Beethoven 7th symphony mickna full#

ItвЂ™s this place, the climax of the whole movement, and the symphony. Just as suddenly as it has arrived, this lacerating music subsides, and gives way, without a break, to the most deliriously repeat-laden music in the symphony in the final вЂњShepherdвЂ™s Song: Thankful Feelings after the StormвЂќ.ДЄnd itвЂ™s in this movement where Beethoven achieves something more purely spine-tingling and life-enhancingly joyful than almost anywhere else in his output. Storms, by their very nature, are protean, non-repeating, violent explosions, and thatвЂ™s what BeethovenвЂ™s music is like too, with some wild rhythmic and textural effects: the churning of four against five in the double-basses and cellos, and electric currents of piccolo, timpani, and trombone. ItвЂ™s a shocking slice of verticality across the horizontal languorousness of the rest of the symphony. The ScherzoвЂ™s dances would and could jollily repeat into the infinite were it not for the Storm, which interrupts these вЂњMerry Dances of the CountryfolkвЂќ, and cuts across the rest of the symphony both dramatically and temporally. ThatвЂ™s nothing, though, next to the slow movement, the Scene by the Brook (the movementsвЂ™ titles are all BeethovenвЂ™s own), in which Beethoven starts to spin what becomes a nearly continuous stream of semiquavers over a hypnotically repetitious harmonic background and collection of melodic motives in the woodwind and strings вЂ“ until, that is, the stream reaches a still pool, and a chorus of birds attract our attention, as wanderers through BeethovenвЂ™s symphonic stream-scape. (Compare this central section with the hell-for-leather momentum of the similar place in the Fifth Symphony).

Beethoven 7th symphony mickna full#

ThatвЂ™s a remarkable reversal of symphonic polarity: this place in the first movement of a big symphony is supposed to be full of driving drama and incident, not static contemplation. ItвЂ™s like looking at a landscape that changes slowly with the lengthening of the shadows and the deepening of the light, in which time is virtually suspended. Take the central section of the first movement, for example, a passage thatвЂ™s dominated by a single rhythm вЂ“ the one youвЂ™ve originally heard in the second bar of the piece. TheyвЂ™re both wildly different, but theyвЂ™re still only two sides of the nine-sided coin that is BeethovenвЂ™s symphonies.Д«ut in lieu of (m)any other metaphors to riff on, I want to show how Beethoven creates a new kind of symphonic rhetoric in the Pastoral, a universe in which lulling repetition rather than teleological development is what defines the structure, on the small and large-scales, and in which the patterns, continuities, and disturbances of the natural world that Beethoven knew (above all in musicвЂ™s most violent storm, up to this point of world history, in the PastoralвЂ™s fourth movement!) are transmuted into the discourse of a five-movement symphony. On one hand, thereвЂ™s the scowling man-of-the-people fomenting musical revolution and purging his inner demons through proto-minimalist compression and white-hot energy (thatвЂ™s the Fifth, by the way!), and on the other, thereвЂ™s the composer content to luxuriate in an early kind of musique concrГЁte by transcribing birdsong into a symphony, who has time to allow his imagination to flow and fly, apparently unfettered by the constraints of formal convention or symphonic concision (thatвЂ™s the Pastoral). The realisation that Beethoven was composing both symphonies at the same time is simultaneously baffling and astounding вЂ“ and itвЂ™s proof that there ainвЂ™t just one Beethoven. I think both pieces are experiments in symphonic extremity, because both are pushing completely different musical boundaries to their limits, and beyond. It was premiered at the same, over-ambitious concert in December 1808, and as the symphonic yin to the FifthвЂ™s yang, the Sixth Symphony is just as вЂњradicalвЂќ as the Fifth вЂ“ in some ways, more so. Yet Beethoven wrote this F major Symphony in tandem with the Fifth. And whatever its veracity, the image of Beethoven the nature-loving hippy has proved a much less enticing idea for historians to appropriate than Beethoven storming the gates of revolution in a blaze of C major glory, as he does at the end of the Fifth. ItвЂ™s as if the Fifth Symphony is the вЂњrealвЂќ Beethoven вЂ“ Beethoven as all-conquering hero вЂ“ whereas the Pastoral is a sort of musical and biographical cul-de-sac. But thatвЂ™s only because history, and music history in particular, likes its battles to be epic, its progress to be heroic, and its most important leaps of imagination to be noisy, radical, and aggressive.