The concert that featured the first performance of Symphony No. 7 in A major op. 92 became one of Beethoven’s greatest successes. It took place in the great auditorium of the University on 8 December 1813; the repertoire included, apart from what was heralded as “an entirely new symphony,” two marches – one by Dussek and one by Pleyel, both performed by Mälzl’s mechanical trumpeter with orchestra, and Beethoven’s short programme symphony Wellington`s Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria (Wellington’s Victory or Battle of Vittoria), first written for panharmonicon, a musical contraption devised by the ingenious Mälzl, the inventor of the metronome. It was he who persuaded his friend the composer to adapt the piece for orchestra; it was he, too, who was the prime mover behind the charity concert for the benefit of war victims’ families. After the recent Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, Vienna was still in a patriotic frenzy, and the audience were enthusiastic about this somewhat peculiar battle symphony, with its artillery percussion effects. Still, Beethoven’s Seventh was also received with extraordinary applause – its second movement encored and the entire concert had to be repeated a few days later.
Symphony No. 7 has not accumulated as many romantic comments that would excite music-lovers’ imagination as did the “Symphony of Fate”, i.e. the Fifth; yet from the point of view of great symphonic form, it is not less of a masterpiece. The punctuated and seemingly soaring rhythm of the first movement’s main theme, craftily introduced after a long and misleading introduction, serves as the chief formative element. The domination of rhythm is also marked in the later movements of Seventh Symphony – not only in the rapid ones, the ravishingly dynamic scherzo and the exuberantly dancing finale, but also in the calm Movement Two. Its remarkably suggestive emotional climate is due in a large part to the pulse of a simple, two-bar rhythmical motif that underlies the first theme, entwined, in its successive recurrences, with a singing melody of an entirely different shape. This highly coherent combination of two different plots is one of the mysteries of Beethoven’s composing craft and creative imagination: the first theme, with its measured strides, appears in Beethoven’s sketchbook as early as in 1806 – several years before even an idea of Seventh Symphony.
Adam Walaciński