Beethoven's Seventh premiered as a wartime charity gig and won an instant encore
In December 1813 Beethoven conducted his new Seventh Symphony in Vienna to raise money for soldiers wounded at Hanau. The audience loved the slow-ish second movement so much they made the orchestra play it again on the spot, and fans have been arguing about the symphony's wild energy ever since.
He wrote it in 1811 and 1812 while recovering his health at the Bohemian spa town of Teplitz, as Napoleon prepared to invade Russia, and many hear it as another of his musical reckonings with the French emperor. His hearing was failing badly by then, and he relied on conversation notebooks to talk with people. Yet the orchestra at the premiere was glittering: Louis Spohr played violin, Hummel, Meyerbeer and Salieri took part, and the guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani sat among the cellos. Spohr described Beethoven flinging his arms apart at accents and leaping into the air at loud entries.
The music runs on rhythm. After a long, slow introduction, the first movement slides into its fast section through sixty-one repetitions of a single note, E, and ends with a two-bar figure hammered ten times over a deep, grinding bass. The famous Allegretto starts with violas and cellos repeating a simple walking pattern, while further melodies are layered on top, one of which George Grove compared to a line of beauties holding hands. The finale reaches a marking of fff, rare in Beethoven, and Donald Tovey heard in it a Bacchic fury.
Richard Wagner called the work the apotheosis of the dance. Not everyone agreed. Friedrich Wieck reported that musicians at rehearsals assumed Beethoven had written it drunk, and the conductor Thomas Beecham likened the third movement to yaks jumping about. A well-worn story that Carl Maria von Weber thought the composer ripe for the madhouse appears to have been invented by the biographer Anton Schindler.
The concerts also rescued Beethoven's finances, with a repeat performance and a benefit in 1814 at which two contrabassoons beefed up the bass line. The first edition came out in 1816, and the handwritten score now sits in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków.
Source: Symphony No. 7 (Beethoven)
