Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92

Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)

After the Fifth, perhaps the most popular of Beethoven’s nine symphonies is No. 7. It often threatens to be overplayed: one remembers an agonised letter to the editor of a university newspaper (after the umpteenth visiting orchestra trotted out the A Major Symphony): “Dear Sir: Beethoven’s Seventh is a masterpiece---but it is not fifty percent of all the music ever composed!

Actually this big, brawling symphony seems quite inexhaustible, overflowing with incredible rhythmic vitality, always revealing new secrets, delights and quirks.

The first quirk to be noted is the introduction to the first movement. Fully four and one-half minutes long, it is quite as long as some entire first movements composed by Beethoven! After the portentous tone of this introduction the joke is on us when we discover that the main business of the first movement is apparently little more than a bright, twittering, somewhat trivial tune built on an obsessive “dactylic” rhythm (tum-ta-tum, tum-ta-tum…) So pervasive is this rhythm that we are apt to lose sight of the underlying sonataform, the listener hearing the movement as a nearly monothematic structure, spinning the springy, jig-like rhythmic pattern into ever-expanding waves of sound. And how remarkably untrivial it all becomes!

From the beginning the second movement was enormously popular, being encored at the first performance---most unusual for a slow movement. “Slow” it isn’t quite, the irrepressible rhythmic bounce of the entire symphony evident here in this very individual movement, with an obsessive rhythm once again informing the music, And again Beethoven chooses to work with curiously “unpromising” raw material”: a sort of “Johnny One-Note” tune which, following the opening “attention-getting” chord in the winds, is heard in a series of repetitions, increasing in volume, building to an impressive fullness of orchestral tone. A lyrical episode (A Major) follows, with flowing triplets, before returning to A Minor for a further twist to the main tune, culminating in a fugue and a blaring fortissimo statement of the tune. Then a shorter version of the lyrical episode becomes a coda, rounded out by a hushed final appearance of the main theme, slipping downwards from upper winds to low pizzicato strings, concluding with the same chord which opened the movement.

In his middle period works Beethoven favoured scherzo movements with two trios, and this symphony’s third movement follows that plan: scherzo – trio – scherzo –trio (repeated) – scherzo. Here the traditional contrasts between the main parts could not be plainer: a bustling, breathless F Major scherzo followed by a trance-like trio in D Major, with long sustained pedal-points, low murmuring horn patterns, and a faintly peasant, folk-like atmosphere.

The finale is unusually animated, even for Beethoven. Donald Francis Tovey refers to it as “a triumph of Bacchic fury.” As with the first three movements, a positively prancing rhythmic energy snorts through every bar of this overwhelming movement. A sonataform structure, with many short, repeated sections, the two major elements comprise a whirling first subject (over a thudding, pile-driving bass) and a nimble, skittish second subject, flitting hither and thither with endless teasing. This is all sent storming on its way with Beethoven’s usual thorough development of musical ideas. After the return of the main elements, the coda is of particularly galvanising energy. The whirling opening melodic motive is frisbee-ed about the upper strings while the cellos and basses relentlessly grind away on the dominant (low E) so obsessively that the final triumphant appearance of the main tune (complete with horns in full-throated whoop) cannot distract them from their “drilling operations.” Eventually the entire orchestra joins the romp and the movement rockets home with wild exultation.

Richard Wagner has been chided for runaway rhapsodic notions about this symphony, but any person of feeling cannot but sympathise with these comments:’

“All impetuosity, all longing and raging of the heart here become the blissful exuberance

of joy, which with Bacchantic omnipotence carries us with it through all the realms of

nature, all the streams and seas of life, exulting wherever we are led by the audacious

rhythms of this human dance of the spheres. This symphony is the very apotheosis of

the dance, it is the dance in its highest being.”