Berlioz writes of this symphony:
“Here Beethoven abandons wholly the ode and the elegy—a reference to the Eroica symphony—to return to the less lofty and somber but perhaps no less difficult style of the Second symphony. The character of this score is generally lively, nimble, joyous, or of a heavenly sweetness. If we except the meditative adagio, which serves as an introduction, the first movement is almost entirely given up to joyfulness. The motive in detached notes, with which the allegro begins, is only a canvas, on which the composer spreads other and more substantial melodies, which thus render the apparently chief idea of the beginning an accessory. This artifice, although it is fertile in curious and interesting results, has already been employed by Mozart and Haydn with equal success. But we find in the second section of this same allegro an idea that is truly new, the first measures of which captivate the attention; this idea, after leading the hearer’s mind through mysterious developments, astonishes it by its unexpected ending.... This astonishing crescendo is one of the most skillfully contrived things we know of in music: you will hardly find its equal except in that which ends the famous scherzo of the Symphony in C minor. And this latter, in spite of its immense effectiveness, is conceived on a less vast scale, for it sets out from piano to arrive at the final explosion without departing from the principal key, while the one whose march we have just described starts from mezzo-forte, is lost for a moment in a pianissimo beneath which are harmonies with vague and undecided coloring, then reappears with chords of a more determined tonality, and bursts out only at the moment when the cloud that veiled this modulation is completely dissipated. You might compare it to a river whose calm waters suddenly disappear and only leave the subterranean bed to plunge with a roar in a foaming waterfall.
“As for the adagio—it escapes analysis. It is so pure in form, the melodic expression is so angelic and of such irresistible tenderness, that the prodigious art of the workmanship disappears completely. You are seized, from the first measure, by an emotion which at the end becomes overwhelming in its intensity; and it is only in the works of one of these giants of poetry that we can find a point of comparison with this sublime page of the giant of music. Nothing, indeed, more resembles the impression produced by this adagio than that which we experience when we read the touching episode of Francesca da Rimini in the Divina Commedia, the recital of which Virgil cannot hear ‘without weeping in sobs,’ and which, at the last verse, makes Dante ‘fall, as falls a dead body.’ This movement seems to have been sighed by the archangel Michael, one day when, overcome by melancholy, he contemplated the worlds from the threshold of the empyrean.
“The scherzo consists almost wholly of phrases in binary rhythm forced to enter into combinations of 3-4 time.... The melody of the trio, given to wind instruments, is of a delicious freshness; the pace is a little slower than that of the rest of the scherzo, and its simplicity stands out in still greater elegance from the opposition of the little phrases which the violins throw across the wind instruments, like so many teasing but charming allurements.
“The finale, gay and lively, returns to ordinary rhythmic forms; it consists of a jingling of sparkling notes, interrupted, however, by some hoarse and savage chords, in which are shown the angry outbursts which we have already had occasion to notice in the composer.”
SYMPHONY NO. 5, IN C MINOR, OP. 67
I. Allegro con brio II. Andante con moto III. Allegro; trio— IV. Allegro
As for the Fifth symphony, what words can be said of its composer more fitting than those of De Quincey’s apostrophe to Shakespeare; “O mighty poet! Thy works are not those of other men, simply and merely great works of art, but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, the frost and the dew, hailstorm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert, but that the farther we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had nothing but accident!”
In all modern music there is no page more thrilling than that of the mysterious, unearthly transition from the scherzo to the finale, and the preceding pages are the triumph of absolute music over that which needs a programme or is the translation of something into music. Here is music that was not suggested, but it suggests that which can only be imagined, not spoken, not painted, not written in lofty rhyme or passionate prose.
