Beethoven’s Symphonies: What did the 9th century think?.The wonderful veiled Allegretto that follows is haunted by the same rhythm, the Trio of the scherzo repeats it like a playground game, while the finale is positively possessed by it, right up to the ferocious elation of the final bars. This same pattern pulses expectantly in the audacious sustained one-note transition to the Vivace, then springs to life in its main theme. Just over a minute into the substantial slow introduction, the woodwind intone a rhythmic pattern: DA de-de – in classical metric terms, a ‘dactyl’. Confronted with one particularly obsessive chain of repetitions (possibly the spine-chilling final crescendo in the first movement), Beethoven’s younger contemporary Carl Maria von Weber pronounced him ‘ripe for the madhouse’.īut there’s nothing mad about the way Beethoven draws together the seemingly diverse dance rhythms in this work. The key of A major is often associated with light and buoyancy (Mendelssohn’s Italian, Schubert’s Trout Quintet), but here the sheer physical energy – expressed in dancing muscular rhythms and brilliant orchestration – can, in some performances, border on the unnerving. 7 sounds like what Beethoven would later call a ‘return to life’. Composed after a much-needed restorative spa holiday in 1811, Symphony No.
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