Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was first heard in a long concert that Beethoven gave at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien to present an amazing series of his own works, all first performances. The evening began at 6:30 pm with the Sixth Symphony, followed by the concert aria “Ah, perfido!,” two movements from the Mass in C, and the Fourth Piano Concerto (with the composer himself as soloist) on the first half. After intermission the audience heard for the first time the Fifth Symphony, a piano fantasy improvised by the composer, and the Choral Fantasy. The last piece did not end until 10:30 pm.

Given the length of the evening, most of the reports concentrated on the one real catastrophe of the evening, when the orchestra fell apart in the middle of the Choral Fantasy and the whole piece had to be started over. Thus, the most important and influential reaction to the Fifth Symphony did not come until a year and a half later, when the famous writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who was also a composer, gave an enthusiastic appraisal of the Fifth Symphony as a landmark in the history of music.

Early audiences were either stupefied or exhilarated. When someone asked Beethoven, “What does it mean?” he replied, “Thus Fate knocks at the door.” As such things go, it was appropriate enough: fate working out a path to victory has long been associated with the piece. Victory is inherent in the music itself and this is why the piece grips us today no matter how many times we have heard it.

Is it possible, at this late date, to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth not as if it were the most familiar of symphonies, but rather as if it were brand new? The opening four note figure assumes great importance from the outset, but we gradually realize that this musical atom is not a theme in itself; it is the rhythmic foreground to an extraordinarily long limbed melody, made up of a chain of four note atoms. We hear a long phrase, but no one in the orchestra actually plays it. Instead one section overlaps another, then another. The tensely climbing phrase is an aural illusion. The rapid interplay of orchestral sections, a constantly boiling cauldron in which each has its own brief say before yielding to the next, lends a dramatic quality to the sound of the orchestra from the very opening.

The drama in the Fifth Symphony is musical: How does one achieve a coherent and fully satisfying conclusion in the major mode to a symphony that begins in the minor? Throughout the four movements of this symphony, C major keeps appearing without ever quite exorcizing the haunting sense of C minor—never, that is, until the end of the last movement. In the opening Allegro, the C major appears right on schedule where it is conventionally expected—at the recapitulation of the secondary theme. But then the lengthy coda goes on—in C minor—to show that there is still a struggle ahead.

In the Andante, Beethoven keeps moving with a surprising modulation from the home key of A-flat to a bright C major, reinforced by trumpets and timpani. But that C-major idea is never once allowed to come to a full conclusion; rather, it fades away, shrouded in harmonic mists and sustained tension.

The very unjoking Scherzo (in C minor) turns to C major for a trio involving some contrapuntal buffoonery, but the fun comes to an end with a hushed return to the minor key material of the opening. Finally we begin to approach the light, moving through the darkness of a tense passage linking the movements to a glorious sunburst of C major that opens the finale. Even then we have one more struggle. Beethoven recalls the Scherzo and the tense linking passage just before the recapitulation (another shift from gloom to bright day). Only then have we safely arrived in C major. An extended coda—an extraordinary peroration—needs to be as long as it is because it is not just the conclusion of the last movement, but rather of the entire symphony, culminating a demonstration of unification on the very grandest scale to which countless composers since have aspired, though few have succeeded. —© Steven Ledbetter