Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67

Program notes

About the Work

No piece of orchestral music is more famous than Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and few have been more influential. Its four opening notes, three short and one long (‘short-short-short-LONG’), are perhaps the most recognisable musical idea ever written, and the symphony built from them became, almost immediately, the very emblem of what a symphony could be: not merely a sequence of pleasing movements but a single dramatic journey, a struggle that ends in triumph.

Beethoven worked on the symphony over several years, completing it in 1808 amid the most fertile period of his life, even as his deafness deepened. It was unveiled at one of the most extraordinary concerts in history: a marathon, freezing four-hour event at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien on 22 December 1808, which also gave the premieres of the Sixth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy, with Beethoven himself at the piano. The under-rehearsed performance was reportedly a shambles, but the Fifth Symphony’s power soon became undeniable. The writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, reviewing it shortly afterwards, hailed it as opening ‘the realm of the colossal and immeasurable.’

The symphony’s overarching design, a tense, stormy C minor driving across four movements to a blazing C-major victory, became the model for the ‘struggle to triumph’ narrative that would shape Romantic music for the rest of the century. The terse opening motto saturates the whole work, binding it into a single, irresistible argument.

What to Listen For

Everything grows from those first four notes. Listen for how the opening motto is not just a theme but a building block: Beethoven hurls it through the first movement obsessively, in every register and instrument, generating tremendous momentum from the barest material; even a lone oboe’s brief, plaintive cadenza cannot halt its drive.

The second movement (Andante con moto) offers respite: a flowing, dignified set of variations on two themes, with noble brass outbursts. The third movement returns to C minor and a sense of foreboding: listen for the menacing opening on cellos and basses and the gruff, scrambling fugato of its central trio. Then comes the symphony’s great masterstroke: instead of ending, the scherzo dissolves into a long, suspenseful passage of hushed, throbbing strings over a quiet drumbeat, the tension stretched almost unbearably, until it bursts directly, without a break, into the blazing C-major finale. At that moment Beethoven brings in trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon for the first time in the symphony, flooding the hall with new brilliance. Listen, too, for how the shadow of the third movement briefly returns mid-finale, only to be swept aside as the music drives to one of the most emphatic, hard-won victories in all of music.