Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92

Program notes

About the Work

Beethoven composed his Seventh Symphony in 1811 and 1812, part of it during a stay at the Bohemian spa of Teplitz, where he had gone for the sake of his health. It is dedicated to Count Moritz von Fries. More than a year passed before it was heard. The first performance took place on 8 December 1813 in the hall of the University of Vienna, at a charity concert for soldiers wounded at the Battle of Hanau, with Beethoven himself conducting.

It was one of the great public successes of his life. Vienna was in a patriotic fever as Napoleon’s power collapsed, and the same concert included the first performance of Beethoven’s noisy battle piece Wellington’s Victory. The orchestra, led by his friend Ignaz Schuppanzigh, was full of well-known musicians who had volunteered their services, among them Louis Spohr, Hummel, Meyerbeer and Salieri. The audience insisted on hearing the second movement again immediately, and the whole concert had to be repeated. Spohr left a description of Beethoven on the podium, flinging his arms apart at a sudden accent and leaping into the air at a loud entry. Beethoven, for his part, counted the symphony among his best works.

The Seventh has no programme and no nickname. What holds it together is rhythm. Each of the four movements is built on a short, obsessively repeated rhythmic pattern, and the energy that results has struck listeners from the start as physical. Richard Wagner, writing in 1850, called the symphony ‘the apotheosis of the dance’, meaning dance raised to its highest form, and the phrase has never been bettered. The harmony is as bold as the rhythm. Beethoven keeps swerving from the home key of A major into the distant keys of C and F, and the plan of the whole work rests on that tension.

Tonight’s performance falls in a Beethoven year: 2027 marks two hundred years since his death in Vienna in March 1827.

What to Listen For

I. Poco sostenuto, Vivace. The slow introduction is unusually long, almost a movement in itself, with long rising scales and excursions into the keys of C and F. At the end everything shrinks to a single note, E, repeated more than sixty times until it catches the skipping dotted rhythm of the Vivace. That rhythm then runs through almost every bar of the movement.

II. Allegretto. A single unstable chord in the winds opens the movement. Then violas and cellos begin a quiet march in A minor on a pattern of one long note, two short and two long, and the theme is at first little more than one repeated pitch. It is handed upward through the strings, gathering a counter-melody and growing each time, like a procession approaching from far away. Gentler episodes in A major bring relief. This is the movement that was encored in 1813, and it has had a life of its own ever since.

III. Presto. A racing scherzo in F major, full of sudden changes between loud and soft. The slower trio, a broad tune in D major said to be based on an Austrian pilgrims’ hymn, comes round twice instead of the usual once.

IV. Allegro con brio. The finale goes at a relentless pace. Its whirling main theme is driven by heavy accents, and the movement outdoes even the scherzo in sheer force. The energy never lets up, and by the last pages the music seems to dissolve into pure sound and motion.