Beethoven: a Guide to the Symphonies

There is a longstanding myth that revolutionary works of art, particularly in music, are never understood and embraced in their own time. True, Beethoven’s epochal Third Symphony, the ‘Eroica’, did boggle its first audiences, but two years later the leading music magazine in Europe declared it the greatest symphony ever written. It had already begun to redefine and amplify what a symphony could be, and to a degree what music itself could be.

That sense of his symphonies and the rest of Beethoven’s music has survived to our own day. Still, like all long-lived works they have had to endure the winds of cultural times and tides. When the Fifth Symphony first appeared, many found it a joke or an outrage: the very idea of calling four shouted-out notes a theme! By the end of the 19th century, the Fifth had become something quite otherwise, the most famous symphony in the world. When Boston Symphony Hall was built in the 1890s, there was one name engraved in the middle of the proscenium: Beethoven. It was as if he stood astride the whole of music. Since then he has taken his lumps, been retired with honours from his pedestal. From catastrophic experience we have learned to be wary of bestriding figures, and we are not so keen on artists who seem to want to suck all the air out of the room.

Yet Beethoven, his symphonies, all his works have survived and prospered, but in a different time and context: their centrality is gone, but their power endures. That is what works have to have the capacity to do, if they are to survive: reinvent themselves, find new ways to be relevant. So it is with Beethoven. We need to put aside what his works symbolised in the past and return to what they are in immediate human terms: the seismic strength of the Fifth; the time-suspending summer sun of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony; the ecstatic dancing of the Seventh, and likewise the others.

Here is a brief tour of the symphonies. Its theme is that there is no such thing as a Beethoven symphony. Each of them is a singular individual, a new direction, a distinctive orchestral sound and emotional world.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Symphony No 1

See it live: Wednesday 30 October 6.30pm, Barbican / Thursday 31 October 7pm, Barbican

Beethoven’s first solo concert in Vienna sparked this work, written quickly and with no grand ambitions. The piece is individual but audibly in his teacher Haydn’s orbit. After a searching introduction, the first movement settles into a four-square, slightly military-tinged outing. Following are a slow movement in the elegant galant mode of the day, a dashing scherzo, and a lightfooted finale.

Symphony No 2

The Second is a major work, expansive and ambitious, the first of three Beethoven symphonies that have an operatic atmosphere. It begins with a slow introduction that puts forth contrasting ideas like a series of characters: a pouncing unison, a tender moment, and so on. The movement proper is a muscular and eruptive Allegro con brio. The slow movement has a touch of tristesse, like a melancholy scene in a comic opera, relieved by a driving and jumping scherzo. The finale is a grand joke, beginning with an absurd giant hiccup that dissolves into skittering comedy.

Symphony No 3, ‘Eroica’

With this work, originally titled ‘Bonaparte’, Beethoven reached his full maturity and in the process changed the conception of the symphony once and for all, and to a degree forged the direction music would travel from that point forward: larger in size and ambition and individual personality. In naming it for the French conqueror, Beethoven declared that he was not just an entertainer, but was joining his work to a world-transforming figure, and thus to history. (He changed the title when he learned Napoleon had crowned himself emperor.)

The restlessly searching, sometimes violent first movement can be called the image of a battle or a military campaign. It is followed by a profound and far-reaching funeral march. After the mourning, back to life in the form of a racing, almost delirious scherzo. The variations of the finale take a simple bassline and dance tune and transform them into music epic and heroic.

Symphony No 4

See it live: Thursday 31 October 7pm, Barbican

After the towering ‘Eroica’, Beethoven produced this work of surpassing grace, wit and charm. Here began his pattern of a heavy, challenging symphony followed by a lighter one. Once again there is an operatic cast, beginning with the mysterious, nocturnal introduction. Then it is as if doors are thrown open to a glittering ballroom full of dancers. There follow a slow movement with a singing theme over an obsessive rhythmic figure, a tripping-over-its-feet scherzo, and a finale based on a madcap fiddle tune.

Symphony No 5

The symphony starts with what became perhaps the most famous gesture in music: an explosive four-note tattoo that starts a relentless force-of-nature first movement, all based on that opening gesture. The gently lyrical second movement is a consoling respite before the intensity returns in a driving third movement that seems to fall at the end into a fog from which emerges, in a blaze of brass, the exultant finale. In this symphony Beethoven creates a story in sound, a journey from fateful to triumphant.

Symphony No 6, ‘Pastoral’

See it live: Thursday 21 November 7.30pm, Barbican

Call the Sixth the anti-Fifth Symphony: gentle, lyrical, folksy, undramatic, a sunny vacation. The story here is told in Beethoven’s titles for the movements: ‘The awakening of joyous feelings on arriving in the country,’ with loping rhythms like a donkey-cart. Second movement, ‘Scene by the brook,’ babbling and flowing. Scherzo, ‘Jolly peasant gathering,’ dancing and folklike, interrupted by a raging storm that resolves into the finale, ‘Shepherd’s Song: Happy and thankful feelings after the storm.’

Symphony No 7

See it live: Thursday 28 November 7pm, Barbican

The Seventh is a series of moods of dance, from gay to mournful to ecstatic. After an expansive introduction, a piping folktune begins a vivace with relentlessly driving rhythm. The second movement’s solemn and plaintive dance is one of Beethoven’s most affecting and unforgettable stretches. The scherzo has a jubilant dashing theme alternating with trios of almost immobile gracefulness. The breathless and ecstatic finale, with its pealing horns, is based on a fiddle reel of Scotch-Irish cast.

Symphony No 8

After the dancing Seventh, a vacation into the past: a beautiful, ironical look back to the 18th century. A grandly dancing theme begins a good-humoured first movement. The second movement sounds operatic, with a striding tread and whistling theme, followed by a nostalgic minuet. The high spirits carry into a scurrying, capering finale.

Symphony No 9, ‘Choral’

See it live: Sunday 23 March 7pm, Barbican

After a life marked by sorrow and suffering including the tragedy of going deaf, Beethoven arrived at the end of his symphonies with a work whose message is the triumph of joy. The first movement is craggy and heroic but also unsettled, ending ominously with a funeral march. For the second movement, a massive and complex scherzo, irresistible in its rhythmic drive, but with a trio like a little folksong whistled on a sunny day. That gives way to one of his most uncannily beautiful, time-stopping slow movements.

The finale is an epic variation movement introducing soloists and choir in a symphony for the first time, the variations on its legendary anthem-like theme ranging from a Turkish march to music exalted and transcendent, all of it proclaiming a simple but eternal message: our joy is founded on freedom, and the perfect society, here called Elysium, is something that gods and heroes cannot give us, but we must create for ourselves in friendship, brotherhood and love.

Written by Jan Swafford

From J S Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven to Betsy Jolas and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the LSO performs works by hundreds of composers every year at the Barbican, LSO St Luke’s and on tour. Discover more about the people who have shaped our musical world.