Beethoven Symphony No 5
_1807–08

Haydn's influence is undoubtedly at its most potent in the Fifth’s highly dramatic first movement, totally dominated by the urgent opening four-note motif. The music here is astonishingly terse, pared down to the melodic minimum, and the second theme is quickly upon us: a relaxed expansion of the main motif on horns, answered by a reassuring embrace from the violins and woodwind. Yet it is this consolatory theme which, reappears in swirling, nightmarish transformation in the movement’s long and turbulent coda.

There is more than a hint of Haydn’s influence, too, in the slow second movement, which has the overall shape of one of his favourite forms, the ‘double variation set’ (where two themes are varied in alternation, often in successively smaller note values). Beethoven’s themes are both in A-flat major, but the second – rather march-like despite being in triple time – soon modulates unexpectedly to C major, where it acquires an extra grandeur. At the end of this particular movement, however, it is the more graceful first theme which wins the day.

Beethoven does not call the third movement a ‘scherzo’, though in form and function it is one. But if there is humour here, it is of a grim cast and beset by uncertainty. When a sturdier theme emerges, it is brief and troubled, dominated by a balefully intoned horn-call transformation of the four-note motif from the first movement. The mood lightens in the scurryingly fugal major key ‘trio’ section, but at its reappearance the first theme, played pizzicato and pianissimo, takes on a stealthy, nocturnal character, before leading us to the most celebrated passage in the whole symphony. Here, over held string notes and sinister tappings from the timpani, wisps of the first theme are heard, leading us for the moment we know not where.

Gradually the excitement rises, as with the sense of something seen approaching from a distance, until with a last sudden rush we find ourselves propelled into the blazingly triumphal C major of the finale, one of the most upliftingly theatrical moments in all music.