Symphony No. 7

The year 1812 was a momentous time for Ludwig van Beethoven, just as it was for Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet things turned out badly for both of them. Napoleon’s foolhardy invasion of Russia, begun that year, led inevitably to his defeat at Waterloo three years later, and to exile away from the excitement and commanding commotion of human (and French national) society. Beethoven’s own inner exile was also coming to a new finality in 1812, as he had to face the social difficulties arising from his deafness. It was clear now that his future would be quite isolated from the everyday world of others.

1812 is also the year of Beethoven’s famous letter to the “Immortal Beloved,” likely Antonie Brentano, an aristocratic Viennese woman married to a Frankfurt businessman. The letter is ambiguous in many ways, but it suggests a mutual passion and a profound sense of resignation to the impossibility of a future together.

In any event, the great stream of music that had been flowing abundantly since the “Heiligenstadt” crisis 10 years before — the “middle-period” masterpieces that stemmed from his first coming to terms with his growing deafness — now began to dry up. The rest of the decade is marked by recurrent bouts of depression and the production of very little music.

Out of these troubles were ultimately born the transcendent works of his final years — the last piano sonatas, the late string quartets, and the Ninth Symphony. Although Beethoven completed his Seventh and Eighth symphonies before the curtain of silence fell completely, he made little progress with the Ninth, conceived at that time as part of a three-symphony group. The Seventh was, in fact, mostly in place before the drama of 1812 unfolded.

The Seventh has always been regarded as one of the mightiest of the nine, less forceful perhaps than the Fifth, less ambitious than the Ninth, smaller than the Third, but broader in range and spirit than any other. The key-color of A major is unusual in Beethoven’s orchestral music, depending partly on the exultant sound of horns in A major, one of that instrument’s highest registers. The sense of a “divine dance,” as Richard Wagner called the Seventh, is very strong in both first and last movements as well as in the scherzo, driven by powerful rhythmic energy and heavy instrumentation. Meanwhile, the Allegretto, though full of charm, has a sense of inexorable fatality.

The slow introduction to the first movement is a huge free-standing structure of its own, only slowly giving way to the persistent Es that herald the start of the main Allegro section and its relentless dancing rhythm. Two striking moments in this great movement should have our attention. First, in the recapitulation, the texture suddenly lightens to allow the oboe to take the melody in a thinner, fresher texture, like a brief clearing of persistent clouds. And, at the end, the lower strings set up a bizarre, grumbling ostinato that seems to be stuck in a groove until the final cadences come to the rescue. This is the passage that elicited Carl Maria von Weber’s famous remark that Beethoven had shown himself “fit for the madhouse.”

So popular was the Allegretto second movement in the 19th century that it was often played as a concert piece on its own and even, on occasion, substituted for the slow movements of other symphonies. Yet, of the entire symphony, this is the movement that most strongly looks forward to the Romantic sensibilities of Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Mendelssohn, and others — all of whom seem to have derived creative benefits directly from it. Schubert must have been bewitched by its hypnotic rhythm, which he often adopted. The opening A-minor passage, gradually growing in sound like an approaching procession, leads, somewhat surprisingly, to a glowing section in major, scored for winds over a still-pulsating string accompaniment. Each section is heard once more before the close, a characteristic parting passage with melodic fragments thrown from one instrument to another. Almost no other movement in all Beethoven leaves such haunting memories as this.

The scherzo third movement is a persistent alternation of a loud and vivacious triple-meter dance, with a calmer, static trio melody that weaves its way over low horns and basses. Thus, one part of the movement takes wing, the other is rooted to the ground.

The old tradition that symphonic finales should be light and breezy is firmly buried by the Seventh’s fourth movement, the heaviest blockbuster in the symphonic repertory to date. Constant off-beat hammer blows and a shortage of quiet music puts Beethoven in the role of a prankish ringmaster. Elsewhere, Beethoven’s humor takes the form of subtle subversions of the audience’s expectations. But here the trick is not subtle at all. We are mesmerized, amazed, and dumbfounded, even as we see exactly how it’s done.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.