Fate's four notes premiered in a four-hour Vienna marathon
Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, written between 1804 and 1808, opens with the short-short-short-long figure often nicknamed fate knocking. It premiered on 22 December 1808 at Vienna's Theater an der Wien in an all-Beethoven concert lasting more than four hours, with the composer himself conducting.
The work sits in Beethoven's middle period of enlarged ambition after about 1803, years also marked by worsening deafness and the Napoleonic upheaval around Austria. He dedicated the printed April 1809 edition to Prince Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky. The premiere orchestra had only one rehearsal; a soloist wandered offstage mid-program, and the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung critic deferred judgment until better hearings of works he found long and complex.
E. T. A. Hoffmann soon published extravagant praise and analysis, casting the music as a climb into an infinite spirit world rather than a glued-together rhapsody. Later listeners needed repeated exposure; Johann Peter Salomon once called a Society rehearsal rubbish before retracting after hearing the first movement through. French Conservatoire concerts under François-Antoine Habeneck around 1828 and early New York Philharmonic programs helped spread it abroad. After World War II some called it the Victory Symphony because Morse code for V matches the rhythm and the Roman numeral five.
A typical performance lasts about thirty to forty minutes across four movements. Conductors still disagree whether the famous opening bars stay in allegro con brio or stretch under weighty fermatas. The recapitulation freezes for a mournful solo-oboe recitative marked adagio. The scherzo leads without pause into the finale, which suddenly enlarges the Classical orchestra with piccolo, trombones, and contrabassoon—and even recalls scherzo material again before the final coda.
Source: Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven)
