Vienna Philharmonic
Carlos Kleiber (conductor)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Otto Klemperer (conductor)
Ìý
1.ÌýPoco sostenuto – Vivace
2.ÌýAllegretto
3.ÌýPresto – Assai meno presto – Presto –
ÌýAssai meno presto – Presto
4.ÌýAllegro con brio
For much of his adult life, Beethoven was tormented by ill health. Aside from his famous deafness, he suffered from persistent ringing in the ears (tinnitus), headaches, abdominal disorders, rheumatic attacks and various other ailments, not all easily diagnosed. He was also prone to depression – not surprisingly, one might say, given all that pain and frustration. But he was clearly also constitutionally robust, fighting off infections and rising above other tribulations. Sometimes it was work that saved him – as Beethoven admits in his famous private confession, the so-called ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’. At other times the experience of recovery gave new impetus to composition.
It was in just such a period of recuperation that Beethoven wrote his Seventh Symphony. In 1811, the prominent Viennese physician, Dr Giovanni Malfatti, recommended that Beethoven spend the summer in the Bohemian spa-town of Teplitz, famous for its ‘cure’. It was also a place of relative peace in troubled times: during the Napoleonic wars, diplomats from all sides met there, regarding it as neutral territory. The visit obviously gave Beethoven a personal and musical boost, as he returned to Vienna with plans for two symphonies. He began writing the Seventh almost immediately, while making notes about ‘a second symphony in D minor’. The latter did not fully materialise until 12 years later, as the choral Ninth Symphony; but as soon as Beethoven had finished No. 7, in May 1812, he began work on the equally buoyant Eighth. Whatever else he may have been suffering from, there was no shortage of creative energy.
One has to be careful about making direct comparisons between Beethoven’s supposed mood at a particular time and the character of the music he then produced. When Beethoven wrote that despairing ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ he was also busy on his Second Symphony – a work not without its struggles but, most commentators agree, overwhelmingly positive and full of vitality. Yet it is hard to avoid the feeling that Beethoven’s renewed dynamism after his stay in Teplitz found direct expression in his Seventh Symphony – the symphony Wagner famously described as ‘the apotheosis of the dance’. The sheer physical energy of the work – expressed in bracing, muscular rhythms and brilliant orchestration – can, in some performances, border on the unnerving. Confronted with one of the symphony’s many obsessively-repeating passages (possibly the final build-up in the first movement), Beethoven’s younger contemporary Carl Maria von Weber pronounced him ‘ripe for the madhouse’. There are darker elements, expressed in the music’s recurring tendency to lean towards the destabilising keys of C and F major, but the overall effect is of a spiritual victory. It is tempting to steal a title from one of Shelley’s poems and sum up the whole work as ‘The Triumph of Life’.
At first there seems to be little of the dance about the Seventh Symphony. Slow woodwind phrases are brusquely punctuated by chords from the full orchestra, but then faster string figures galvanise the music into physical action. Eventually this (relatively) slow introduction settles on a single note – an E, repeated by alternating woodwind and strings. But this soon develops into a sprightly dotted rhythm, and the Vivace begins. This rhythm – basically an emphatic long note followed by two short ones – not only dominates the first movement, but plays a crucial part in the other three as well.
You can also hear it (in a slightly different form) in the main theme of the following Allegretto, after the initial minor-key wind chord calls us to attention. This magically atmospheric movement was such a success at its first performance that it had to be repeated. It left a huge imprint on the young Schubert, who echoed its slow, but strangely weightless tread in a number of his later works.
After the Allegretto, the Presto bursts into life. This has all the racing forward momentum of a typical Beethoven scherzo. It is twice interrupted by a slower Trio section (with another version of the long–short–short rhythmic pattern in its main theme), and yet its vitality seems irrepressible: a third and final attempt to establish the slower Trio theme is magnificently dismissed by five crisp orchestral chords. This scherzo is, however, in the ‘wrong’ key – the destabilising F major.
It is now the finale’s task to ram home the symphony’s tonic key, A major. The result is a magnificent bacchanal, pounding almost to frenzy at the symphony’s seminal rhythmic pattern: long–short–short. The final build-up culminates in two huge full-orchestra climaxes, both marked triple forte – fff – the first time such an extreme dynamic had been used in orchestral music, and entirely appropriate for an ending that is both logical and dazzlingly affirmative.
© Stephen Johnson, 2004
