Symphony No Five By Beethoven example essay topic

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony If you are part of society, I think it is safe to make the assumption you are familiar with and have heard Symphony No. five by Beethoven. Whether it was a theme in movie or part of an advertisement on TV, it captured your attention and added emotion and excitement to the particular segment that it coincided with. Total unification and the pervasive use of a single motif combine to make the Fifth Symphony, which had one of the longest gestation periods of any Beethoven work, the first in which all movements are shown plainly to be part of a cyclic design. The famous motif which dominates the first movement in the form also makes significant appearances that are dramatic entrances in the other three. This feature gives the Fifth Symphony its widespread popularity that it has had over so many generations.

Tonal unity is provided by the close relationship between the parallel keys of C minor (the tonic) and C major, and the gradual yielding of the minor to major in the course of the work. To help achieve this transfer of c control, from minor to major, Beethoven is obliged to make an important change the traditional Key relationships of a sonata movement in a minor key. Instead of having the tonic minor govern the entire recapitulation in the first movement, he brings back the second subject in the tonic major, as a simple transposition rather than the fundamental recasting. (In this respect the movement anticipates the Romantic concept of thematic integrity and by, extension, the idea of the theme as the focal point of a composition.) The fifth Symphony in C minor is rightly considered the paradigm of Beethoven's symphonies; the various alternatives to sonata form, explored in the piano works, are put to one side here in favor of the more rigorous example of Mozart, which is, however, raised to a superbly spectacular level. (Pestelli p. 236) According to Pestelli, No other piece had ever organized the principles of contrast with such integration of metrical structure and thematic invention as does the first movement; the grand balancing of blocks of sound comes, as everyone knows, from a proverbial four-note idea, an idea unusable by others, and in that sense a asocial, rather like the opening of Cori olan (1807), the overture for Collin's tragedy, with it's powerful swelling unions that explode into chords. (236) This explains the why Beethoven's opening to Symphony No. five is so powerful and dominating to the listener's ear.

His use of only four notes to introduce his symphony is an original one, giving it extreme distinction from any other composer's work of the Classical Period. In the second movement a few C Major fanfare figure as some of the closest points of contact between Beethoven and the revolutionary plein air, and if the swift, tiptoeing type of scherzo had been born in the Erotica, the Fifth generates the ghostly type. For the first time the device of linking the two final movements, already employed in the piano sonata, finally appeared in the symphony. Here the point at which they join is filled with a beam of light blazing which makes it cleat to everyone, whether or not they are experts, the great theme of light triumphing over darkness already treated in a cryptic way by Hayden and Mozart.

(Pestelli p. 237). The energy which fills the whole finale is compressed into fifty bars of motionless, traumatic tension; this movement is couched in the same language as the final chorus of Fidelio, and like it-indeed more so, in spite of the absence of words- is a celebration of the supreme and completely secular value of human dignity. (Pestelli p. 237).