The famous Beethoven Allegretto from his Symphony No. WRTI’s Susan Lewis has more on why this particular movement continues to engage us. 7the Allegrettohas captivated listeners since the symphony’s 1813 premiere, when it was so popular that the orchestra used it as an encore. Bonn, then a sovereign electorateThe second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No.
What caused the excitement was not, however, Opus 92, the new symphony, but Opus 91, Wellington ’ s Victory, or The Battle of Vitoria, originally written for a mechanical instrument called the Panharmonicon but presented even at this, its first performance, in the version for orchestra. The concert at which the work had its premiere—it was a benefit for Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the recent Battle of Hanau—was probably the most wildly successful of his career. Ureli Corelli Hill conducted it at the Apollo Rooms, New York, at a concert of the Philharmonic SocietyINSTRUMENTATION: 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, with timpani and stringsTHE BACKSTORY The Seventh Symphony is Beethoven’s last word for quite a few years on the subject of the big style he had been cultivating since the early 1800s. First performed in Viennas Theater an der Wien.US PREMIERE: November 18, 1843.
An Analysis Of Beethoven 7Th Symphony Series Of Concerts
The excursions to C and F are entered upon with startling bluntness. But the public liked the “companion piece” too, and the composer Louis Spohr, one of the violinists in the orchestra for the whole series of concerts, reports that the second movement was encored each time.THE MUSIC A semi-slow introduction, the largest ever heard in any symphony until then and still one of the largest, defines great harmonic spaces, first A major, then C major (the gently lyric oboe tune), then F major (the same tune on the flute). To Beethoven’s annoyance, the critic of the Wiener Zeitung referred to the Seventh as having been composed “as a companion piece” to Wellington ’ s Victory. So great was the success that the entire program was repeated later in the month, again in January 1814, and once more in February. Between the Seventh Symphony and Wellington ’ s Victory, another gadget of Maelzel’s, a mechanical trumpeter, played marches written for the occasion by Dussek and Pleyel. In the battle of Hanau, that October, Napoleon thrashed the mostly Bavarian army that attempted to block his retreat toward the southwest.)The Panharmonicon was an invention of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, whose most enduring contribution to music was the first dependable metronome.
A subtly unstable wind chord begins and ends the movement. The Allegretto that the first audiences—indeed audiences throughout the nineteenth century—liked so much is relaxed only by comparison with what comes before and after. The coda, as so often in Beethoven, is virtually another development, and Beethoven heaves it to a tremendous climax by making a crescendo across a tenfold repetition of an obsessive, harmonically off-balance bass.There is no slow movement. Having done so, he propels us with fierce energy and speed through one of those movements of his that are dominated by a single propulsive rhythm. Gradually, with a delicious feeling for suspense, Beethoven draws the Vivace from the last flickers of the introduction. The material—scales, and melodies that outline common chords—is of reckless simplicity.
His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes. Of course, to sound wild it must be orderly, and rhythmic definition is everything, here as in the notoriously difficult first movement.Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony’s Program Annotator from 1979 to 1999 and a contributing writer to our program book until his death in 2009, was one of the nation’s pre-eminent writers on music.
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