerts himself. In fact the concert that was done when the Beethoven Fifth
Symphony was premiered together with the Sixth Symphony. It was a public concert. But that public is really an elite public. So it's Park Avenue and
the Gold Coast of Chicago, and just a couple of people. And that's it. So it's not a mass public as we know it. But he's communicating
to them and he's showing, how good he is at something new. We think of classical
music always as people listening to things that they
already know, that are old. That wasn't the case, in the
early nineteenth century. In addition, there was a
tradition of symphonies that were sort of battle symphonies. That entertained people. There were no movie pictures so people sat around and they
half-listened to something, tell a story in a very tone painting way. Illustrative way. You hear birds, you hear
cannons and stuff like that. So now he comes up with the idea, he's gonna do something. Now he's gonna impress his patrons and that also expresses, in
a way, his own sensibility. So his personal, subjective feelings become the subject of
the Symphony in his mind. Which is why the first great review of the Symphony called it the really, the
high point of romanticism. Because here is the subjective personality expressing himself. And he does it with utter
brilliance and economy. He takes this very simple musical idea. It's like a game. Like in a story game. You take the simplest
musical idea, four notes. And can you make a
castle out of four notes? And indeed he does. The first movement, which
is its most famous movement, is a dense, absolutely compact,
brilliant one-long sentence. With no periods, no commas. Sounds like a (mumbles) commas. They're only semi-colons. And the whole thing, it's like a one paragraph, one sentence. One breath and it's over. And it is mind shattering because it's completely
unexpected and novel. And he was fearless. In addition, he wanted to make a symphony that was not made of separate pieces. So he didn't want like a meal. He didn't want the soup, and then came the main course, then some other course, then came the dessert. No, he wanted to have something
that would go altogether. So if you look carefully at the Symphony, you discover it has almost one pulse. So the ticktock of the first movement becomes really the ticktock
of the second movement which becomes the ticktock
of the third movement which becomes the pulse
of the last movement. And, he does something. He fuses the third and
fourth movements together. So, therefore, he makes the job simpler. He doesn't have four
pieces to put together and four movements. He's got only three really. And the first is so startling
and goes by so quickly. By the time you recover from the second, you're in the last piece which is the third and fourth together. Right. And, it ends in a blaze of glory. Sort of these hammer blows of these sea major chords at the end. Starts in dark minor and
opens triumphantly in major. So, it's somehow so electrifying, so startling, that it is, and so memorable that
everybody has chosen it as his or her favorite emblem. So in the Second World War, the opening is for victory. Both sides use it. Nobody can own this. This is like a slippery snake that you never can grab on to. It always changes it's colors. It's a piece that went rapidly into the literature as the
most famous symphony written. It is simply unforgettable and it never wears out its welcome. There are generations where
I was performed very slowly and then there's now a
new fashion, very quickly. The first movement. And whatever tempo you take it. Fast or slow, you can't kill it. It beats you every time. And, it is simply baffling how imaginative the composer is in using so little. And how unexpected the
rhythmic punctuation, the use of silence and the dramatic aspect of it. This is the first time
the Symphony wakes up and is a dramatic essay.