Pre-Concert Talk: Beethoven Symphony No. 7

Music Director, Christian Kluxen shares his thoughts in this pre-concert talk video on Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.
Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Poco sostenuto - Vivace
Allegretto
Presto
Allegro con brio
Three years after the premiere of the “Pastoral” Symphony, Beethoven made a retreat (for his health) to a spa town in the countryside, near Prague. It was there that he began his generally energetic, and high spirited, Symphony No. 7. By May of 1812, he had completed the score, and it was given its first public performance in Vienna on December 8, 1813. For all of its many merits, it is the second movement Allegretto that captured the public’s imagination the most. The stately pace, simple dotted rhythm and slowly evolving harmony tugs at the heartstrings with a near funereal air of pathos, of grief and despair. It was so moving that throughout much of the nineteenth century it was often inserted to replace the “less successful” slow movements in Beethoven’s other symphonies. In 1849, the composer Richard Wagner wrote about Beethoven’s Seventh, stating, “this symphony is the apotheosis of the dance herself; it is dance in her highest aspect, as if it were the loftiest deed of bodily motion incorporated in an ideal mould of tone.”