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Jan 23
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
Franz Welser-Möst has forged one of the most transformative artistic legacies in the history of The Cleveland Orchestra, as its seventh and longest-serving Music Director. Now in his 25th and final season, he has shaped its sound with extraordinary care and imagination, cultivating greater warmth and flexibility, while preserving precision and transparency. Since beginning his tenure in 2002–03, his leadership has characterized a quarter century of artistic excellence, community outreach, and global prominence.
Welser-Möst first appeared with The Cleveland Orchestra as a guest conductor in February 1993 and has returned every season beginning in 1995. By the end of the 2026–27 season, he will have led the Orchestra in more than 1,200 performances in 93 cities spanning 15 US states and 26 countries, including 701 concerts at Severance Music Center. He has appointed 56 of the Orchestra’s 100 current musicians, profoundly shaping its sound for a new generation. Welser-Möst’s tenure ushered in major milestones, from innovative opera stagings to the launch of its streaming platform, Adella.live, and its recording label.
Widely admired for his interpretations of Central European and Russian repertoire, Welser-Möst has also championed living composers, specifically through the Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellowship. His artistic partnerships have resulted in dozens of commissions and co-commissions, and at the close of the 2026–27 season, he will have led The Cleveland Orchestra in 27 world premieres and 21 US premieres.
Welser-Möst has made opera an annual tradition at Severance Music Center, culminating in the creation of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival in 2023. Acclaimed productions of Dvořák’s Rusalka, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute demonstrated his commitment to large-scale storytelling. In May 2027, Welser-Möst leads a fully staged production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, a fitting capstone to his enduring artistic vision and remarkable legacy with The Cleveland Orchestra.
A defining aspect of Welser-Möst’s Cleveland career has been his work with The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. He has consistently advocated for the all-volunteer ensemble as an essential artistic partner in performances ranging from symphonic masterworks to staged opera productions. In 2010, Welser-Möst appointed Lisa Wong to work with the Chorus and, in 2018, he named her Director of Choruses. Together, they have elevated the Chorus with performances at home and on the road.
Beyond Cleveland, Welser-Möst maintains a distinguished international career, marked by a longstanding artistic partnership with the Vienna Philharmonic. He regularly leads the ensemble at the Musikverein and on major international tours, and has already conducted the celebrated annual New Year’s concert three times. In 2024, he was named an Honorary Member of the Vienna Philharmonic, one of its highest honors. He is also celebrated for his interpretations of opera, conducting productions which have been widely acclaimed at the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna State Opera.
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.
Music Director Franz Welser-Möst leads a powerful program bookended by Beethoven: his Leonore Overture No. 3 distills an entire opera into its most poignant themes, while his Fifth Symphony creates an epic musical journey out of just four iconic notes. Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen takes thematic transformation even further, layering quotations from Beethoven symphonies in a stirring meditation on the destruction of World War II.
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