Home | Composers Index | Musical Epochs | Musical Forms | Contact Musical Instruments | Updates | Cairo Opera House | Links

Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No.7, Op.92

Further Information

• During the summer of 1811, Beethoven was suffering through difficult times. His music was popular, but his health was declining, and his growing deafness seemed irreversible. In hopes of relief, Beethoven traveled to the northern Bohemian spa city of Teplitz, where he remained for much of the summer. Rather than recovering, his hearing gradually worsened. Still, the trip was worthwhile, for it was in Teplitz that Beethoven met one of the outstanding figures of German culture, the writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The composer had long admired the author. Now, the author had a chance to assess the composer, and he was clearly impressed. Goethe later recalled that time, saying, "I have never met an artist of such spiritual concentration and intensity, such vitality and magnanimity. I can well understand how hard he must find it to adapt himself to the world and its ways." Goethe's description of Beethoven as a lofty misfit was thoroughly accurate, but he may have overlooked a significant fact, that the composer's well-noted "intensity" frequently allowed him to overcome opposition, to write some of his most cheerful pieces in the midst of sorrowful times.

  Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was begun in Teplitz and completed several months later. The composer himself conducted the premiere in 1813 at a Viennese concert to benefit Austrian and Bavarian soldiers who had been wounded at the battle of Hanau in the Napoleonic Wars. That same program also featured the premiere of another Beethoven work, the martial Wellington's Victory. Patriotic Viennese delighted in the program, which was such a success that it had to be repeated four days later. Eventually, Wellington's Victory was dismissed as being of little lasting importance, but the symphony has had a happier history. Beethoven called it his "most excellent symphony," and one music critic of the time reported, "this symphony is the richest melodically and the most pleasing and comprehensible of all Beethoven symphonies." On the dissenting side, Carl Maria von Weber heard the piece as evidence that its composer was "now quite ripe for the madhouse," and, Friedrich Wieck, Clara Schumann's father, maintained that the music could only have been written by someone who was seriously intoxicated. Regardless of Beethoven's state of mind, or his state of sobriety, this symphony is one of the composer's most optimistic works, and it has won some powerful friends. Richard Wagner, who often faced his own hostile critics, thought the piece was perfect dance music, calling it "the apotheosis of the dance." In Wagner's words, "if anyone plays the Seventh, tables and benches, cans and cups, the grandmother, the blind and the lame, aye, the children in the cradle fall to dancing." Eager to prove this imaginative theory, Wagner once danced to the Seventh Symphony, accompanied by Franz Liszt at the piano. It must have been quite a show!

  ---

  Symphonies Page L. Van Beethoven | Concerti | Piano Sonatas | Chamber Music | The Opera "Fidelio"
  Incidental Music | Vocal and Choral Music | Picture Gallery | List of Works
  

  ---

  This project was created by Ahmed Azab.
  Since �2001
  

  ---

  
  
  Hosted by www.Geocities.ws