This repeatedly and persistently occurs; and it would have been gratifying had Beethoven indicated what he meant by it:—"Bacchusfest?"—or something deeper? The other passage is curiously like the one ventured by Dr. Macfarren's criticiser. The venture was no doubt perfectly justifiable—almost everything is allowable in music, for deliberate poetic effect.
Beethoven no doubt did it for the sake of intensity.
[P.S.—Since writing the above we have come across a chance remark of Goethe's, which struck us as singularly applicable to this great picturesque symphony. During the campaign in France, he noticed in one of the old German towns, the living contrast of knighthood and monkhood (or chivalry and the cloister, we might say). The suggestive words set us thinking if they might not prompt a symphony; and soon after, we saw that they may be applied, perhaps with curious felicity, to Beethoven's A major. Have we not here, indeed, an epitome of the olden time, with its knights, monks, revels, and all?]
[ The Allegretto.]
This has been well called "the riddle" of the symphony; nor can we altogether accept Herr Elterlein's solution of it, though geistreich. He prolongs his fancy, and looks upon this music as a contagious pause and period of melancholy, of pathetic reminiscence in the "hot-blooded southern folk." Imaginative sympathy has a right to its own fancies, and these fancies will ever be more or less true; nevertheless, a more profound, more sacred gloom—mystery of sorrow—is borne in upon us in these unfathomable tones. Here we seem to have the portentous, almost God-accusing, grief of insane love and virtue, in this fate-and-madness-haunted world—of Juliet in the tomb (re-read the tremendous lines)—of the ineffable Ophelia, after outraged princeliness and intellect had lost its reason, and killed Ophelia's own venerable father;—"Ach!" previous to the violent death (her own) of an angel. Or, we might feel here the incipient atheism of a Hamlet himself; wrestling with it, but dreading he wrestles in vain. Later, it is true (the A major melody—"immortal" Berlioz calls it), solace descends from heaven, through the toppling sun-gilt clouds; but it is unavailing (indeed, we rather regret the introduction of this episode? we had liefer be plunged to, and remain in, the heart of this "deeper, and deeper still" of grief): Rachel will not be comforted, in her sublime despair; and the final strains seem those of incurable, illimitable woe. Ah! these are the strains, too, the accents—"Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! thou that killest the prophets, how often would I have gathered thee as a hen gathereth her chickens and thou wouldst not!" The divine resolution to sacrifice self for all that (the A major motive?) remains even firmer, but the divine sorrow at it remains even deeper and inextinguishable.