The premiere of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

I’ve been spending much of this week working on the program for the RCO’s season-opening concerts on September 20 and 21. As usual, I wrote much too much for the program notes, and had to prune those carefully crafted thoughts, those veritable pearls of wisdom and insight (!)

By the way, we’ll be posting the program notes at the RCO website in the next week or two. Not everyone has a chance to read them at the concert, in the dark. So this way you can take a look at them at your leisure, should you desire to, and prepare yourself for what should be a fabulous concert.

A good portion of what ended up disappearing from the notes in the editing process concerned the concert at which Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was premiered. It was a remarkable event in music history. A bit of background: Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony over the years 1804 to 1808. This was the heart of what is generally looked on as the most productive period of his composing career. In fact, he interrupted work on the Fifth several times to write other great masterworks – the first version of the opera Fidelio, the Symphonies Nos. 4 and 6, the Violin Concerto, the Piano Concerto No. 4, the three “Razumovsky” string quartets, and the “Appassionata” Piano Sonata, among others.

But concert life was not then what it is today. There were comparatively few full-time orchestras, and even a celebrity like Beethoven couldn’t count on performances of every new work he produced. Quite often, composers had to arrange for concerts themselves, hiring the hall and orchestra, and hoping that they could make some money off the ticket sales. Mozart, for instance, famously created his great final piano concertos for subscription concerts he put on himself.

So by 1808, Beethoven had quite a backlog of new music, and he decided to put on a concert at which several of his newest large-scale works would get their premiere performances. On December 22, 1808, the Theater an der Wien in Vienna played host to a concert at which Beethoven conducted the following program:

Symphony No. 6
Concert aria "Ah! perfido"
The “Gloria” from the Mass in C Major
Piano Concerto No. 4 (with Beethoven as soloist)
Intermission
Symphony No. 5
The “Sanctus” and “Benedictus” from the Mass in C Major
A solo piano improvisation played by Beethoven
Choral Fantasy

Either half of this program would make for a decent-sized concert today. But the fact that all this music – all of it receiving world premiere performances! – was heard in one marathon concert of over four hours rather boggles the mind.

There are quite a few other little details about this performance that add to its reputation. For one, only one rehearsal preceded the concert. And Beethoven, who was to conduct the concert, wasn’t allowed into the rehearsal! It seems that a month or two before, Beethoven had been involved in some performance at a church at which he threw a little tantrum and accidentally knocked over an altar boy holding a candle. The orchestra members, outraged at his behavior, insisted that he not lead the rehearsal. So Beethoven had to sit in a separate room to listen, and the concertmaster would occasionally leave the stage and run over to this other room to get Beethoven’s comments from him.

The Theater an der Wien that was the site of the big concert had opened only seven years before, and had already been the site of other Beethoven premieres, including Fidelio and the Second and Third Symphonies. But remember that we are talking about just three days before Christmas here and it was just a little, well, freezing out. So we have a very cold audience, sitting for four and a half hours or so listening to entirely new, and rather substantial and complex, music played by a community orchestra on just one rehearsal.

Then a soprano soloist pulled out at the last minute and needed to be replaced. To top it all off, the Choral Fantasy that concluded this marathon hadn’t received any rehearsal at all, and a few minutes into their performance the musicians became confused about the repeats. Chaos ensued, and the performance ground to a halt and had to be restarted.

It is no surprise that Beethoven’s assistant Anton Schindler, who attended and left one of the few accounts of that evening that has come down to us, wrote that “the public was not endowed with the necessary degree of comprehension for such extraordinary music, and the performance left a great deal to be desired.”

I don’t think it’s too great of an exaggeration to say that the RCO’s performances of the Fifth on September 20 and 21 will be more fully prepared, and sound rather better, than the performance at that 1808 premiere.