No single work in the symphonic literature is more often performed or more universally admired than the Fifth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Only the composer’s Ninth Symphony has achieved a comparable kind of universal, even mythic, presence and stature in the symphonic repertoire.
It wouldn’t surprise me if, between the two of them, these two monumental works have inspired more commentary, interpretive scrutiny and impassioned argument than all the other major symphonies in the repertoire put together.
Given this reality, one might well ask: “What is there new to be said or learned about a piece as familiar as the Fifth?”
My experience is that even (or perhaps especially) listeners who have heard a work many times and feel they almost know it “by heart,” are often unaware of some of its symbolic implications and are fascinated to have the opportunity to discover the inner workings of a great masterpiece.
What makes it tick and how is it constructed? What do we know about the process of its composition? How does it relate to the rest of a composer’s output and to the work of his contemporaries? What are the challenges in playing or conducting it?
There are dozens of such questions, any one of which we could easily spend an entire evening exploring and not get to the bottom of it.
For this unusual combination of a complete performance and a full-scale talk with musical examples, I’m going to take the opportunity to explore the Fifth Symphony in considerable detail, and to talk in depth about the significance of the fact that the piece, like so many of Beethoven’s most important pieces, is in the key of C minor.
Why does a composer choose a certain key for a piece of music and what difference does it make to the listener? What exactly does it mean, from a narrative, dramatic, psychological point of view, for a piece of music to be “in a key?”
Why did the idea of a single key or tonality for a piece of music have such importance in Beethoven’s time, and why did this idea eventually begin to break down and give way to a much freer approach to tonality, and ultimately to its complete abandonment at the dawn of the 20th century?
