Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was completed in the late spring or early summer of 1812. It wasn't performed publicly until December 8, 1813, at a concert in Vienna to benefit wounded Austrian and Bavarian soldiers. Also on the program was Beethoven's Wellington's Victory.

Beethoven himself conducted. The composer Ludwig Spohr described the scene: “The execution was quite masterly, despite the uncertain and often ridiculous conducting of Beethoven…. It is a sad misfortune for anyone to be deaf; how then should a musician endure it without despair? Beethoven's almost continual melancholy was no longer a riddle to me.”

A review of the concert reported that the Symphony “deserved the loud applause and the exceptionally good performance it received …. This symphony … is the richest melodically and the most pleasing and comprehensible of all Beethoven symphonies.”  Beethoven regarded the Seventh as “among my best works.”

Not everyone shared Beethoven's opinion. After a performance in Leipzig, Clara Schumann's father suggested that the music could only have been written by someone who was very, very drunk. When the Seventh was played before the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Carl Maria von Weber remarked that Beethoven was “now quite ripe for the madhouse.” Twelve years later, Weber conducted the London Philharmonic's performance of the Beethoven Seventh. Apparently Weber had changed his mind about the piece.

It was Wagner who dubbed the Seventh “the apotheosis of the dance, the dance in its highest condition, the happiest realization of the movements of the body in ideal form.” He wrote: “If anyone plays the Seventh, tables and benches, cans and cups, the grandmother, the blind and the lame, aye, the children in the cradle, fall to dancing!” Wagner once demonstrated his theory by dancing to the Seventh Symphony, accompanied by Franz Liszt at the piano.

“It would require more than a technical yardstick to measure the true proportion of this Symphony – the sense of immensity which it conveys,” writes John N. Burk. “Beethoven seems to have built up this impression by willfully driving a single rhythmic figure through each movement, until the music attains (particularly in the body of the first movement, and in the Finale) a swift propulsion, an effect of cumulative growth which is akin to extraordinary size.”

After a long introduction, the opening movement launches into a persistent rhythmic propulsion that Ernest Walker found virtually unparalleled elsewhere. The second movement, according to Marion M. Scott, is “marvelous … full of melancholy beauty.” Beethoven's biographer, Alexander Thayer, says the trio of the third movement is based on an Austrian pilgrims’ hymn. In the Finale, George Grove discovered “a vein of rough, hard, personal boisterousness, the same feeling which inspired the strange jests, puns and nicknames which abound in his letters.”

~ Program Notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2022.