Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92

“This symphony is a monster,” complained a disconcerted critic when he first had to hear it in 1827, the year of Beethoven’s death. He was aghast: “What has become of the good man in his later years? Has he not quite lapsed into a kind of madness?” His review, published in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung zur Beförderung der theoretischen und praktischen Tonkunst, presents the Seventh Symphony in a distorted mirror image – wildly exaggerated and yet, in an alienated way, not entirely wrong. For what was Beethoven accused of? First of all: the length! “Four movements, each lasting nearly a quarter of an hour – the whole therefore at least three-quarters of an hour long.” But Beethoven’s symphony seemed to him not merely far too long, but also incoherent and rambling, lacking any red thread: “a veritable quodlibet of tragic, comic, serious and trivial ideas, rambling on and on pointlessly without the least connection, repeating themselves to the point of weariness.” And on top of that, it was dreadfully loud: the anonymous reviewer condemned “the excessive noise” that almost burst the eardrum. In short – this symphony, he thought, was a relapse into barbarism.

There can be no such thing as a “zero hour” in the history of music. But anyone wanting to know when it all began – when modern music first started to be dismissed as mad, excessive, chaotic, loud, and barbaric – need only listen to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, completed in the wartime year of 1812. A music of extremes, which one must either resist or surrender to; there is no middle ground, no escape. What Richard Wagner would later exclaim about his Tristan could already have been said of Beethoven’s Seventh: “Only mediocre performances can save me! Truly good ones must drive people mad.”

This symphony is familiar only in appearance. Certainly, at times it sounds like an overture, like a pastoral, a musette; it recalls folk music, a procession, a cavalry march – popular and rustic. Above all, the rhythms imprint themselves indelibly, especially the ever-present long–short–short figure, close to the dactylic metre of ancient verse. With a taste for memorable epithets, Beethoven’s Seventh has accordingly been called the “Dactylic Symphony” – but also “Dionysian”, “dithyrambic”, and “dynamic”.

For what happens with this material, with these rhythms, these ideas, quite defies comprehension. The symphony begins, immediately stretches into the boundless, contracts back into itself, fixes on a single note, starts again – pulsing like a deranged Morse signal – halts again, and then bursts forth a third time (after which there is no stopping it). And it does not merely race onwards: it shoots off in every direction, into the depths, into the heights. Or it approaches from afar – now in the second movement – like a pilgrim’s chorus or a funeral cortège, conjured by a bizarre effect: a cadential six-four chord in the winds, a kind of musical colon traditionally used in concertos to herald the solo cadenza.

This symphony is pure energy, sheer volume, unleashed motion. The third movement, the Presto, outdoes everything. The finale, then, outdoes even the Presto – and finally outdoes itself. At its remorseless speed, it is scarcely comprehensible, dissolving into sonic sensation. In the finale of his Seventh Symphony, Beethoven seeks an acoustic borderline experience, the loss of perceptual control. “Has he not quite lapsed into a kind of madness?”