Flowering of Romanticism: The Expressive

¶ … flowering of Romanticism: The expressive nature of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

Da-da-da-DUM. So runs the familiar motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in C Minor, op.67. This simple musical phrase has become an indelible part of modern musical culture. This Symphony's main theme is often described as giving the listener a sense of "fate" or "destiny" knocking at his or her door December 1, 2009. Whether it is true that Beethoven actually described this musical phrase as fate personified is controversial. However, what is clear is that for the composer's listeners, such an interpretation seemed resonant and appropriate: "Beethoven's symphony in C minor had closed the programme. Let us be silent! How often we hear it in public, but also in our deepest self, and how it projects its force upon all people of all ages, just like the great natural phenomena, which leave us in awe every time they appear. This symphony alike, will still resound centuries to come, for as long as there will be man and music," wrote Beethoven's contemporary and biographer of a performance of the work (Munteanu 2006).

For the first time, during the Romantic era, the interior life of the composer and the exterior life of his music were linked. Thus, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony marks a clear shift in the view of music as 'expression.' Music was no longer simply a collective expression of a culture or an exercise in demonstrating the potential of the artistic medium of music. Now musical compositions were linked to the personal, emotional nature of human heart. Much as Romantic poetry strove to give voice to the feeling of the individual through words, Romantic music like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony gave voice to the stormy life of the composer through wild shifts in tone that were united by a single, consistent driving theme. "Its overall structure is not one of four independent essays linked simply by tonality and style, as in the typical 18th-century example, but is rather a carefully devised whole in which each of the movements serves to carry the work inexorably toward its end. The progression from minor to major, from dark to light, from conflict to resolution is at the very heart of the 'meaning' of this Symphony" (Rodda 2009). The Symphony is not an enclosed and deliberately perfect work, but tries to encompass the messiness of human life.

The Symphony is characterized by a single, driving motif of the darkness of fate interdispersed with periods of joy and lighter-sounding tones. For example, the first section of the Symphony, entitled Allegro con brio, introduces the theme of 'fate,' the sense that destiny is always haunting the listener in the background, just as it does all humanity. Beethoven's worldview is expressed through this motif: however, the full range of human expression is manifested over the course of the Symphony despite the persistence of fate. The second section, entitled Adante con moto has been described as having "a lyrical theme with a hymnal resonance, even festive" in quality which indicates a sense of hope, even in the midst of despair (Munteanu 2006). In contrast to earlier musical works, which can be analyzed purely in terms of musical structure, Beethoven's Fifth is often analyzed as a creation of Beethoven's own, unique psyche: desperate yet occasionally finding joy. It is a sprawling yet seamless whole, like his mind and life, rather than a composition of particular movements that carefully balance one another and deal with several unified themes in a structurally perfect manner.

The third section entitled simply Allegro "has a free form, neither scherzo nor intermezzo, but constitutes itself as an epilogue to the dramatism in Part I and a prologue to Part IV. This is considered to be the key moment of the entire symphony, both psychologically and from the point-of-view of the musical construction" (Munteanu 2006). But while composers of the past may have used this critical, linking movement to engage in musical pyrotechnics, or to reconfigure the previous themes of the two movements, Beethoven chooses instead a psychologically revelatory approach to the third section that adds new emotive tones to the work. The motif of 'fate' continually intrudes, often in unexpected sections. It is as if, regardless of the mood of the listener, or what is transpiring in life, fate and a sense of foreboding will always drift across the landscape of human emotions.