Beethoven Symphony 5 Analysis

In this essay, I will discuss how Beethoven was a revolutionary composer, with a main focus on his Symphony No 5. Ludwig van Beethoven was a German pianist and composer who is now considered to be one of the greatest composers in history. He was the crucial transitional figure connecting the Classical and Romantic eras of Western music. The music that Beethoven composed was different to that of previous composers the works of his early period brought the Classical form to its highest expressive level, expanding in formal, structural, and harmonic terms the musical idiom developed by predecessors such as Mozart and Haydn. Beethoven revealed in a heart-wrenching 1801 letter to his friend Franz Wegeler, "I must confess that I lead a miserable

The opening bars of the symphony present the ‘fate motif’ which symbolises ‘fate knocking at your door’; showing Beethovens attitude to his encroaching deafness. He describes his melancholy and anger towards the situation in the statement ‘I would have ended my life’. This is overcome however in a later letter which contained the statement ‘I will seize fate by the throat, it shall certainly not overcome me’. When he wrote his fifth symphony, he was almost completely deaf, so the idea that he is defying his own fate is represented by the completion of this symphony, and his later

The ‘Most important opera composer during the French revolution’ Étienne Méhul’s First Symphony (1808) is notable for its dissonant and violent mood, and has been compared to Beethoven’s Symphony No 5, written in the same year. All four movements of his First Symphony bear striking stylistic similarities to Beethoven’s Fifth. While It can be suggested that Méhul influenced Beethoven’s composition of his fifth symphony, as well as the revolutionary theme of his only opera, Fidelio. Symphony No 5 also appears to take some inspiration from one of Beethoven’s early teachers; Haydn’s anguished Sturm und Drang Symphonies, which are now viewed as the finest examples in a whole series of minor-key symphonies. These symphonies contain musical turbulence and are thought to signify a romantic crisis; similar to the crisis of hearing loss that Beethoven