Beethoven's Fifth

Enthusiasm, excitement, vigour, soaring emotions – all this can be found in Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. On the day of its premier, 22nd December 1808, it was received frigidly, yet today it is one of the most often performed pieces of classical music.

“Yes, it's fate knocking at the door” – supposedly this is what Ludwig van Beethoven said about the first bars of this composition. According to another anecdote, the genial composer wanted to transcribe the sound of a yellowhammer whose tweeting he heard during a walk in the Vienna Prater.

The writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, who lived in the times of Beethoven, thought his music “set in motion the mechanism of terror, fear, panic and suffering, as well as evoking the feeling of infinite yearning that is the essence of Romanticism”. The composer Robert Schumann added: “he impresses us with unchanged force, just like a natural phenomenon, which every time it repeats, it always fills us with fear and amazement”. The commonly known motif used in ringtones, commercials and films consists of only four sounds: three short ones and one long. This simplicity of form exhibits the genius of a man for whom Symphony no. 5 was a great triumph over his progressing deafness.