[MUSIC] Probably the most famous moment. The motive in all classic music, is the beginning of Beethoven's Symphony Number Five. [MUSIC] Likely, the only thing that's equivalent to it in western culture, is the line, To be or not to be, from Shakespeare's Hamlet. And in the that is what symphony is about. What is it to be or not to be this symphony? Beethoven is reputed to have said about it, well, it's fate [SOUND] knocking at the door. How did Beethoven respond to fate? How did he act? Well, aggressively and emphatically and judging ultimately from the final chords of this symphony triumphantly. This symphony has the general feeling of struggle, Beethoven's struggle, the struggle of all of us, against the forces of nature. Maybe against the forces of human nature. From an uncertain beginning to a triumphant end. Symphony number five was premiered in Vienna on a bitterly cold night, 22nd of December 1808 along with his sixth symphony and other compositions in a concert that lasted four hours. Beethoven had organized it and had the audience sit there freezing for four hours in an unheated theater. But in the sense Beethoven didn't care much about audience comfort, he just cared about the music. Here's the outside of the theatre. Beethoven actually lived upstairs in this theatre for a while. And here's the inside of it as it looks today, and here's the theatre as it looks. In Beethoven's day, you can see down there at the bottom, right at bottom left you can see the orches, orchestral pit. Immediately up above that is the emperor's box, with the red curtains. On the stage, well, lo and behold, we see horses. This was something akin to Radio City Musical Hall in New York City. It was an entertainment performance space. Again, this is where Beethoven's famous Symphony number 5 was premiered in 1808, and here's the autograph of the opening page of that symphony. Now, I know it's difficult to see this, but if you look to, let me see if I can use the pointer. Here we go, here we've got some of the the string parts up here and you can see the three short values that you're familiar with in and it goes over to here. The long note with a fermata. So you can see it's not a very economical use of this space here. All right, now, we're going to examine this Symphony. But first, just a bit of music theory. We all know about the short, short, short, long rhythmic motif, that predominates here. But there's something else, a diminished triad. Now in music of course, we have major triads and we have minor triads. There's also a third kind of a triad, called a diminished triad. It's made up of only minor thirds. So let's play a major triad. [SOUND] There's a major triad, now I'm just going to lower the middle note there. [SOUND] That makes a minor. Triad but supposing I lower both middle and top note? [SOUND] Well, I get that. And that's a diminished tri, triad. I can e, add one more minor third up there on top, I get a diminished seventh. It's a tension building chord. And we can take this when it comes in rising sequence, it's full of tension. Okay, talk now probably oh, I don't know, five, six, seven minutes about this, about this particular symphony. And let me get my glasses on to do so. So you know the beginning. We start this way. I'm working off of what's called just a piano score of the full score. Piano, two hand version of the full score. [MUSIC] We would expect it to go. [MUSIC] So it's an odd beginning. [MUSIC] Sort of that punch in the nose of that theme, but it never gets resolved. He moves away from it. [MUSIC] We have a pause there and then it starts out again. [MUSIC] And then we have the descent. [MUSIC] Building, coming down, just on the diminished chord again, diminished sound. Then eventually he works that through, builds up a little climax. [MUSIC] This is transition. [MUSIC] Top of that transition line. [MUSIC] Then this chord, major chord. And then this chord, which is another presentation of our. [MUSIC] Diminish chord until we reach. [MUSIC] Pause, and then we have our short, short, short, long. [MUSIC] But then, he extends it by two notes. [MUSIC] And he uses that as a modulation into the second theme. [MUSIC] Now the second theme, as is usually the case, is lyrical, sort of sweet, tender sounding. [MUSIC] But did you ever notice, and it takes a good conductor to make this come out, what the basses are doing underneath? [MUSIC] So we have a little counterpoint, it's like the Jaws theme, every time you think it's safe to come out of the water, lurking underneath. [MUSIC] Is that motif. [MUSIC] After the second theme he builds up through rising melodic sequence. [MUSIC] Continues to build off of that up until the point way up here. [MUSIC] And then finally, when he resolves that. [MUSIC] Concluding theme. [MUSIC] And that takes us to the end of trhe exposition. The development begins in a odd way, but developments often do. Begins this fashion. [MUSIC] A very dissonant interval is encountered right there. But it only gives us that at the beginning of the development section. It's like holding up a sign saying disruption is coming our way. We are in a new section. And he works through this section. [MUSIC] And so on and then takes us through a series of modulations modulating to there and then again. [MUSIC] To a new key here. So we're moving along, modulating, and the he starts to build up this sound again. [MUSIC] Well, that was a very strange moment. Strange on a, on a number of counts. Here we are right in the epicenter of the entire movement. Right in the dead middle of the development section, and we're sitting here playing this kind of chord. Almost as if we've been electrocuted by the, the rhythmic energy of this piece. But at the same time, it's a compression of this energy. We're doing to just one note, instead of short, short long. Maybe it's just short, short, short, everything is short. And of course the tension is cause here by, we've got this chord, diminished cord and then diminished chord. This is a radically different sound. Just 15 or so years earlier, we would have heard from Mozart this sort of thing. [MUSIC] A. [MUSIC] That's what the audience expected and instead of that they get this sort of sound. [MUSIC] They must have thought Beethoven was nuts at that particular, at that particular moment. Well, that's the epicenter of the movement. Then he begins to back off of it. The music becomes quieter becomes more consonant. [MUSIC] Just moving his motive through different keys. [MUSIC] And now he reduces that transition motive. [MUSIC] Richard took four and sometimes six pitches, down to just two. One, two, one, two, one, two, one. [MUSIC] Now just down to one, because it's just at the octave. Here's a new one, but one, one, one. So he's reduced the whole thing really down to just one sound. At this point the orchestra wants to get back in. [MUSIC] But that one note won't let it back into it. It keeps repeating again and again and again. Finally. [MUSIC] The orchestra more or less breaks down the door. [MUSIC] To get back in. And it does get back in with the main theme. [MUSIC] Now something very strange happens. [MUSIC] Right in the middle of all this tension with this. [MUSIC] Lovely oboe solo. An oboe cadenza, what's he doing? I think what he's doing here is trying to release all of this tension that has been built up in the, in the development section. When I was a kid, my mother to cook on something called a pressure cooker. I don't know if they have anymore, but you'd put all this meat in there and you'd turn up the heat, and there'd be this valve up on top. And if you didn't loosen that valve, that thing would blow up. And one time it did blow up, it blew up all over my mother's kitchen ceiling. Because that release valve wasn't turned on. So this is a, a sort of musical moment. [MUSIC] Where Beethoven is just letting the tension out and then he will pick it up. [MUSIC] [NOISE] With a chord below it, but again it's that tension filled diminished chord underneath. Well, that's a bit of these first movements, and of the ideas of the first movement here of the fifth symphony, it's filled with intensity. It's filled with anxiety, because of the diminished triad, because of the, of the insistent [SOUND] rhythmic motor and also because of compression. This is actually, although it's very intense, this is actually a very short movement by Beethoven's standards. This combination of compression, intensity, and insistence of the rhythmic motive that makes this movement exceptional. The second movement begins in a diametrically opposed way, with a long, lyrical, lovely theme in the strings. But soon the brasses enter with a contrasting heroic theme. And again, we hear here that short, short, short, long idea. [MUSIC] Short, short, short long. [MUSIC] All played by the brasses which once more makes it sound very heroic. Now, Beethoven does something use, unusual here with regard to the third and fourth movements. He links the third movement to the fourth movement by means of I, a gigantic crescendo. A Beethovenian swell as it's called, though maybe we should call it a Beethovenian tsunami. It's entirely made up of the same pitches, and these pitches continue to turn, or continue to twist. They circle around. [MUSIC] And then gradually the pitches raise a little bit as the volume raises until we have this gigantic swell, this great wave of sound come over top of us. [MUSIC] Brasses are in at the top of the line. With the triadic theme. [MUSIC] And on it goes. Eventually, because this movement, indeed this symphony, has taken several surprising turns, at the end Beethoven must prove that he's not surprising us once again. Not deviating off course. Not crying musical wolf. So he reassures us with, with what is arguably most over the top final cadence ever written in the history of music. [MUSIC] [APPLAUSE] Well, again, Beethoven the Great Communicator. We always know where we stand with Beethoven, what his message is. And here the message is simple, the end, the end, the end, the end, the end. Let's review what's special now about Beethoven's Symphony Number Five. First of all, it doesn't have a nickname oddly enough. We've got the Eroica as number three, we've got the Pastoral as number six. We have this strange beginning [SOUND] as, as I say here, something of a sucker punch, a surprise punch in the nose at the beginning. There's the emphasis a constant emphasis on the short, short, short long rhythmic motive, and almost all the material is derived from that single motive or single musical cell. There's the importance of the diminished chord, that tension filled diminished chord, particularly in the first movement. And there's the linking of the third and fourth movements by means of a Beethovenian swell. That's the first time that had ever. Never been done in music. There is the bulking up of the orchestra for the finale of this symphony and the emphasizing of sound for the sake of sound, sound for the sake of sound. As we'll see here in our next session.
