“If the initial reviews failed to recognize it as one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, one needs to understand the adverse conditions under which the work was first heard. The concert venue was freezing cold; it was more than two hours into a mammoth four-hour program before the piece began; and the orchestra played poorly enough that day to force the nearly deaf composer—also acting as conductor and pianist—to stop the ensemble partway into one passage and start again from the very beginning. It was, all in all, a very inauspicious beginning for what would soon become the worlds most recognizable piece of classical music: Ludwig van Beethovens Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67—the Fifth Symphony—which received its world premiere on this day in 1808. Also premiering that day at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna were Beethovens Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, and the Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68—the Pastoral Symphony. But it was the Fifth Symphony that, despite its shaky premiere, would eventually be recognized as Beethovens greatest achievement to that point in his career. Writing in 1810, the critic E.T.A. Hoffman praised Beethoven for having outstripped the great Haydn and Mozart with a piece that opens the realm of the colossal and immeasurable to us...evokes terror, fright, horror, and pain, and awakens that endless longing that is the essence of Romanticism. That assessment would stand the test of time, and the Fifth Symphony would quickly become a centerpiece of the classical repertoire for orchestras around the world. But beyond its revolutionary qualities as a serious composition, the Fifth Symphony has also proven to be a work with enormous pop-cultural staying power, thanks primarily to its powerful four-note opening motif—three short Gs followed by a long E-flat. Used in World War II-era Britain to open broadcasts of the BBC because it mimicked the Morse-code V for Victory, and used in the disco-era United States by Walter Murphy as the basis for his unlikely #1 pop hit A Fifth Of Beethoven, the opening notes of Beethovens Fifth Symphony have become a kind of instantly recognizable musical shorthand since they were first heard by the public on this day in 1808.” History https://youtube/watch?v=fOk8Tm815lE
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 17:22:44 +0000
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