Symphony No. 8 in F Major

Beethoven’s Eighth is the most compact of his symphonies, but that doesn’t make it small in spirit. When the composer was told that it had been less well received in concert than the Seventh, he is said to have snorted, “That’s because it’s so much better!” He was probably being defensive—are there any “better” symphonies than the Seventh? Yet despite the Eighth Symphony’s relatively slender proportions and half-ironic homages to the Classicism of Haydn and Mozart, it remains highly original and full of wonderful surprises. None of Beethoven’s first movements makes such striking use of quickfire loud-soft contrasts, and the second’s metronomic tick-tocking is gruffly challenged to the point where it almost falls apart. In place of his usual scherzo, Beethoven casts his third movement as a minuet, but it is a minuet that has thrown off its former courtly elegance and plunged wholeheartedly into rude beer-garden merriment. The racing finale has a slightly alarming tendency to throw spanners into its own machinery, causing some weird and wonderful diversions. The Eighth has been called a symphony for connoisseurs, but in fact the listener needs no specialist technical knowledge to appreciate its cleverness, only the resolution to listen more than once.