‘The emancipating power of a work like the Seventh Symphony was bound to appeal to the woman who created Heathcliff,’ writes the American literary scholar Robert K Wallace, who goes on to hypothesise that certain of Heathcliff’s rough characteristics were transplanted by Bronte from Anton Schindler’s biographical portrait of Beethoven. Emily Bronte liked to play the second movement at her piano to achieve spiritual equilibrium hints of the symphony can be found in Wuthering Heights. Richard Wagner called it dance music: ‘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.’ Isadora Duncan, in one of her most celebrated acts, would dance Beethoven’s seventh symphony, start to finish.įor writers, it provoked untold depths of contemplation. Clara Schumann’s father said he must have been drunk. Carl Maria von Weber declared the symphony was proof that Beethoven had lost his mind. Music, Spohr seems to suggest, makes fools of us all. Fortunately this comical incident did not take place at the performance. When this did not follow his movement he looked about in a startled way, stared at the orchestra to see it still playing pianissimo and found his bearings only when the long expected forte came and was visible to him. The composer Louis Spohr, who played in the violin section at the first performance, has left a pathetic memento of Beethoven’s general shortcomings as a conductor, aggrevated by his near-total deafness: He jumped into the air at the point where according to his calculation the forte ought to begin. In a challenge to audience expectations, Beethoven did not write a slow movement, leaving it up to conductors to manipulate the emotions of audiences as they controlled the ebb and flow of the masterpiece. The Allegretto second movement stands out both in its majestic theme and in a regret for lives wasted in wars of imperial vanity. Beethoven presented it to publishers as ‘one of my most excellent works’. Although in four-square Haydn form, the symphony is noisier than any prior work and boldly self-assured. While there may be a swagger in the Presto third movement the rest of the work is founded on a tissue of complex and contradictory emotions. The symphony was mistaken by its first audiences for a second victory anthem. The symphony’s premiere in December 1813, preceded by the appalling Wellington’s Victory, was at a gala concert to raise funds for Austrian and Bavarian soldiers who were wounded in the final battles against Napoleon. The seventh is almost at risk of being taken for granted because, at this peak in his development, Beethoven had attained so complete a command of orchestral sound that others could only stand back in awe, a response that persists to the present day. There are plenty of books about other symphonies but none I can find discusses this symphony alone. Of the most important Beethoven symphonies – the ones with odd numbers: 3, 5, 7, 9 – the seventh receives the least critical attention. Welcome to the 78th work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition
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