About this Piece

Beethoven began his Seventh Symphony in the fall of 1811 and finished it in mid-1812, but it had to wait until the end of 1813 for its first performance. In the meantime, Napoleon had met with disaster in Russia, and Wellington had defeated the French at Vittoria. With the end of the Napoleonic era in sight, Beethoven composed Wellington’s Victory and presented it, along with the Seventh Symphony, in a Vienna concert on December 8, 1813, to benefit Austrian soldiers who had been wounded in the battle of Hanau that fall (Napoleon had won that one). The concert was a stellar affair, with famous composers (Salieri, Hummel, Spohr, and Meyerbeer among them) joining in the orchestra. According to Spohr, “The new compositions of Beethoven pleased extremely, particularly the Symphony in A; the wonderful second movement was encored and also made upon me a deep and lasting impression. The execution was a complete masterpiece, in spite of the uncertain and frequently laughable direction of Beethoven.”

Wellington’s Victory was a sensation and became the most popular work of Beethoven’s career. The symphony was also a hit, its jubilance fitting the occasion of its premiere so well that the critic of the Wiener Zeitung referred to it as a “companion piece” to Wellington’s Victory. A repeat of the entire concert was quickly put on four days later, and the music was done again in January and February, with Beethoven adding the Eighth Symphony for good measure. By 1816, the Seventh was available in no fewer than six published arrangements for playing at home or in social gatherings.

By the middle of the 19th century, the Seventh Symphony was firmly entrenched as the particular darling of musicians among Beethoven’s nine. And with this fame came a flood of written interpretations with which it has been associated, for better or worse, ever since.  

Dancing and celebration have figured prominently in various famous musicians’ views of the symphony. For Berlioz, the first movement was “a peasant dance”; to Schumann, the Allegretto depicted “a rustic wedding”; Wagner, in his detailed analysis, referred to the entire work as “the apotheosis of the dance.” During the 20th century, portions of the Seventh Symphony—particularly the Allegretto—were choreographed to the chagrin of the eminent British musicologist and teacher Donald Francis Tovey, who, with George Grove (of Grove Dictionary fame), told us that we had no right to see anything but music in the seventh, as Beethoven had intended. Harumph!

Whatever anyone may or may not hear in the Seventh Symphony, its music has delighted and thrilled audiences since it was first presented in Vienna two centuries ago. Those who see in it dances, a wedding ceremony, a “bacchanalian orgy” (the finale, according to Leonard Bernstein), love it no less, and perhaps more, than those huffy British musicologists. —Excerpted from notes by Howard Posner and Herbert Glass