When Beethoven Premiered His Seventh

(This piece is best enjoyed while listening to the above piece. Just hit the play button to begin.) 

On December 8, 1813, Ludwig van Beethoven stood before a packed house in Vienna and premiered his Seventh symphony. It was a sensation, especially the Allegretto second movement which was repeated at the concert at the behest of the crowd. The concert was for charity, honoring and raising funds for the veterans of the Battle of Hanau, which had happened just over a month earlier and resulted in a defeat for the Austrian forces at the hands of Napoleon. Regardless, Napoleon had left Austria, and Beethoven and the people celebrated with this supreme orchestration.

He had actually begun its composition years earlier. Beethoven, who was intermittently plagued by illness throughout his entire life, had spent time away from the bustle of Vienna in a small mountain town in Bohemia. Here, in the early months and frigid temperatures of 1812, he focused on writing the four movements of his Seventh symphony. 

Despite his personal state, the music was exuberant. The quick tempos and jaunty rhythms inspired German composer Richard Wagner to dub Beethoven’s Seventh the “apotheosis of the dance.”  It begins with a bang; strikes of the timpani with flutes and clarinets airily weaving together the loud periodic interjections. There is a sense of dramatic motion from the outset, one that carries through the entire 40 minute orchestration. Beethoven’s intensity and joyful love of big music are on display even during the low moments. 

The success of this Seventh symphony, especially its second movement, carried Beethoven into something of a resurgent period in his career. While he was never unpopular as a composer in Austria, his intermittent deliberate recessions from the public eye, especially at a time before recordings and when audiences only heard your music if you were there to perform it, meant the vaunted composer was not always at the forefront. But with audiences demanding and paying to take in his increasingly notable and talked about Seventh symphony, Beethoven began one of the more productive times in his life. These were some of the last pieces he wrote in his middle period, defined both by their distinct stye and the fact that they were written before he fully lost his hearing. Ultimately Beethoven’s Seventh has become one of his less popular works, overshadowed by his Fifth and Ninth symphonies, as well as his “hit single” Fur Elise. It still is, however, one of his best, and worthy of a listen every now and again.