Spring Symphonies No 67 - Beethoven: Symphony No 5

Beethoven: Symphony No 5

To start with an explanation of the music seems in this case beside the point.  It is the most famous symphony and for most of you, even if you only hear the first four notes of it, you know what it is. How that has happened is all about enduring and arresting effect of both the opening and the remainder of this 30 minute work.  But what is it that we have come to admire, applaud, laud and in some cases shrug off?

I want to spend some of your time on four aspects of this work.  Where it came from.  The baggage it has accrued.  The history of it’s performance.  Where it’s future lies.

Genesis

Many might tell you that Beethoven the troubled genius was put through promethean trials to produce this symphony and he wrought elemental aspects of music to produce something so new it transformed music as we know it.  This was THE step which moved us from the Classical age of classical music to the Romantic age.  I’m not sure it’s quite that easy - but this is quite a symphony and some of that claim is true. We only have to consider the preceding four symphonies to hear a great deal of Beethoven’s preparation to move to a short, terse symphony of personal and dramatic impact.  The First and Second symphonies have him stretching is compositional muscles - vigour, invention, interconnection and that idea of the symphonist journey.  The Third symphony is an extraordinary piece of theatre in a contrapuntal playground which is still dizzying to us.  The Third is also yoked with this idea of a virtuous trait been enhanced by tribulations.  It’s longer the the Fifth bigger in many ways, but not as athletic.  The Fourth symphony was perhaps even more daring and more spare than any of it’s sisters, a bigger risk in some ways for the composer.  It’s not just perfectly proportioned but also pressing closer to the classical model while subverting it. My take here in Spring Symphonies No 32 

The Fifth was written over a long period with sketches from 1804 which did not see their fruition until 1808 at the famous 22 December concert at the the Theater an der Wien.  In the concert which lasted 4 hours, the Fifth premiered in the second half: the Sixth Symphony (my thoughts on that one here in Spring Symphonies No 58 ) as Beethoven’s opening salvo in the first half for his frozen audience.  The concert also contained other Beethoven works and other premieres including the Fourth Piano Concerto.  The famous Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung was frankly overloaded but the symphony No 5 in C Minor was soon picked up.  It was given it’s New York debut in 1849 by the New York Philharmonic.  In terms of it’s subsequent effects on western classical music it was quite a gig. In terms of the two symphonies alone we can say both were game changers.  But in terms of the imperative behind the Fifth (perhaps part of Beethovenian myth making), we know he put work on the Fifth aside to do the things in that period between 1804 and 1808.  He was shrewd enough to do what he was paid to do first, though he even dallied a while getting the score of the Fifth to the man who had paid for it.

Baggage

When we hear this work in concert or in a broadcast we might try and shed the associations we have and hear it anew.  Its quite hard unless someone does something very different with it.  The scant opportunities Beethoven left for broader interpretation make that harder - though it can be done.  We seem to have a series of choices - not mutually exclusive on how we take this piece in the ear and in the mind. First as a supremely well crafted work: a fascinating journey in tonality, use of motto and melody, drama and orchestration.  We can view it as an entirely abstract symphony (like the Fourth symphony), allowing it to hit the deep brain emotional sweet spots repeatedly and currying favour with our synapses with it’s creation of patterns and it’s disruption of them. Or we could view it as something more “realised” (like the Third or Sixth symphonies) already laced with real world concepts and leanings. Those two siblings had themes, written and unwritten, by Beethoven himself, but the Fifth seems to have these associations from elsewhere.  Great brains that have come to read it as some sort of narrative, emblematic journey or piece of classical theatre - acting through a great life to supreme adversity and then some even greater and harder won triumph.  All of these models of listening (there are many more I suspect) resolve around the great ending.  This is one of the many satisfying things about this work - through which ever lens it viewed.  Our perception of the piece is also muddied by our view of the composer. Beethoven the personification of his own music started to accrue legends (some of them true). He was the tormented artist, the great deaf musician, the triumph of his will power, “must it be, it must be”, the amazing determined struggle against fate and the Rage, all the time raging (a now dubious, but popular idea that rage was a strength).  

It is important I think that we uncouple the autobiography here - or at least appreciate that at the same premiere concert the Sixth symphony presented a different narrative - one of Pastoralism in all it’s aspects.  The Fifth symphony has become a flagship for all that external fluff, musings on authorial intent and personal extension of life into art.  Thanks perhaps to supporters like E T A Hoffman for romanticism.  For some the Fifth has become the poster for the notion of an “endured” symphony, that is the works that get uncomfortable but are alright at the end so worth the disconcerting feelings in their midsts.  In this symphony we face Mahler and his extension of that idea to extremes, but we might also look back to Haydn’s dramatic symphonies or Mozart’s darker works, but we don’t - we lay it on Beethoven.  The effect of 19th century mass media was to lionise Beethoven and this was the work often pulled out to show his status.  The effect of much late 20th and 21st century media is to provide an opportunity for the whole work to be boiled down to it’s signature motto and no more. 

The idea of the Fifth has come to be it’s downfall in recent years - everyone knows what it is and whether from internet memes, popular culture or the tidal wave of recordings, many have come to a lasting conclusion of how it goes and then moved on with a shrug.  In some ways Beethoven should be congratulated at getting his message across  - though I think he’d be quite grumpy at the prospect of getting no royalties on a ringtone.  The most famous symphony there is carries much more weight than most people know.  For people who carry round this music purely as background noice, a passing delight on four notes, that adds nothing to their lives, then they are missing it’s elemental relevance to a flourishing existence rather than as a life expended.  Then we, the one’s who know it’s worth, should be helping people to go on it’s journey and to be glad that some get it. 

Performance Style

Beethoven died in 1827, Artur Nikisch the great Hungarian conductor was born in 1855 but started his musical training in 1866 in Vienna. In 1913 Nikisch made one of the first recordings of a complete symphony – and the first recording of Beethoven’s Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic. A recording said to be from 1911 of the Odeon Orchestra under Fredrick Kirk is the first full recording.  Nikisch’s training albeit as an 11 year old started 58 years after the premiere of Beethoven Five - who knows what traditions may have accrued by then - but it is tantalising to think his teachers knew people who knew Beethoven.  By the time he had recorded it, the work was hallowed.  Though that didn’t stop Wagner, Liszt and others having a go at “improving” Beethoven - and Wagner in particular left his mark on the scoring. 

Given the literature the Fifth comes up as a star in the classical firmament thought it’s first century,   it’s popularity perhaps underscored when Kirk and Nikisch recorded it.  In classical music we can only point to general trends in performance because there will always be outliers - it’s difficult to know what was played where.  A crude and partial trend though can be seen in the UK by the Proms archive – with great enthusiasm for the Fifth at the turn of the century with 44 performances between 1895 and 1919 often more than one performance a year mostly conducted by Henry Wood.  There were 4 performances in the double 1902 season.  The work was embraced again in the 1940s – partly picking up one of it’s enduring quality of victory and vanquishing.  The morse da da da dah was a signal during World War II in broadcasting: V for Victory.  

As the graph shows it’s popularity has dwindled in the last 40 years and one hopes it will pick up - it’s a long time since it was played once a season.

Sonically not much changed in Beethoven interpretation in the first century of it’s existence except the development of the instruments at the disposal of the instrumental players - the Historically Informed Performances (HIP) on authentic instruments have occasionally given us a sparer sonic landscape with fewer players, the use of gut strings and narrower bored instruments. It’s a rich garden but the sound it makes is just one aspect of the performance.

As Alain Frogley points out in his excellent chapter on performance style in The Cambridge Guide to Beethoven, there have been several movements in Beethoven interpretive modes over the years since that concert in 1808 – though our grasp on Beethoven’s performance style or preference is scant.  On one side we have adherents like Berlioz on with his adherence to the text and just the text without any grandiloquence.  On the other side, Liszt and Wagner used the text as a starting point for a broader experience on the idea of this symphony, they literally added to the text too.  These approaches still persist we have moved through a tradition in the performance of this symphony which has extremes though it probably most polarised in the first half of the last century.  This can easily be heard still in recordings and illustrated by, to take Frogley’s examples, Toscanini with an almost neo-classical approach, and Furtwangler, the searcher of the ecstatic moment, the Wagnerian ideal .

Later there was a lot of great Beethoven available to the listener in the 1960s - Klemperer, Cluytens, Karajan etc, and by the 1970s and 1980s Beethoven sets were ten a penny and the Fifth became one of nine great symphonies available at a price for any pocket.  Performances varied, approaches became more uniform and there was a uniformity about it all.  In the concert hall readings of the Fifth were becoming less notable - though a legendary fiery performance by Haitink reacting to news of the death of Shostakovich, is perhaps sign this symphony is still one to fill the heart in difficult times.  

Those interested in music played on instruments of the time of composition found a bigger audience as the second half of the last century progressed. The application of this principle to Beethoven meant not just natural horns and smaller timpani.  It also meant using Beethoven’s testing metronome markings and considering a rebalance of the orchestral sections.  Overall less romanticising and less bombast.  Recordings came in from great pioneers which radically changed for some the weight of a Beethoven symphony it became a more athletic and and in some cases a more agitated proposition.  There were great arguments about how far to go but the whole adventure shed more light on the nature of the Fifth symphony - closer to Toscanini but with a sparer sound. This normalised the symphony and brought closer to it’s immediate siblings.  Some would say it diminished it.  More detail emerged in this sound world - inner voices, clearer articulation of rhythms and the immediacy of a more intimate sound.  The authentic performance movement may have got us to the sunnier uplands with a clarity of lines but in pursuit of covering the ground some of the drama and personal immediacy went out the window.  Plus a dreary round out-doing each other came with each new historically informed CD, though none though to serve it up in a freezing cold hall (but give it time…).

Another important milestone was reached in 2001 with the new Barenreiter Urtext.  This critical edition drew on extant manuscripts and copies of the symphony in Beethoven’s hand, fragments and orchestral parts to build the definitive, on current evidence, text.  Barry Cooper’s excellent accompanying essay in introduction to the text draws out the the long formation of the piece. Beethoven’s work from February 1804 on movements broadly 1, 3, 4 and finally movement 2 ready for performance in 1808.  Of course this version is clean of all the accretions of time and uncertainty of  poor editing in earlier printed copies.  Some vagaries about Beethoven’s intentions remain - he was not always clear.  That said it was a great opportunity to hear this symphony in a closer form to what the composer wrote irrespective of the instrumental forces, not that it sounds greatly different.  Conductors like Abbado, Zinman and Vanska took the opportunity to slim down their big orchestras to the kind of forces the HIP advocates had been using.  Some went further still and combined the new addition with gutless strings and original brass.  It proved to be a jumping off point and Beethoven Five became a bit more popular again - along with the rest of the symphonies.  

The story doesn’t end there.  In the 17 years since Jonathan Del Mar’s critical edition there have been a few operating across the practices of the HIP with modern orchestras and some operating with HIP orchestras but bring back some of the high drama of Furtwangler’s moody readings and Toscanini’s exacting ones.  I think the remarkable thing is that this symphony has found a more powerful advocacy - I think with this cross pollination some sort of a line has been been drawn.  Conductors like François Xavier Roth with his period instrument band Les Siecles and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla with the City of Birmingham Symphony orchestra are perhaps the best, though not the only, examples of these developments.  They both look deeper into the score and it’s realisation the music and have the vision and capability in their orchestras to realise it.  The new guard combine the best of HIP, the new edition, the innovative skills and techniques of the modern player and both have produced performances of the Fifth of enormous subtlety meaning and power. Both these new conductors concentrate on distinct voicing across the orchestra leading to much more interplay between phrases. They have brought back the fizz of excitement in performance that the symphony has lacked since Karajan took the best of the Toscanini vs Furtwangler debate with his phenomenal hybrid – nowhere more determined than his last recordings and concerts of the piece 40 years ago.  Both Roth and Grazinyte-Tyla are capable of raising a storm in the dramatic manner of Furtwangler by subtler means usually by altering the weight and balancing of phrasing and beginning climatic mood earlier than one might expect.  They point to a golden era for interpretation of this symphony. Karajan’s advice was to burn the first 100 Fifths - sadly conductors don’t do that now - the record early and move on to bigger and better things leaving a mostly indistinct and inadequate contribution to the canon.

Where next?

Grillplazer the poet who wrote an oration for Beethoven at his funeral and later suffered a reversal of his admiration, is not untypical for many who approach Beethoven’s music with enthusiasm and find it later on a bit prosaic perhaps due to it’s ubiquity.  New approaches are required - within the bounds of the score - which surprise and invigorate.  

In a world full of superficial images it’s easy to skate over the the true depth of this great symphony and as Victor Hazan has said in terms of Italian wine and cuisine - image is NOT identity.  Conductors can’t put up a front that looks and sounds like Beethoven’s Fifth without engaging with it’s deeper elements and still pull off it’s deeper undercurrents.  Audiences too should not be content with the sugar rush of the triumphant ending or the doom laden opening motto summing up this symphony - as though it was concentrated to save busy people time and “headspace” (whatever that is). The best conductors of this work nowadays will make more of it than the familiar highlights.

We should note that this symphony most popular at the Proms in the war years has an unerring tendency to inspire.  It’s deeper resonance is not built on mental pictures, a story or indeed much melody at first.  It is abstract, absolute music and should I think be pondered on as such. Despite all that I have written here, the one call I have is that you forget about the filmic references, the epithets and the weighty essays, and listen afresh.  Be it Furtwangler, Toscanini, Karajan, Nikisch or a million other conductors…this music is a constant reward.

We have exciting new conductors, new radically different orchestras and a new audience waiting to hear this great symphony given full voice the prospects are good - if concert promoters seize it’s power.  After all, there’s scarcely an audience member who doesn’t know how it begins.

The Symphony

Having said all that, I have little space to impose further on your time to talk about the music.  Insofar as it’s appropriate to put any words in the way of a listener and Beethovens music.  This work is so compact, so abstract, so clever and so insistent on it’s goal, words don’t mean much.  

Like all of these pieces this is serious music and it demands rehearing to harvest it’s many rewards.  Beethoven told his patron and the commissioner of this symphony Count Franz von Oppersdorff about the inclusion of trombones and the piccolo in the last movement.  It’s hard to ignore the importance of their contribution to the colour of the finale which blazes like no other. But such an observation seems facile now.  But if you listen out for them the colour of the finale changes.  This kind of things is worth bearing in mind.  Like all great art this symphony bears that kind of focused scrutiny - especially now performers are allowing the inner voices to come through more too. 

For the listener Karajan’s advice to Rattle is also true - the symphony needs a 100 auditions.  The opening movement has become so unbalanced by our memory of “da-da-da-dah” that the true appreciation of its working through (which is where we get our fulfilment from this kind of music).  The familiarity of the smaller building blocks of the only comes with close acquaintance but not necessarily study but attention.   We can read as much as we like about this symphony, a good performance is easy to find nowadays - so we should seek them out. 

It is a remarkable work seeped in Beethoven’s genius of the subliminal or at least liminal, beneath the surface, in the shadows bursting though with the life enhancing blazing glory many of us regard as unattainable, yet he demands each time we listen to this and many other works.  This is more then C minor to C major, feeling bad to feeling great, light to dark, A to B.  Harking back to so many of the works I’ve covered these symphonies exist and are still in demand because in a flourishing life they give us nutrition.  Robert Simpson, in the invaluable BBC Music Guide on Beethoven Symphonies, reminds us of the importance of the persistence in his case for the repeat of the scherzo and trio in this work.  His point comes that the glorious conclusion of the work does not close the door on the dark world of the third movement.  This fulfilment, glory. self-realisation (whatever you want to call that lifted state) exists only when it is over and above our setbacks or struggles.  It is reconciling the two that is so important.  Only understanding that light and dark will always exist side by side is a necessary condition of flourishing.  Beethoven knew that in 1804, modern mental health practice knows that too and in our world the reminder by art, that is so therapeutic as to be essential.