LSO
Antal Dorati (conductor)
Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Philharmonic
Gianandrea Noseda (conductor)
Camerata Salzburg
Roger Norrington (conductor)
1. Allegro con brio
2. Andante con moto
3. Allegro
4. Allegro - Presto
Whereas many of the 'classics' of drama, epic poetry and sculpture date from ancient Greek and Roman times, most of Western music's 'classical' texts are little more than two centuries old. Positively, it might be hoped that the exemplary quality of these pieces will therefore continue to inspire composers for centuries to come. Negatively, however, and more in line with our current post-modern and anti-canonical attitudes, it might also be predicted that in the forthcoming millennium their status as role-models for the highest mode of musical thinking will diminish. World music and as-yet-unforeseen emanations of popular culture will, according to this theory, reveal the high ideals of the so-called classics to be nothing more than the product of cultural relativism.
As a work that the composer-critic and teller of tales E. T. A. Hoffmann was already describing in prophetic terms barely two years after its Viennese premiere on 22 December 1808 - a work that ever since has occupied a prime location on the higher slopes of music's Mount Parnassus - Beethoven's Fifth Symphony might seem in this case to be chief evidence for both the defence and the prosecution. Certainly, this century's explosion in our awareness of music from the East has placed it and other works of its kind in a broader context than was previously imaginable. Currents of cultural and political change are now the terms in which we tend to analyse acknowledged masterpieces, rather than those of time-honoured genius. On the other hand, and unlike the Schlegels in E. M. Forster's Howards End ('Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man'), we shy away from over-subjective readings of the music. Future audiences are unlikely to hear in Beethoven's third movement the sounds of stomping goblins and dancing elephants detected by Forster's Helen. And no bad thing at that.
Yet, for all the sophistication of our late-twentieth- century sensibility, Beethoven's Fifth still delivers such a payload of powerful originality that its status as a kind of Platonic ideal of abstract instrumental expression seems assured. Naturally, our knowledge of the composer's crises of unrequited love and encroaching deafness in the years preceding the Symphony's composition gives strong circumstantial and presumptive evidence for the truth of this conviction. So, too, does the musicological evidence. For, in spite of its apparent spontaneity, Beethoven struggled hard to give to it the form that fulfilled his conception. Intending the work as a successor to the 'Eroica' Symphony, he completed the first two movements in 1805, but put them aside to compose the Fourth Symphony and three 'Rasumovsky' Quartets. Composition was resumed, alongside work on the Sixth Symphony, in 1807-8.
The breakthrough that made further progress possible was the linking of the Fifth Symphony's scherzo with its finale, making the two movements a single entity whose unity is strengthened by the finale's haunting reprise of the nightmare scherzo-theme. The compressed energy of the first movement (time-hallowed by its four-note opening, immortalised even in Beethoven's lifetime as synonymous with Fate) and the lyrical ease of the ensuing Andante con moto are thereby balanced in a perfect fusion of form and content. Not even Mozart in his G minor Symphony (No. 40, K550) approached the sheer dramatic and rhetorical impact Beethoven attained in his Op. 67; nor, it seems likely, will any composer in years, decades or even centuries yet to come.
© Nicholas Williams
