The Seventh may well be the most frequently played of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, the Fifth notwithstanding. The Ninth may be the most beloved today (it was not always so), but it requires vastly larger forces than the Seventh, well beyond the means of many amateur and semi-professional orchestras. The Seventh requires only a modest-sized orchestra (pairs of woodwinds, horns, trumpets and timpani in addition to strings), but the sheer visceral impact it makes virtually guarantees a successful performance by even the least accomplished of ensembles. “The sound itself creates the actual and personal physical contact: in sports language, it ‘tackles’ you, so that you will not quickly return to normal,” writes Klaus G. Roy, former program annotator for the Cleveland Orchestra.

When Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was first performed in the large hall of the University of Vienna on December 8, 1813, it was immediately hailed as a sensational achievement, a judgment maintained continuously down to the present day. “All persons, however they had previously dissented from his music, now agreed to award him his laurels,” wrote Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s first biographer.

The occasion of that world premiere was a gala benefit concert for Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded in the Battle of Hanau, which had occurred a few weeks earlier. This was also the event at which the noisy spectacle Wellington’s Victory, or The Battle of Vitoria, was first performed, a huge success at the time but now regarded as something of an embarrassment.

Many of Europe’s musical luminaries, including Salieri, Spohr, Moscheles, Hummel, Meyerbeer, Romberg and Dragonetti played in the orchestra, lending an extra air of celebration to the concert. Beethoven himself conducted. Adding further zest was the presence of Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, inventor of both the metronome and of the mechanical instrument for which Wellington’s Victory had originally been written, the Panharmonicon (Beethoven subsequently rewrote it for orchestra).

The enthusiasm aroused by this symphony over more than two centuries and countless thousands of performances have generated reams of eloquent praise. Ernest Newman saw it as inducing a “divine intoxication of the spirit.” Alexander Oulibicheff called it “a masquerade of a multitude drunk with joy.” Wagner, never a man to shy away from offering his opinion, offered these words: “All tumult, all yearning and storming of the heart, become here the blissful insolence of joy, which carries us away with bacchanalian power through the roomy space of nature, through all the streams and seas of life, shouting in glad self-consciousness as we sound through the universe the daring strains of this human sphere-dance. The symphony is the Apotheosis of the Dance itself: it is Dance in its highest aspect, the loftiest deed of bodily motion, incorporated into an ideal mould of tone.”

Or consider this remark from another Cleveland Orchestra annotator, Peter Laki: “Every rock musician knows how intoxicating the constant repetition of simple rhythmic patterns can be. That’s part of what Beethoven did here, but he did much more: against a backdrop of continually repeated dance rhythms, he created an endless diversity of melodic and harmonic events. There is a strong sense of cohesion as the melodies flow into one another with inimitable spontaneity. At the same time, the harmonies, melodies, dynamics and orchestration are full of the most delightful surprises. It is somewhat like riding in a car at a constant high speed while watching an ever-changing, beautiful landscape pass by.”

Unquestionably the driving force of the Seventh Symphony is rhythm. Throughout each movement runs a single rhythmic pattern (two in the third movement) that propels it relentlessly, irresistibly forward with cumulative energy. The effect in the first movement, on most listeners, is exuberant, in the second mildly hypnotic, in the third boisterously athletic and in the fourth something akin to a full-scale Bacchanalia. Beethoven himself said of the finale: “I am Bacchus incarnate, to give humanity wine to drown its sorrow... [Each person] who divines the secret of my music is delivered from the misery that haunts the world.”

The introduction to the first movement is the longest such passage Beethoven (or anyone else up to that time) had ever written for a symphony, amounting almost to an entire movement in itself and lasting a third of the movement’s approximately twelve-minute length. It contains its own pair of themes and defines the harmonic regions that will have reverberations throughout the rest of the symphony. The transition to the main Vivace section is scarcely less imaginative and extraordinary, consisting of 68 repetitions of the same note (E) to varied rhythms. These eventually settle into the pattern that pervades the entire Vivace section. From here Beethoven propels us through a sonata-form movement of bold harmonic changes, startling alternations of loud and soft, and an obsessive display of the pervasive rhythmic motif often described as dactylic. A dactyl is a measure of poetic scansion consisting of a long followed by two shorts, but Beethoven’s dactyls are a variant, amounting to a rhythmic relationship of 3:1:2 (a long, a “short” short, and a “long” short). Once the main Vivace portion of the movement is launched, there is scarcely a single bar that does not contain this rhythmic motif.

The second movement (Allegretto) is hardly a “slow” one, but it is more restrained and soothing than the frenetic first movement. Again, an underlying rhythmic pattern pervades (here we find the perfect dactyl). The virtually melody-less principal “theme” in A minor is heard in constantly changing orchestral garb. There is also a lyrical episode of surpassing beauty in A major (woodwinds) and a stormy fugato built from the principal theme. The audience at the first performance liked this movement so much that it demanded an encore on the spot.

The third movement is a double Scherzo and Trio (scherzo-trio-scherzo-trio-scherzo). The slower Trio sections, with their accordion-like swells and strange growling from the second horn, are believed by some to have been based on an old Austrian pilgrims’ hymn. With characteristic humour, Beethoven threatens to present the Trio a third time (“What, again?” is the expected reaction from the listener), but suddenly dismisses it with five brusque chords from the full orchestra (“That’s e-nough of that!”)

The final movement eclipses all previous ones in its intoxicating exhibition of sonic power, sweeping listeners instantly into its orbit and holding them fast until the symphony hurtles to an abrupt stop seven or eight minutes later.

Mario Bernardi led the NAC Orchestra in their first performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in 1970. In 2014, the Orchestra played this work on their tour of the United Kingdom with Pinchas Zukerman conducting, and in 2018, again in Southam Hall, this time with Xian Zhang on the podium.

By Robert Markow