A subtly unstable wind chord begins and ends the movement. The Allegretto that the first audiences-indeed audiences throughout the nineteenth century-liked so much is relaxed only by comparison with what comes before and after. The coda, as so often in Beethoven, is virtually another development, and Beethoven heaves it to a tremendous climax by making a crescendo across a tenfold repetition of an obsessive, harmonically off-balance bass. Having done so, he propels us with fierce energy and speed through one of those movements of his that are dominated by a single propulsive rhythm. Gradually, with a delicious feeling for suspense, Beethoven draws the Vivace from the last flickers of the introduction. So important are these journeys that Frederik Prausnitz, in his wonderfully stimulating book Score and Podium, refers to the Seventh Symphony as a “Tale of Three Tonalities.” The material-scales, and melodies that outline common chords-is of reckless simplicity. Obviously Beethoven’s aim is to draw attention not only to these shifts, but to these new harmonic areas, and in fact every one of the symphony’s journeys is foreshadowed here. The excursions to C and F are entered upon with startling bluntness. THE MUSIC A semi-slow introduction, the largest ever heard in any symphony until then and still one of the largest, defines great harmonic spaces, first A major, then C major (the gently lyric oboe tune), then F major (the same tune on the flute).
Beethoven 7th symphony oboe sheetudic series#
But the public liked the “companion piece” too, and the composer Louis Spohr, one of the violinists in the orchestra for the whole series of concerts, reports that the second movement was encored each time. To Beethoven’s annoyance, the critic of the Wiener Zeitung referred to the Seventh as having been composed “as a companion piece” to Wellington ’ s Victory. So great was the success that the entire program was repeated later in the month, again in January 1814, and once more in February. Between the Seventh Symphony and Wellington ’ s Victory, another gadget of Maelzel’s, a mechanical trumpeter, played marches written for the occasion by Dussek and Pleyel. The Panharmonicon was an invention of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, whose most enduring contribution to music was the first dependable metronome. In the battle of Hanau, that October, Napoleon thrashed the mostly Bavarian army that attempted to block his retreat toward the southwest.) (At Vitoria, in northeast Spain, an army of English, Spanish, and Portuguese troops under the Duke of Wellington defeated the French on June 21, 1813. What caused the excitement was not, however, Opus 92, the new symphony, but Opus 91, Wellington ’ s Victory, or The Battle of Vitoria, originally written for a mechanical instrument called the Panharmonicon but presented even at this, its first performance, in the version for orchestra. The concert at which the work had its premiere-it was a benefit for Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the recent Battle of Hanau-was probably the most wildly successful of his career. THE BACKSTORY The Seventh Symphony is Beethoven’s last word for quite a few years on the subject of the big style he had been cultivating since the early 1800s. INSTRUMENTATION: 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, with timpani and strings
Ureli Corelli Hill conducted it at the Apollo Rooms, New York, at a concert of the Philharmonic Society NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE: November 18, 1843. WORLD PREMIERE: December 8, 1813, at the University of Vienna Bonn, then a sovereign electorate (now Germany)ĬOMPOSED: Begun late in 1811, completed in June 1812 Liszt´s Beethoven transcriptions remain a mountain in the piano repertoire: they bear witness both to his reverence for Beethoven and his genius in the art of transcription.BORN: Beethoven’s baptismal certificate is dated December 17, 1770. Liszt reworked the original three transcriptions and sped his way through the remaining Symphonies, although he conceded "the impossibility of making any pianoforte arrangement of the 4th movement. But it would not be until 1865 that Liszt would complete his set at the behest of the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel. Liszt began his Beethoven Symphony transcriptions in 1838, completing Symphonies Nos.
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