The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ludwig van Beethoven · a symphony in C minor, Op. 67 · four movements, the last two joined without a break · about 30 to 36 minutes in performance
Mode
Symphony as directed drama; sonata, double variation, scherzo with fugato trio, and a march-like finale in one span
Mythos
Darkness into light, struggle to victory: a will under trial, with the dark recalled inside the light
Phase
Four movements, the third passing into the fourth without a break; C minor to C major, the minor returning to be overcome
Presentation
Concert music; four movements for an orchestra of pairs of winds, horns and trumpets, timpani and strings, with piccolo, contrabassoon and three trombones added in the finale
Register
From four notes under fermatas and a ghost of a scherzo, pianissimo, to a C major march with trombones
Scale
One will, a public at the end; one rhythmic cell; about half an hour
Governing Proposition
A symphony grows all four of its movements from three short notes and a long one, holds back its major key for half an hour, and then reaches it by a passage held on a single drum. The wager of the work is that victory is not escape from the dark but a passage through it, and that the terror goes on inside the victory, which has to be won a second time.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The symphony begins before it has a tempo. Three repeated notes and a longer fourth, G, G, G and E flat, are held under a fermata; then F, F, F and D, held again. Allegro con brio, C minor, two beats to the bar: only after the two statements does the music set off. The four notes are not a theme but a cell, a rhythm of three short and a long, and the first movement is built from it entire. The first theme is made of it. Nothing in the movement is ornament.
The second group opens with a horn call, the same rhythm stretched to a fifth, and the lyrical second theme that follows has the cell in its bass. In the development the material is taken apart. It is whittled down to single chords, passed softly between the wind and the strings, until little is left but the exchange; then the hammer returns. The exposition repeat is taken, and in a form this compressed it is felt as pressure, not convention. At the recapitulation the horn call comes back in the bassoons, because the natural horns of the day could not play it in that key, and performers have often given it back to the horns.
In the recapitulation the drive stops. A solo oboe plays a single bar, Adagio, a short lament, and the whole orchestra waits for it. It is a person heard inside a force, and then the force resumes. The coda is long, a second development rather than a close, because the recapitulation has not settled the argument. The movement takes about a quarter of the symphony.
Movement II
Andante con moto, A flat major, 3/8: a double variation on two themes, gracious in register. More than once in the movement the music turns from A flat to C major, and trumpets and timpani enter with a fanfare. These are the work’s first glimpses of its goal: the key of the finale, sounded three movements early, and taken away again.
The plan is variation. The two themes come round in turn, each time in new figuration. It is the most relaxed music in the symphony and its gentlest law. Here the subtractive test finds its first give. The woodwind interlude and some stretches of figuration could be shortened without breaking the argument, and the figuration is routine by Beethoven’s standard.
Yet the movement is bound to the rest. Its fanfares carry the cell’s rhythm, and its turns to C major promise what the work withholds. Grace is its register, not height; the elevation comes in the sudden brass and in nothing else. The double-variation plan is a container the themes fill, and another plan could hold them without loss to the whole. It is the one joint in a form that is otherwise welded.
Movement III
Allegro, C minor, 3/4. Beethoven does not call it a scherzo, but it is one. It opens in the dark: the cellos and basses rise through an arpeggio, pianissimo. Then the horns take up a theme whose rhythm is the opening cell, three short and a long, in triple time. The two ideas alternate, the question in the low strings and the hammer in the horns, and the minor key of the first movement is back.
The trio is in C major, and it is a fugato that begins in the cellos and double basses. The low strings lead off, and the other strings enter after them. No symphony had asked so much of its double basses. The trio is the major key again, briefly and roughly, a second promise of the goal; and it gives way.
The scherzo returns changed. The strings play pizzicato, the dynamic falls to pianissimo, and a bassoon sounds through it like a ghost. In the standard performing version the scherzo is played once through with its trio and this soft return; some modern editions and conductors restore a long repeat of scherzo and trio, and the two versions are both whole. The ghost does not end the movement. It thins, and the music passes without a break into what comes next.
Movement IV
The transition is the work’s hinge. The timpani hold a C over a long span; the strings hold a chord of A flat above it; and over both a violin figure begins to climb. It gathers, rising and growing louder, until it breaks into C major, fortissimo, Allegro, 4/4. With the arrival three trombones are heard for the first time in the work, and the piccolo and contrabassoon with them. The instruments have been held back for three movements and are spent here.
From the end of the scherzo to the end of the finale the music runs without a stop, about fifteen minutes, almost half the symphony as one span. The finale alone takes about a third. The weight of the work has moved to its end, and the first movement, for all its force, is heard at last as the beginning of an argument that the finale must close. The finale’s march is public, open-air music, and its exposition repeat is taken or left as the conductor chooses.
Then, at the height of the C major, the darkness returns. Before the recapitulation the scherzo comes back, quietly and in 3/4, a shadow of itself. The triumph has been reached, and the terror has not gone. The recapitulation has to win the major key a second time, and it does. Without the recall the minor would not have been overcome, only replaced.
Movement V
The coda quickens to Presto and drives to a long run of C major chords. They say the arrival more times than the argument requires. The excess is deliberate, but it is permitted rather than compelled, and the last pages are grandeur by accumulation. The work ends in the key it has been seeking for half an hour, with the dark it passed through still in the hearing.
The symphony was composed chiefly in 1807 and 1808, from sketches going back to about 1804. It was first performed on 22 December 1808 at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, in Beethoven’s own benefit concert: a programme of about four hours, in a cold hall, that also gave the first performances of the Sixth Symphony and the Choral Fantasy and the first public hearing of the Fourth Piano Concerto. The performance was under-rehearsed. The work was dedicated jointly to Prince Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky and published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1809.
In 1810 E. T. A. Hoffmann reviewed it in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, and the review made it the founding text of the Romantic idea of instrumental music. The symphony that moves its weight to the finale and passes from minor to major runs on through Brahms’s First, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth and Mahler’s Second and Fifth. In the Second World War its opening was a BBC signal. It has been in the core of the orchestral repertory without a break since 1808. What it shows does not depend on how often it is heard: a victory that keeps the dark inside it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance almost everywhere in the first movement. Everything grows from the four-note cell: the first theme, the horn call that opens the second group, the bass under the lyrical second theme, the development whittled to single chords passed between wind and strings, and the coda, which is a second development rather than a close. Nothing there is ornament. The scherzo is needed by the finale, which recalls it, and the transition is needed by both. The test finds give in two places: the Andante’s woodwind interlude and stretches of figuration, which could be shortened without breaking the argument, and the finale’s coda, which says the arrival more times than the argument requires.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: victory is not escape from the dark but a passage through it, and the terror remains in the victory. The proof is in the finale. At the height of its C major the scherzo comes back, soft and in 3/4, and the triumph has to be won a second time. A second truth is in the first movement’s recapitulation, where a solo oboe stops the music for one bar of lament: a single voice heard inside a collective drive before the drive resumes. Held below the top on two counts: the proposition is general, will against fate, felt more as energy than stated as a condition of a particular life; and the finale asserts more than it examines.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height in both registers, and often. The sublime of dread: the opening under its fermatas; the development whittled to soft single chords before the hammer returns; the scherzo’s rising arpeggio in the basses, pianissimo, and its return as pizzicato with a bassoon’s ghost. The sublime of grandeur: the Andante’s sudden turns to C major with trumpets and timpani, and the transition, where a held timpani C and a held chord of A flat sit under a violin figure that climbs until it breaks into C major with the trombones heard for the first time. Held a tenth below Winterreise, at 9.3, because the Andante is mostly gracious, and the finale’s last pages are grandeur by accumulation.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One archetype is built and is load-bearing: darkness into light, struggle to victory. It is not evoked by a title or a programme. It is the tonal plan, C minor to C major with the minor returning to be overcome, the transition and the recall; without it the work has no shape. That the following century took this archetype from the symphony shows how firmly it was built. The archetype is dramatic and directed, a protagonist’s trial, not a frame. What holds it below the summit is the particular, which instrumental music keeps thinly: no person, place or act is named, the myth is one figure, and its particular, a will, is abstract.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Viennese symphony of Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven’s own Eroica (1803 to 1804), which had already made the symphony a heroic drama of large scale. The departures are several: a whole first movement saturated from one rhythmic cell of four notes, carried into all four movements; a minor-key symphony whose goal is a major-key finale, so that the weight falls at the end; two movements joined by a composed transition, and an earlier movement recalled inside a later one; trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon brought in for the arrival. The stake was real: a benefit concert on which his income depended. Held below the top because the road was his own, and the Eroica took the larger risk first.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Its meaning, that the victory carries the darkness inside it, is made only by form: the transition without a break, without which the finale would be a new piece rather than a resolution; the recall of the scherzo inside the finale, which is the work’s thought, not a reminiscence; the tonal arch from C minor to C major. The first movement’s sonata form is compressed until the exposition repeat is felt as pressure, and its coda is long because the recapitulation has not settled the argument. The oboe’s bar is form too, a solo breaking a tutti. The joint is the Andante, whose double-variation plan is a container the themes fill.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence, and two centuries of it. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s review of 1810 in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung made the work the founding text of the Romantic idea of instrumental music; Schenker devoted a monograph to it; its first four notes are the most analysed opening in music. Performance keeps answering it differently: the first movement’s tempo, the length of the fermatas, whether the scherzo takes its long repeat, the horn call of the recapitulation written for bassoons and often given back to horns. The questions stay open, whether the triumph is earned or imposed and what the scherzo’s return means. Held below the top because familiarity costs here: much that is said repeats what was said first.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is the Viennese symphony after 1800, and the work reorganised what a symphony is for. It made four movements one directed drama with a goal, made a single motive the material of a whole cycle, joined movements, and moved the weight to the finale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is decisive and documented. The finale-weighted, minor-to-major symphony runs through Brahms’s First, also C minor to C major, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth, Mahler’s Second and Fifth, and Bruckner; the cyclic recall runs through Berlioz; Hoffmann’s review shaped the aesthetics of absolute music. The opening became a public sign as a BBC signal in the Second World War. Held below the ceiling because the Eroica broke first.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole. The score survives as published, with the autograph, and its one textual question, the scherzo’s repeat, is a choice between two complete versions, not a loss. Presence: continuous since 1808 and the widest the concert repertory has, in the core of every symphony orchestra’s repertory for two centuries, among the most recorded orchestral works, and its opening known to people who have never heard a concert. Fabric: the instruments have changed, to valve horns, modern timpani and strings, and the work has needed no retouching beyond the familiar reassignment of one horn call. Held below the ceiling because its survival, though continuous, is two centuries, not millennia.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. Economy is the method: from four notes a whole sonata movement, and a development that shrinks its material to one chord passed between choirs. The orchestration is structural: the horn call that opens the second group; the oboe’s cadenza; the basses’ rising arpeggio and the trio’s fugato in the low strings, which tests the double basses as no symphony had; the pizzicato return; the timpani pedal; the trombones withheld for three movements and spent at the arrival. Rhythm is a constructive force across all four movements. The costs are in the score: the recapitulation’s horn call given to bassoons, which natural horns could not play there; the Andante’s routine figuration; the coda’s repeated cadences.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the first movement’s C minor storm and the finale’s C major march with trombones and piccolo, or the Andante’s graceful A flat and the scherzo’s ghostly basses. One law governs them. Its rhythm is the opening cell, three short and a long, which drives the first movement, sounds in the horns’ theme of the scherzo, returns in the Andante’s fanfares and in the finale’s figures. Its tonality is C minor overcome by C major, enacted twice, at the transition and again after the recall, and the recall is the law made audible. The range is wide: dread, lyric grace, a fugato, a ghost, a march. Held below the top where the Andante obeys a gentler law than the rest.
Score: 9.4 / 10
A wordless symphony holds more than its medium suggests, and less than a song cycle or an opera with a world. The orders it holds: consciousness, as a will under trial; the collective, in the finale’s public, open-air music; the individual against the collective, in the oboe’s single bar; the military and the festive, in the fanfares of the Andante and the finale; mortality and terror, in the scherzo. They are held by one law, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the natural order, which belongs to the Sixth, written beside it, the family, labour, the sacred and history do not appear, and the state appears only as public celebration. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, then The Living Form, The Made and The Inner Law at 9.4. A score whole since 1808 and in the core of the repertory ever since; a reorganisation of the symphony as one directed drama, carried from Brahms to Mahler; and a form in which one rhythmic cell, a transition and a recall make the work’s whole meaning.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: a wordless symphony holds a will under trial, the collective, the individual against it, the military and festive, and mortality, but the natural order, the family, labour, the sacred and history are absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, whose built archetype has an abstract particular, and The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 8.9, held by a finale that asserts more than it examines and by the Eroica’s earlier break.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.6, Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the nearest by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score of the Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, as published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1809, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The unit is the score in its standard performing version: four movements in Beethoven’s order, the first movement’s exposition repeat taken, the scherzo played once through with its trio and soft return, the finale’s exposition repeat taken or left as the conductor chooses. The long repeat of scherzo and trio restored in some modern editions is the same work and moves no axis by more than a tenth. There are no words; Beethoven’s markings are given as he wrote them, and no other words are quoted. The proportions of the movements were counted by script on the timings of the tradition. Figures that could not be verified, among them the bar counts, the length of the transition in bars, the date of Schenker’s monograph and claims of priority for the finale’s trombones, are not given. An anecdote about fate knocking at the door, generally doubted, is not used. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.