Symphony No. 2 in D major, op. 36

Program notes

About the Work

Beethoven’s Second Symphony is the sunniest of his nine, and it was finished in the darkest months of his life. He began it in 1801 and completed most of it in 1802, much of the work done during a long summer stay in Heiligenstadt, then a village on the edge of Vienna, at a time when his deafness was growing worse and he had begun to fear it could not be cured. On 6 October 1802, at the end of that stay, he wrote a long letter to his brothers Carl and Johann, meant to be read after his death, in which he described the humiliation of standing beside someone who could hear a distant flute when he could hear nothing, and admitted that only his art had held him back from ending his life. The letter was never sent. He kept it among his private papers, where it was found after he died, and it is known today as the Heiligenstadt Testament.

Almost none of that despair reaches the symphony. It is in D major, a bright key for strings and trumpets, and its overall mood is energetic, witty and warm. Commentators have long wondered at the gap between the letter and the music; one common answer is that composition was Beethoven’s refuge rather than his diary. What the symphony does show is a composer impatient with the models of Haydn and Mozart. The dynamics lurch from very soft to very loud without warning, accents land in the wrong places, and silences cut phrases short. Heard beside the more polished First Symphony, it sounds restless, and heard beside the Eroica, which followed within two years, it sounds like the moment Beethoven started to break the frame.

Beethoven conducted the first performance himself on 5 April 1803 at the Theater an der Wien, in a long concert that also introduced his Third Piano Concerto and his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. Not everyone was ready for it. A reviewer for the Viennese Zeitung für die elegante Welt compared the symphony to a hideously wounded dragon, writhing and refusing to die, still thrashing its tail in the finale. The image stuck because it describes something real: the finale’s ending keeps promising to stop and then starting again. Posterity has been far kinder, and the Second is now heard as the bridge between Beethoven’s Classical beginnings and the heroic symphonies of his middle years.

Two structural choices point the way forward. The third movement is a scherzo, fast, jokey and rustic, in place of the courtly minuet a Haydn or Mozart symphony would have had. And the finale ends with a coda so long and so eventful that it becomes a climax in its own right, a practice Beethoven kept in the symphonies that followed.

What to Listen For

I. Adagio molto; Allegro con brio. The symphony opens with a long slow introduction. A loud unison is answered by soft woodwind phrases, and the music then wanders through distant keys before a long crescendo launches the fast music. Once the Allegro starts, the main theme is given to violas and cellos rather than violins, and the movement runs on nervous energy: listen for the sudden loud chords, the abrupt silences, and the trumpet and timpani calls that end the exposition. The coda is long and exuberant.

II. Larghetto. One of Beethoven’s longest slow movements, and one of his most gentle. The strings play the long, songlike main theme first, and then the woodwinds repeat it, like a serenade. The mood is calm and contented, with only passing shadows when the music moves into minor keys in the middle section.

III. Scherzo: Allegro. Short and full of jokes. Tiny three-note figures leap from instrument to instrument and from soft to loud, as if the orchestra were passing a ball. In the trio section, oboes and bassoons play a simple tune, and the strings keep interrupting with a gruff, loud outburst in the wrong key before backing down.

IV. Allegro molto. The finale opens with its most famous gesture: a quick two-note slur followed by a trill, which sounds like a stumble followed by a burst of laughter. That little figure drives the whole movement. Listen for the lyrical second theme in the woodwinds, and then for the enormous coda, with its false endings, hammered chords and sudden hushes, before trumpets and timpani finally bring the symphony home in blazing D major.