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The Cleveland Orchestra, under the leadership of Franz Welser-Möst since 2002, is one of the most sought-after performing ensembles in the world. Year after year, the ensemble exemplifies extraordinary artistic excellence, creative programming, and community engagement. In recent years, The New York Times has called Cleveland “the best in America” for its virtuosity, elegance of sound, variety of color, and chamber-like musical cohesion.
Founded by Adella Prentiss Hughes, the Orchestra performed its inaugural concert in December 1918. By the middle of the century, decades of growth and sustained support had turned the ensemble into one of the most admired around the world.
The past decade has seen an increasing number of young people attending concerts, bringing fresh attention to The Cleveland Orchestra’s legendary sound and committed programming. More recently, the Orchestra launched several bold digital projects, including the streaming platform Adella.live and its own recording label. Together, they have captured the Orchestra’s unique artistry and the musical achievements of the Welser-Möst and Cleveland Orchestra partnership.
The 2025–26 season marks Franz Welser-Möst’s 24th year as Music Director, a period in which The Cleveland Orchestra has earned unprecedented acclaim around the world, including a series of residencies at the Musikverein in Vienna, the first of its kind by an American orchestra, and a number of celebrated opera presentations.
Since 1918, seven music directors — Nikolai Sokoloff, Artur Rodziński, Erich Leinsdorf, George Szell, Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Franz Welser-Möst — have guided and shaped the ensemble’s growth and sound. Through concerts at home and on tour, broadcasts, and a catalog of acclaimed recordings, The Cleveland Orchestra is heard today by a growing group of fans around the world.
Music Director
Now in his 24th season, Franz Welser-Möst continues to shape an unmistakable sound culture as Music Director of The Cleveland Orchestra. Under his leadership, the Orchestra has earned repeated international acclaim for its musical excellence, reaffirmed its strong commitment to new music, and brought annual opera productions back to the stage of Severance Music Center. In recent years, the Orchestra also launched its own streaming platform, Adella.live, and a recording label. Today, it boasts one of the youngest audiences in the United States.
In addition to residencies in the US and Europe, Welser-Möst and the Orchestra perform regularly at the world’s leading international festivals. Welser-Möst will remain Music Director until 2027, making him the longest-serving music director of The Cleveland Orchestra.
Welser-Möst enjoys a particularly close and productive artistic partnership with the Vienna Philharmonic. He regularly conducts the orchestra in subscription concerts at the Vienna Musikverein, at the Salzburg Festival, and on tour in Europe, Japan, China, and the US, and has appeared three times on the podium for their celebrated New Year’s Concert (2011, 2013, and 2023). At the Salzburg Festival, Welser- Möst has set new standards in interpretation as an opera conductor, with a special focus on the operas of Richard Strauss.
Among Welser-Möst’s many honors and awards, he was named an Honorary Member of the Vienna Philharmonic in 2024, one of the orchestra’s highest distinctions.
Composer
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was a German composer and pianist whose works revolutionised classical music, bridging the Classical and Romantic eras. His compositions include nine symphonies, numerous concertos, and chamber music that remain cornerstones of Western classical music.
How wonderful that such familiar pieces as Beethoven’s Fifth — the most famous of all symphonies — still “work” in performance. Audiences of all kinds, occasional and frequent attenders alike, still enjoy its wonders 200 years after its premiere in an unheated concert hall one cold night in Vienna in December 1808. Even those few who arrive with trepidation at hearing an old warhorse one more time are inevitably drawn to the music’s opening drama, rousing ending, and innumerable discoveries in between.
Beethoven began this symphony in 1804, soon after completing his Third, which had been nicknamed “Eroica” (Heroic). That 45-minute work, which contemporary audiences felt was much too long for a symphony, was composed just after one of the composer’s most anguishing life experiences, as he brought himself to terms with the growing affliction that would eventually rob him of all hearing.
After sketching the first two movements, Beethoven set it aside for more than two years while he wrote his opera Fidelio and the lively and untroubled Fourth Symphony. He then worked diligently on the Fifth throughout 1807, while simultaneously writing the Sixth, nicknamed “Pastoral.” This kind of multitasking — working on several compositions at once — was a normal practice for Beethoven throughout his life, with the ideas originally intended for one work slipping across into a different work entirely.
Throughout this middle period of Beethoven’s life, the composer was routinely strapped for funds and, in 1808, he developed plans for a special evening “Akademie” concert on December 22 to raise money for himself. He secured the Theater an der Wein and rehearsed with musicians in the days leading up to the concert. Beethoven, perhaps sensing the difficulty of scheduling future concerts, kept revising the evening’s program to include more and more music.
The concert lasted more than four hours and featured the world premieres of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto (with Beethoven as soloist), and the Choral Fantasy as a grand finale, assembling all of the evening’s performing forces at once. Unfortunately, the weather that night was colder than usual and the building was unheated, so the conditions for comfortable listening and performing deteriorated as the hours passed.
From that chilly premiere, the Fifth Symphony’s reputation only increased, and by the end of the 19th century, it had attained its current status as a classical superstar. The association of the opening four-note motive, matching Morse code’s dot–dot–dot–dash for the letter “V,” came to be a shorthand to signify Allied victory during World War II, pushing it further into public consciousness.
The idea that those four notes represent the composer’s turbulent struggle with destiny was put into circulation by Beethoven himself, or at least by his fantasy-spinning amanuensis Anton Schindler, who reported the composer’s explanation of the opening motive as, “So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte” (Thus Fate knocks at the door).
Fate struck Beethoven most cruelly in 1802 when, still in his early 30s, he acknowledged his deafness and began the long process of coming to terms with a handicap that was both a musical disability and, perhaps moreso, a social one. His standing as a virtuoso pianist with excellent connections at court was seriously threatened, and his connections with friends, and especially with women, were now forever circumscribed.
We might think that, as a composer, his reactions were far more violent than the situation warranted. The “Eroica” Symphony, the immediate product of that profound crisis, transformed the world of classical music forever. But he did not stop there. One colossal pathbreaking piece followed another, combining unearthly beauty of invention, technical virtuosity, vastness of conception, and a radical freedom of expression and form.
Beethoven may have felt inordinately sorry for himself, but there is no self-pity in his music. Defiance, certainly, although the sense of triumph expressed in the conclusion of the Fifth Symphony is surely more than Beethoven thumbing his nose at Fate.
Whether you choose to listen to this work with the idea of “Fate knocking at the door,” as a path from darkness to light, mystery to certainty, ignorance to enlightenment; or merely a well-crafted symphony, this piece is sure to take you on an exhilarating journey.
The four movements are concise and focused. The first movement is built almost entirely around the four-note opening motive — stated again and again, as foreground then background, upside down and right side up again, in unison and harmonized.
The second movement takes a graceful line and works it through various guises, almost always with a sense of expectancy underneath, growing stronger and stronger.
The third movement alternates between quiet uncertainty and forthright declamations. Near the end, a section of quietly forbidding darkness leads directly into the bright C-major sunshine of the last movement. Beethoven revels in the major key, then develops a strong musical idea through to an unstoppable finish, repeated and extended, emphatic and triumphant.
— Eric Sellen
Eric Sellen is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Editor Emeritus. He previously was Program Book Editor for 28 seasons.
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