In the Fourth Symphony only one flute is used. It is scored for two drums, two trumpets, two horns, one flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, first and second violins, violas, violoncello and double-bass.
This Symphony, lovely as it is, was severely criticised. No one was more satirical than Weber, who was then a young man. He wrote a sketch in which he imagined himself as seeing in a dream all the instruments of the Orchestra grouped around the violins. The double-bass speaks: “I have just come from the rehearsal of a Symphony by one of our newest composers; and though, as you know, I have a tolerably strong constitution, I could only just hold out. Five minutes more would have shattered my frame and burst the sinews of my body. I have been made to caper about like a wild goat and to turn myself into a mere fiddle to execute the no-ideas of Mr. Composer. I’d sooner be a dancing master’s kit at once.”
The first violoncello (bathed in perspiration) says that for his part he is too tired to speak, and can recollect nothing like the warming he has just had since he played in Cherubini’s last opera. The second violoncello is of the opinion that the Symphony is a musical monstrosity, revolting alike to the nature of the instruments and the expression of thought and with no purpose but that of perpetually “showing-off.” The conductor enters and threatens if they are not quiet to make them play the Eroica Symphony; and then he makes a speech, telling the instruments that the time has gone by for clearness and force, spirit and fancy, works like those of Gluck and Haydn and Mozart; and that here is the latest Vienna recipe for a Symphony: “First a slow movement full of short, disjointed, unconnected ideas, at the rate of three or four notes per quarter of an hour; then a mysterious roll of the drum and passage of the violas, seasoned with the proper quantity of pauses and ritardandos; and to end all a furious finale, in which the only requisite is that there should be no ideas for the hearer to make out, but plenty of transitions from one key to another—on to the new note at once, never mind modulating—above all things, throw rules to the winds, for they only hamper a genius.”
“At this point,” says Weber, “I woke in a dreadful fright. I was on the road to become either a great composer, or a lunatic.”
The Fifth Symphony is scored for two drums, two trumpets, two horns, two flutes, one flute piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three trombones, first and second violins, violoncellos, basses and contra-fagotto (double-bassoon).
The piccolo, trombones and double-bassoon here make their first appearance in the symphonies. Beethoven had long known the double-bassoon, for there was one in the Orchestra of the Elector of Cologne.
The C-minor Symphony is of all Beethoven’s works the most popular. It was the work that made him known to the whole world.
Berlioz tells an anecdote of how the C-minor impressed Lesueur, one of Berlioz’s masters, at the Paris Conservatoire when it was first played in Paris. “After the performance,” Berlioz says, “I hurried to see the effect the work had had upon him and to hear his judgment on it. I found him in the passage, red as fire and walking furiously fast. ‘Well, my dear master,’ said I—
“‘Ouf!’ was his reply, ‘I must get out into the air. It is astonishing, wonderful. It has excited and overcome me so that in trying to put my hat on I could hardly find my head. Don’t stop me now, but come to me to-morrow.’