Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 7 in A Major, op. 92 Poco sostenuto / Vivace Allegretto Presto Allegro con brio

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Program notes by Martin Pearlman

Beethoven, Symphony No. 7 in A Major, op. 92 At the end of the year 1813, Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, Beethoven's friend and the inventor of the metronome, organized a concert for the benefit of Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded in a battle against Napoleon. The program opened with the premiere of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, which had been completed the previous year. There followed marches by Dussek and Pleyel, and the program concluded with the featured work, a bombastic new "Battle Symphony" by Beethoven, which he called Wellington's Victory. The latter, which Beethoven is said to have called "a stupid thing," with its battery of percussion and battle noises, was the spectacular success of the evening; but his Symphony No. 7 was also enthusiastically received, and its second movement so impressed his audience that it had to be played twice.

The orchestra on that occasion was noteworthy, Maelzel having persuaded many of the leading musicians of the day to participate. The well-known violinist and composer Louis Spohr played in the violin section, and the virtuoso Dragonetti played double bass. Those who did not play orchestral instruments, such as Salieri, Hummel, Moscheles and Meyerbeer, assisted with bass drums, cymbals and cannon for the Battle Symphony. (Meyerbeer was always behind the beat, according to Beethoven.) The composer himself, though already quite deaf, conducted the entire program. Spohr gives the following account of his conducting:

Although I had heard much about his conducting, it still greatly surprised me. Beethoven had the habit of conveying expression to his orchestra by all sorts of peculiar motions of the body. Whenever there was a sforzando, he tore his arms, which he had previously crossed on his breast, violently asunder. At a piano, he would crouch down, bending lower as the music became softer. Then at a crescendo, he would gradually raise himself until, at the forte, he sprang to his full height. Sometimes, to increase the forte, he would shout aloud to the orchestra, without being aware of it.

Spohr's poignant account also relates how Beethoven, unable to hear the orchestra during rehearsals, would get many measures ahead of them, recovering his place only when he could visually see them beginning a forte passage. It was the last public concert he would conduct.

With the premiere of his Seventh Symphony, Beethoven became truly popular among the general public and was recognized, even among his critics, as the world's greatest living composer. Wagner's famous description of this symphony as the "apotheosis of the dance," points to its intense rhythmic energy and extraordinary sense of invention. There are harmonic progressions that take us to unexpected, distant places, and there is an astonishingly powerful drive in passages such as the obsessive, descending chromatic bass line in the last movement that pulls the music inexorably down to the dominant and sets up a return of the opening material. Passages such as this have had their critics. Carl Maria von Weber thought they showed that Beethoven "was ready for the madhouse." But they also give this symphony a propulsive energy that has made it one of Beethoven's most popular works.