About this Piece

Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies are a set of “untwins,” contrasting works created basically side by side in 1811 and 1812. They also share a connection with Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (1772–1838), who was part musician and part engineer, but mostly an entrepreneurial salesman.

Maelzel was named Vienna’s imperial court mechanician in 1808, and one of his principal product lines was ear trumpets, which Beethoven eagerly—desperately—tried. Maelzel also created the Panharmonicon, a mechanical chamber orchestra.

The inventor persuaded the composer, with a much-needed loan, to write a piece for the Panharmonicon celebrating Wellington’s victory in the Battle of Vitoria. Maelzel planned to tour the work to London, where Wellington was a national hero, and to raise money, they gave concerts in Vienna featuring Beethoven’s new piece performed by live orchestra. These concerts were quite successful, but Beethoven and Maelzel fell out over ownership of the music, and Beethoven filed—and eventually dropped—a lawsuit against Maelzel. This rift did not stop Beethoven from becoming one of the early adopters of another of Maelzel’s inventions: a mechanical timekeeper he branded the metronome.

Those two fundraising concerts in December 1813 and one Beethoven produced for himself in January 1814 (after the break with Maelzel) included the first performances of the Seventh Symphony, which he had completed over a year earlier. The first of these concerts was also a charity benefit for soldiers wounded at the recent Battle of Hanau; a worthy patriotic cause, but also clever cross-promotion. The occasion and Beethoven’s celebrity attracted an all-star band. Beethoven’s favored quartet leader, Ignaz Schuppanzigh, was the concertmaster, and next to him sat violinist-composer Louis Spohr. Domenico Dragonetti led the basses, and composers and pianists Giacomo Meyerbeer, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Ignaz Moscheles all played percussion in the battle piece, for which composer Antonio Salieri served as a sort of assistant conductor. Beethoven conducted, and the music was much admired, though to the composer’s irritation the Seventh Symphony was referred to as a “companion piece” to Wellington’s Victory.

The symphony begins with a long and profound introduction before kicking into kinetically energized music, which characterizes the entire work. The introduction predicts the harmonic journeys coming in the rest of the symphony just as the main body of the movement foretells its rhythmic obsessions, and the startling coda walks the wild side.

The following Allegretto—the work doesn’t have a conventional slow movement—has a solemnly welling beauty intensified by counterpoint. It was so popular that audiences demanded an encore at the premiere, and during the 19th century it often was substituted into other Beethoven symphonies.

The scherzo is a blazingly fast one, with a much slower trio section. Beethoven reverses some of the dynamic surprises for the repeated sections and plays additional jokes with the scoring.

Also fast paced, the finale picks up the wildness initiated in the first movement and spins it into a breathless but utterly joyful mania, ending with a coda that mirrors the aggressive beast that closes the first movement.

—John Henken