Symphony No. 7 in A Major

Beethoven wrote his Seventh Symphony in 1811-12, after a stay at a famous spa town had restored his health, and with it his will to live and to create. Beethoven’s music doesn’t always reflect his mood at the time he wrote it, but the Seventh Symphony has the feeling of a return to life. Dynamic rhythm had always been important to Beethoven, but in the symphony Wagner called "the apotheosis of the dance" it’s both a key ingredient in the music’s explosive vitality and an important organising feature: so many of the themes emerge from the DA da-da pattern heard near the start. After a slow, portentous beginning, the first movement is like an elemental ballet, bursting into flames in its joyous conclusion. It isn’t all sunlight and joy, though. The famous “Allegretto” second movement is a deeply atmospheric, shadowy processional, yet even here the basic propulsive rhythm is present throughout. A lightning-paced scherzo with a hymnlike trio follows, then the finale dances itself almost to fury, the seminal rhythm now pounded out obsessively throughout the orchestra. The symphony was such a hit at its premiere that the “Allegretto” had to be repeated, and it clearly left a profound impression on Beethoven’s younger Viennese contemporary Schubert, who echoed its steady tread in many of his later works.