BEETHOVEN’S 5TH PROGRAM NOTES: LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN’S SYMPHONY NO. 5

Posted on November 8, 2017

PYP will perform Ludwig van Beethoven‘s Symphony No. 5 on Saturday, November 11, 2017 in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

Program notes written by Carolyn Talarr

Premiered in 1808 and celebrated during his lifetime, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has become the most easily identifiable work of ‘classical music’ in the entire canon.  This timeless masterpiece has been endlessly analyzed and claimed for multiple cultural contexts over the past 200 years. The opening four-note motif coincidentally matched Morse Code for “V” during WWII and was played to symbolize “V for Victory” in BBC radio broadcasts; less seriously, the same notes hit #1 on the 1976 pop charts as “A Fifth of Beethoven”.

The symphony seems less like four discrete movements and more like an organic whole, woven of melodic and rhythmic motifs established from the start.  The opening theme, in forceful, tutti c minor, yields to fragmented statements of that theme in minor and major, powerful rhythmic assertions by the brass countered by gentle wind subthemes, with strings in both camps at different times. 

Fragmentations and alternations wend their way through the first and second movements, as closely-related motifs play with instrumentation and dynamics to create dynamic contrasts. The third and fourth movements, which begin with an invocation of the first movement four-note opening, literally flow seamlessly into a long fugal, chiaroscuro climb to the final, magnificent tutti ‘victory’ in C major.