The Greatest Symphony of Them All?

I have had my nose to the grindstone rather recently, revising for my upcoming exam on the 18th, after which I will officially be one year down the line towards my dreams of academia.

Despite the obvious perils of a nose-grindstone interface, it has not actually been that unpleasant, consisting mainly of going over basic elements of musical theory, history and style from the years 1600 - 1900, as well as thorough listening to and analysis of our set works. We've had some tremendous set works too - Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas", Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings.

But recently I've been going back over Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. This surely has to rank as one of the most familiar pieces of classical music in the world today, if from nothing else than its opening motto. And I think you could make a pretty good case for it being one of the finest pieces of Symphonic writing in existence.

What is the key of it though? Not in a literal sense (that would be C minor), but what holds such sway in this piece? After all, the essence of this symphony is perfectly capable of being distilled down to two bars' worth of music, as demonstrated by one of our tutors the other day. The familiar "ta-ta-ta taaaaa" finishing on a chord of C minor, followed straight away by a chord of C major, and you have the whole piece in a nutshell. But the thing about it is, it teeters on this tremendous precipice between the ordered, still relatively structured and constrained Classical era, and the unbridled inhibition of the Romantic era. A lot of this symphony can be traced backwards, and likewise a great deal of its contents can be seen as harbingers of the new world to come.

Yet the spark of genius is elusive, and I have been desperately trying to think about what it is that makes this symphony carry such an impact. Certainly the famous opening movement is relatively conventional. The layout fits exactly what we expect from something founded on sonata principle, with a few characteristic Beethovian flourishes - the extended coda, the recapitulation being subtley different from the first subject. And you cannot overlook the fact that the entire symphony grows organically from the first five bars of music - the bulk of the main themes in the piece bear some kinship to the opening motif.

So if not the opening movement, what about the last movement? It has some bold statements of romanticism - as a trombonist I am obliged to love the last movement purely for the fact that for the first time in symphonic history, the trombones proclaim themselves present at the party (and, by the end of the movement are reduced by one, as the first player expires from having to play the highest symphonic trombone part written). But no. While this is a bold stroke, the trombones are there to add weight and volume, not for some grand expressive purpose. Then you have the second subject, upon which Nicholas once commented that John Williams (the film composer) had built his entire career. I'm sure you can think of the moment. After the strident horn theme, keeping resolutely to the "new" tonic of C major, boldly appears, the music takes a strange, almost modernistic lurch towards a new key.

(As an aside, as I know Mr Moore was interested in what marks this out so strongly, the harmony moves from being founded on a C major triad, to being founded on a D major triad. This creates two effects. Firstly it is the movement from C-E-G to D-F#-A - this is the movement from the tonic (I) to a chromatically altered supertonic (II), both in root position. If chord II was in its unaltered state according to the C major scale, this would be frowned upon, and thoroughly against "the rules". However, the chromatic alteration allows Beethoven to sidestep that. The fact is D-F#-A is not a chord in C major, but it is present in the dominant of C, which is G major (a D major chord being the dominant of the new key). But C-E-G is also present in G major, as chord IV. So you realise that far from being in the tonic of the movement, C major, the horn theme was actually based on the subdominant of G major, and suddenly you find yourself rethinking what has gone before. It's a peculiar situation for sure!)

But ot return to the fourth movement, despite the broad brush of instrumental innovation, and with the exception of what I mentioned above, there is very little harmonic innovation in the movement itself. Mostly it is based on tonics and dominants, and I know certain people have been driven to absolute distraction by the seemingly endless repetition of C major at the conclusion, all 100 plus bars of it. This does serve to point out something remarkable - this symphony is one of the first to chart the "romantic" journey from darkness into light, through the transformation of an opening minor key into its tonic major by the end - but it is not here that genius resides.

The second movement is largely traditional too. There is a curious instability in the founding harmony at the end, mainly around the problem of timpani tuning which I won't go into here, but otherwise this movement moves exactly as you would expect.

You can tell that I am leaving the third movement until last for a reason. This, I feel holds the key to the whole symphony, which is a remarkable claim for a section of music that has no proper ending, and about which no-one knows for certain what the composer's final thoughts were - the whole "repeat-or-not-repeat" question, which could be the subject of a whole separate post. But I think this movement really is a work of genius, be it in the ever-expanding bass and 'cello line of the scherzo, which ebbs and flows, rises and falls, like the swelling of great waves, or in the scurrying of the trio with cascades of string figures building up and up on each other, yet never causing any crowding. And who could forget the majestic horn theme, when the second horn comes in in thirds with the solo and rounds out the sound so well.

The innovation of this section is not vast either, though the way the end of the music builds and launches into the fourth movement without pause is a truly revolutionary moment. But I think this is the one movement where everything - the form, the melody, the dynamics, the emotion - coalesces to form a whole that is truly magnificent. This for me is the centr of the whole symphony, and sets a benchmark for everyone else to follow. Not bad coming from someone virtually deaf, perpetually irrascable and possibly certifiable.

There is one other reaosn why I like studying this symphony. It reminds me of Nicholas enthusing passionately over this symphony and why he considers it is the greatest of all works. And that's not a bad image to have in your mind.