According to Beethoven’s biographer, Alexander Thayer, the Fifth Symphony “was no sudden inspiration. Themes for (three of the movements) are found in sketchbooks belonging, at the very latest, to the years 1800 and 1801.” After interrupting himself to write the Fourth Symphony, Beethoven finished the Fifth in the spring of 1808.

Beethoven conducted the first performance at a typically massive all-Beethoven concert in Vienna on December 22, 1808. Besides the Fifth, the program included the Sixth Symphony, the concert aria Ah, Perfido, two movements from the Mass in C major, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy. One listener complained: “There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten, and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing--and still more of a loud…. Many a failure in the performance vexed our patience to the highest degree.”

In 1830, Mendelssohn played the first movement on the piano for Goethe, who said: “It is tremendous--quite crazy--one is almost afraid the house will collapse; and imagine how it must sound in the orchestra!” Of the celebrated four notes that begin the movement, Beethoven is supposed to have said: “Thus Fate knocks at the door.” Much has been made of this remark, most of it nonsense. Pointing to the same four notes in the Fourth Piano Concerto, theorist Heinrich Schenker wondered, “Was this another door on which Fate knocked or was someone else knocking at the same door?” By coincidence, the rhythm of the four notes corresponds to the Morse code for the letter “V.” That, coupled with Winston Churchill’s “V for Victory” gesture, inspired the BBC to use the phrase as a signature during World War II.

Sir Donald Francis Tovey compared the second movement to Shakespeare’s heroines, for “the same courage, the same beauty of goodness, and the same humor.” Berlioz claimed that the third movement produces “the inexplicable emotion that one experiences under the magnetic gaze of certain individuals.” With the finale, writes George Grove, “all the noisy elements at Beethoven’s command in those simpler days (burst) like a thunder-clap into the major key and into a triumphal march.”