Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92, symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. Premiering in Vienna on December 8, 1813, the work is considered a notable example of the more ebullient side of Beethoven’s compositional personality and evidence that even after the onset of deafness, he yet found cause for musical optimism. Certainly it is far less fraught and explosive than his fifth and sixth symphonies, although it borrows or echoes a few elements from each.

Beethoven began his Symphony No. 7 in the summer of 1811 while vacationing in the Bohemian spa city of Teplitz, completing it several months later. He himself conducted the premiere at a concert to benefit Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the battle of Hanau in the Napoleonic Wars. That same program also featured the premiere of the martial Wellington’s Victory. Eventually, Wellington’s Victory was dismissed as being of little lasting importance, but the symphony has had a happier history, becoming one of the composer’s most popular works and hailed even at that premiere as a significant piece; it was performed three more times within two and a half months of its debut and has remained an orchestral standard ever since.

Beethoven called the Symphony No. 7 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 (1786–1826) heard the piece as evidence that its composer had lost his mind, and, Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873), a renowned piano teacher and 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 sanity—or his state of sobriety—this symphony is one of the composer’s most optimistic works, and it quickly won some powerful friends. Richard Wagner (1813–83), 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 Symphony No. 7, accompanied by his colleague and father-in-law Franz Liszt (1811–86) performing his own piano reduction of the orchestral score.

As it begins, the first movement may seem not particularly dancelike, as sweet wind lines are repeatedly interrupted by strongly punched chords in its Poco sostenuto introduction. Flowing string phrases promise motion but seem hesitant to take that step, and several minutes pass before the movement’s most prominent theme arrives with the brilliant colors and nimble dotted rhythms of the Vivace.

By contrast, the second movement Allegretto, often performed separately from the rest of the symphony, is a funeral march in all but name. Often, several contrasting melodic ideas are made to coexist, as if Beethoven were imagining several processions converging upon the cemetery at once. Inasmuch as he was at work on this symphony during the years of the Napoleonic Wars, that experience would likely have been within his experience.

Wagner’s vision of the dance returns with the third movement Presto. Here, Beethoven alternates between two nimble melodies, the second more elegant than the first, but both using the triple meter 6/8 pattern found in many country dances.

The Allegro con brio finale opens with a four-note motif that is closely related to the famous one with which Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 begins. In that work, three repeated short notes are followed by a single longer note lower in pitch; here, the single long note comes before the short notes, rather than after, and the short notes are lower in pitch rather than higher than the long note. In either case, it is a rhythmic pattern that will recur throughout the movement, rising its head among much swirling action. Beethoven had given himself rather limited instrumental forces—only pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, with timpani and strings—yet he needed nothing more for brilliant dramatic effect.