Beethoven characterized his Eighth symphony as “a little symphony” and in the same letter spoke of the Seventh as a great one; yet if Czerny is to be believed the composer was vexed because the audience was cool when the Eighth was first performed. He said, “because it is much better” than the Seventh, which was played at the same concert. Authors often pronounce strange judgments on their works, as parents often favor a stupid or unpleasant child; but this composer had a right to be proud of the little Benjamin—the colossal Ninth was not then born—for the Eighth symphony is charged with the spirit of the greater Beethoven.
Some commentators have endeavored to read a programme into the symphony, thinking perhaps thus to give it greater importance. One speaks of the symphony as a “military trilogy”; another thinks the allegretto is a parody of Rossini’s manner, but the movement was written in 1812, and Vienna did not go mad over the Olympian Rossini until after that year. We even find Vincent d’Indy citing the Eighth as revealing impressions of Nature made on the composer’s soul; the trio of the pompous minuet is to M. d’Indy a representation in grotesque fashion of a peasant band, and the Hungarian theme in the finale, the hymn of Hunyadi, denotes the arrival of gypsy musicians in the midst of a festival.
The symphony needs not such support to excite extraneous interest. In the music we find Beethoven in reckless mood, whimsical, delighting in abrupt contrasts, shouting his joy, ready to play a practical joke. There is, no doubt, the absence of the “fine taste” which Debussy misses in the case of Beethoven and finds ruling the musical life of Bach and Mozart. No, Beethoven was not Paterian in a struggle after taste. He was an elemental person, coarse in his life, with an enormous capacity for hard work. There are others who have been condemned for a lack of taste: Euripides, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Verdi, Walt Whitman. De Quincey, a stylist, found Goethe lacking in taste when he wrote Wilhelm Meister.
And in this symphony, characterized by mad jollity, and a playfulness that at times approaches buffoonery, there are exquisite musical thoughts; there are passages that for a moment sound the depths and reach the heights.
The Eighth symphony was composed at Linz in the summer of 1812. Beethoven was in poor physical condition in that year, and as Staudenheim, his physician, advised him to try Bohemian baths, he went to Töplitz by way of Prague; to Carlsbad, where a note of the postillion’s horn found its way among the sketches for the Eighth symphony; to Franzensbrunn, and again to Töplitz; and lastly to his brother Johann’s home at Linz, where he remained until into November.
At the beginning of 1812 Beethoven contemplated writing three symphonies at the same time; the key of the third, D minor, was already determined, but he postponed work on this; and as the autograph score of the first of the remaining two, the Symphony in A, No. 7, is dated May 13, it is probable that he contemplated the Seventh before he left Vienna on his summer journey. His sojourn in Linz was not a pleasant one. Johann, a bachelor, lived in a house too large for his needs, and so he rented a part of it to a physician, who had a sister-in-law, Therese Obermeyer, a cheerful and well-proportioned woman of an agreeable if not handsome face. Johann looked on her kindly, made her his housekeeper, and according to the gossips of Linz, there was a closer relationship. Beethoven meddled with his brother’s affairs, and, finding him obdurate, visited the bishop and the police authorities and persuaded them to banish her from the town, to send her to Vienna if she should still be in Linz on a fixed day. Naturally, there was a wild scene between the brothers. Johann played the winning card: he married Therese on November 8. Ludwig, furious, went back to Vienna and took pleasure afterwards in referring to his sister-in-law in both his conversation and his letters as the “Queen of Night.”
This same Johann said that the Eighth symphony was completed from sketches made during walks to and from the Pöstlingberge, but Thayer considered him to be an untrustworthy witness.
The two symphonies were probably played over the first time at the Archduke Rudolph’s in Vienna, April 20, 1813. Beethoven in the same month endeavored to produce them at a concert, but without success. The Seventh was not played until December 8, 1813, at a concert organized by Mälzel. The first performance of the Eighth symphony was at a concert given by Beethoven at Vienna in the Redoutensaal on Sunday, February 27, 1814.
The Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, in a review of this concert, stated that the Seventh symphony was again heartily applauded, and the allegro was repeated. “All were in anxious expectation to hear the new symphony (F major, 3-4), the latest product of Beethoven’s muse; but this expectation after one hearing was not fully satisfied, and the applause which the work received was not of that enthusiastic nature by which a work that pleases universally is distinguished. In short, the symphony did not make, as the Italians say, a furore. I am of the opinion that the cause of this was not in weaker or less artistic workmanship (for in this, as in all of Beethoven’s works of this species, breathes the peculiar genius which always proves his originality), but partly in the mistake of allowing this symphony to follow the one in A major, and partly in the satiety that followed the enjoyment of so much that was beautiful and excellent, whereby natural apathy was the result. If this symphony in future should be given alone, I have no doubt concerning its favorable reception.”