Beethoven: Symphony no. 4

by Chris Vaneman

Ludwig van Beethoven 1770 (Baptized) - 1827

Beethoven stands as such a colossus in the history of music that he has even come to overshadow himself, a curious problem if ever there was one. He has come to be seen as music’s consummate Conquering Hero – the man who overcame deafness to write music of timeless glory, the composer who struggled through years of revising and rewriting to complete his greatest masterpieces, the radical who boldly broke existing conventions of form and harmony to paint a musical picture of an ultimately successful human struggle with fate. And all that is true! Beethoven really was all of those things – but he was also much more than that, even, and this is a truth that’s easy to lose sight of.

Beethoven’s music, in fact, runs the whole gamut of human experience. His compositional voice is comfortable and distinctive even when moving within the conventions he inherited from Mozart and Haydn, and his portrayals of boisterous and even tipsy good humor, relaxed ease, and the gentle pang of unrequited love are just as vivid as his depictions of existential struggle. 

This phenomenon is on particular display in the realm of Beethoven’s symphonies. The Third, the Fifth, the Ninth – music lovers all know those titanic depictions of struggle and triumph. There are over 600 commercially available recordings of the Fifth alone, for instance, and that’s not even counting the disco version (by Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band, you’ll recall) that was so popular in the Seventies. But too often the Fourth, like the Second and the Eighth, gets overlooked. Those symphonies don’t break the chains of convention and don’t depict Promethean spiritual conflict, but inhabit a happier realm of joy and love where excitement isn’t fraught with terror, and we tend to forget about them.

We do so to our loss, however, and this evening’s performance of the Fourth – the Spartanburg Philharmonic’s first in some decades – is a reminder of that. 

Beethoven was typically in the habit of working on several pieces at once, skipping among them and endlessly revising each over an extended period, but the Fourth poured from his pen with Mozartean effortlessness in the summer and early fall of 1806. In fact he interrupted work on the Fifth to devote himself entirely to the Fourth, and the piece reflects his relatively cheerful state of mind during that summer. Over the previous few years the composer had come to terms with his encroaching deafness, had completed with enormous labor his lone opera, Fidelio, he had viewed the meteoric rise of Napoleon first with hope and then with rage (as the Little General reneged on his promises of democracy and had himself crowned), and premiered the massive symphony whose subtitle he changed from “Bonaparte” to “Eroica.” He was ready for a break, and he found one at the Silesian palace of the Count von Oppersdorf.

Oppersdorf was a music lover who required that every servant in his household play an instrument, and he pulled them together for frequent concerts in his grand ballroom. We don’t know for certain that this Oppersdorfian ad hoc orchestra was the group that premiered the symphony, but it’s a safe bet that they read through some of its sketches, and we do know that Oppersdorf pampered his guest and paid him amply for the time he spent in Silesia. The Fourth’s relatively slender orchestration may well reflect the size of Oppersdorf’s ensemble, and it certainly reflects the approach to form and proportion of Haydn, Beethoven’s great teacher. 

The prolonged and mysterious introduction that sets up the energetic first movement is characteristically Haydnesque, as are the small harmonic and orchestrational jokes that stud the symphony like chocolate chips in a cookie. Be on the lookout (or listen-out, I suppose) for the fourth movement’s “Great Bassoon Joke,” as it’s been called for many years: two-thirds of the way through, when we recap our opening melodies, Beethoven places a scurrying tune usually played by the first violin section in the hands of a single chugging bassoon. Sometimes this sort of gentle comedy is exactly what the world needs.