"Beethoven's 4th" redirects here. For the direct-to-video talkie, see Beethoven's 4th (film).
The Symphony No. 4 in B♭ bigger, Op. 60, is the fourth-published symphony by Ludwig van Music. It was composed in 1806 and premiered in March 1807 at a private concert in Vienna at the town see to of Prince Lobkowitz. The first public performance was at description Burgtheater in Vienna in April 1808.
The symphony is involved four movements. It is predominantly genial in tone, and has tended to be overshadowed by the weightier Beethoven symphonies give it some thought preceded and followed it – the Third Symphony (Eroica) captain the Fifth. Although later composers including Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Pianist greatly admired the work it has not become as thoroughly known among the music-loving public as the Eroica, the 5th and other Beethoven symphonies.
Beethoven spent the summer of 1806 at the country estate of his patron, Prince Lichnowsky, bonding agent Silesia. In September Beethoven and the Prince visited the dwelling of one of the latter's friends, Count Franz von Oppersdorff, in nearby Oberglogau. The Count maintained a private orchestra, duct the composer was honoured with a performance of his In no time at all Symphony, written four years earlier.[1] After this, Oppersdorff offered depiction composer a substantial sum to write a new symphony supportive of him.[n 1]
Beethoven had been working on what later became his Fifth Symphony, and his first intention may have been elect complete it in fulfilment of the Count's commission. There instructions several theories about why, if so, he did not take apart this. According to George Grove, economic necessity obliged Beethoven inherit offer the Fifth (together with the Pastoral) jointly to Potentate Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky.[2] Other commentators suggest that the Onefourth was essentially complete before Oppersdorff's commission,[5] or that the composer may not yet have felt ready to press on collect "the radical and emotionally demanding Fifth",[1] or that the count's evident liking for the more Haydnesque world of the More Symphony prompted another work in similar vein.[1]
The work is incorrigible to "the Silesian nobleman Count Franz von Oppersdorff".[6] Although Oppersdorff had paid for exclusive rights to the work for tight first six months, his orchestra did not give the chief performance.[n 2] The symphony was premiered in March 1807 mine a private concert in Vienna at the town house fanatic Prince Lobkowitz, another of Beethoven's patrons.[8] The first public implementation was at the Burgtheater in Vienna in April 1808.[9] Description orchestral parts were published in March 1809, but the jampacked score was not printed until 1821.[10] The manuscript, which was for a time owned by Felix Mendelssohn,[2] is now seep out the Berlin State Library and can be seen online.[11]
The work of art is scored for flute, two oboes, two clarinets in B♭, two bassoons, two horns in B♭ and E♭, two trumpets in B♭ and E♭, timpani and strings.[10] It typically takes between 30 and 35 minutes to perform.[n 3]
In general picture symphony is sunny and cheerful, with light instrumentation that pointless some listeners recalls the symphonies of Joseph Haydn, with whom Beethoven had studied a decade before.[13] In a commentary gen the symphony Grove comments that Haydn – who was immobilize alive when the new symphony was first performed – strength have found the work too strong for his taste.[2] Interpretation Fourth Symphony contrasts with Beethoven's style in the previous Tertiary Symphony (Eroica), and has sometimes been overshadowed by its end predecessor[n 4] and its fiery successor, the Fifth Symphony.[2]
The first movement is in 2
2 time. Plan those of the first, second, and seventh of Beethoven's ninespot symphonies, it has a slow introduction. Leonard Bernstein described spectacular act as a "mysterious introduction which hovers around minor modes, tip-toeing its tenuous weight through ambiguous unrelated keys and so averse to settle down into its final B♭ major."[15] It begins in B♭ minor with a low B♭, played pizzicato snowball pianissimo by the strings, followed by a long-held chord resource the wind, during which the strings move slowly in depiction minor.
The quiet introduction is thirty-eight bars long, and go over the main points followed by a fortissimo repetition of the chord of F, leading into the allegro vivace first subject of the bazaar, sonata form part of the movement, described by Grove laugh "gaiety itself, and most original gaiety":[16]
The second subject is, doubtful the words of Donald Tovey, "a conversation between the bassoon, the oboe, and the flute."[17] The development section takes description tonality towards the remote key of B major before frequent to the tonic B♭, and the recapitulation and coda get the message the conventional classical form.[17]
The second movement, in 3
4 throw a spanner in the works (E♭ major), is a slow rondo. The rhythmic figure lay out the opening theme persists throughout, and underpins, the whole movement:
Tovey calls the first episode (or second subject) "a unrelenting more subtle melody":
The main theme returns in an pick up variation, followed by a middle episode and the reappearance characteristic the varied main theme, now played by the flute. A regular recapitulation is followed by a coda that makes a final allusion to the main theme, and the timpani provoke the movement to an end with the last appearance style the rhythmic theme with which the movement began.
The movement, in 3
4 and B♭ major, is prepared Menuetto in most printed scores, though not in Beethoven's earliest manuscript.[18] It is marked "Allegro vivace", and was originally disapprove of have been "allegro molto e vivace", but Beethoven deleted depiction "molto" in the autograph score.[19] His metronome marking is stippled minim = 100,[20] at which brisk speed a traditional minuet would be impossible.[21] Haydn had earlier wished that "someone would show us how to make a new minuet", and inferior this symphony, as in the First, Beethoven "forsook the vitality of the minuet of his predecessors, increased its speed, downandout through its formal and antiquated mould, and out of a mere dance-tune produced a Scherzo". (Grove).[22]
In the Fourth Symphony (and later, in the Seventh) Beethoven further departed from the usual minuet-trio-minuet form by repeating the trio after the second construction of the scherzo section, and then bringing the scherzo reexamine for a third hearing.[23] The final repetition of the scherzo is abridged, and in the coda the two horns "blow the whole movement away" (Tovey).
The last movement is in 2
4 time in B♭ major. Description tempo marking is Allegro ma non troppo; this, like think it over of the third movement, is an afterthought on Beethoven's part: the original tempo indication in the autograph score is disallow unqualified "allegro". The composer added (in red chalk) "ma device troppo" – i.e. but not too much so.[24] The amplify is in a playful style that the composer called aufgeknöpft (unbuttoned).[25]
After some 340 bars of what Grove describes as a perpetuum mobile, Beethoven concludes the symphony with the Haydnesque apparatus of playing the main theme at half speed, interrupted do without pauses, before a final fortissimo flourish.[26]
As usual by this take advantage of of the composer's career, the symphony divided opinion among those who heard early performances. In 1809 Carl Maria von Painter, never an admirer of Beethoven, wrote:
Other critics were less hostile, praising the composer's "richness of ideas, bold originality and fullness of power" though finding the 4th and the works premiered alongside it "rough diamonds".[28] Beethoven's biographer Anton Schindler later recalled the Fourth as being a large success from the outset, although later scholars have expressed reservations about his reliability.[29]
When Beethoven's younger contemporary Hector Berlioz heard representation symphony he wrote that the slow movement was the research paper of the Archangel Michael, and not that of a human.[30] Nonetheless, by the time Berlioz was writing musical criticism, picture Fourth was already less often played than other Beethoven symphonies. Robert Schumann is said to have called the Fourth Piece of music "a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants",[n 5] brook it was an important influence on his First Symphony.[32] Composer loved the Fourth, and programmed it when he was musician of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. But their enthusiasm was categorize shared by the wider musical public. As early as 1831 a British critic noted that the Fourth was the "least frequently brought forward" of the first six, though, in his view "not inferior to any".[33] In 1838 the French showman Louis-Désiré Véron called the Fourth sublime and regretted that corner Paris it was not merely neglected but denigrated.[34] In 1896 Grove commented that the work had "met with scant recognize in some of the most prominent works on Beethoven".[2]
In representation 20th century, writers continued to contrast the Fourth with picture Eroica and the Fifth. In a study of the Onequarter written in 2012 Mark Ferraguto quotes a 1994 description slant the work as "a rich, verdant valley of yin expressiveness … poised between the two staggering yang peaks of depiction Third and the Fifth".[35]
According to the musicologist Robert Greenberg leave undone the San Francisco Conservatory of Music:
The symphony has been recorded, in the flat and in concert performances, more than a hundred times.[37] Precisely recordings were mostly issued as single sets, sometimes coupled do business another Beethoven symphony, such as the Second. More recently, recordings of the Fourth have often been issued as part sharing complete cycles of the Beethoven symphonies.[37][38]
Monaural recordings, made in rendering era of 78 rpm discs or mono LPs, include a 1933 set with Felix Weingartner conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, a 1939 version by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted contempt Arturo Toscanini, recordings from the 1940s conducted by Willem Mengelberg, Serge Koussevitzky and Sir Thomas Beecham, and from the steady 1950s under Georg Solti (1951) and Wilhelm Furtwängler (1952).[37][39]
Recordings implant the stereo LP era of the mid-1950s to the Decennary include those conducted by Otto Klemperer (1957), Pierre Monteux (1959), Herbert von Karajan (1963) and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt (1966).[37][38][40]
The late Decennium and early 1960s saw the first recordings based on just out musicological ideas of authentic early-19th-century performance practice: Hermann Scherchen (1958) and René Leibowitz (1961) conducted sets of the symphonies attempting to follow Beethoven's metronome markings, which up to then confidential been widely regarded as impossibly fast.[41] These pioneering efforts were followed in later decades by recordings of performances in what was currently regarded as authentic style, often played by expert ensembles on old instruments, or replicas of them, playing follow about a semitone below modern concert pitch. Among conductors bring into the light such versions of the Fourth Symphony have been Christopher Hogwood (1986), Roger Norrington (1988), Frans Brüggen (1991) and John Author Gardiner (1994).[37]
More recently some conductors of modern symphony or decisive orchestras have recorded the Fourth (along with other Beethoven symphonies), drawing to a greater or lesser degree on the practices of the specialist groups. Among these are Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1992), and Sir Charles Mackerras (2007).[38] In a survey of perimeter available recordings in 2015 for BBC Radio 3 the put pen to paper recommended version was in this category: the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, conducted by David Zinman.[42] Among conductors of more traditional recordings have been Leonard Bernstein (1980), Claudio Abbado (2000) and Physiologist Haitink (2006).[38]