Classical Music — Explanation and Commentary: The Fifth Symphony

We continue the publication of these guiding commentaries, broadcast from the Radio Orient station at half past seven every Wednesday evening:

It is truly astonishing that Beethoven—when people supposed him already upon one of the summits of art—should have been able to leap to a higher one, until he reached the summit we shall attempt to climb tonight in the Fifth Symphony. For after the Third Symphony, or the Heroic Symphony, which connoisseurs thought the highest that the art of music, and art altogether, could attain, Beethoven came with the Fourth Symphony, and it was a leap higher; and then came after it the great bound in the Fifth Symphony, the most famous thing in all music, the highest figure of genius, which Beethoven set down in a gem he presented to the generations—a golden, alluring ladder bearing humanity from height to height, as far as God wills, unto God.

Beethoven thought long, and meditated long, and tried many methods, before he composed this symphony, in awe of the gravity of venturing upon so mighty an event. At last the design was completed in that boundless mind, and he rapped with his knuckles upon a table before him—and behold, we hear Fate knocking at the door as the fingers of visitors knock. Thus opens the symphony that carries us into Beethoven's world, that independent, ideal world, rich in all truth, all goodness, and all beauty; and we, still like one between waking and sleep, hear that rapping on the door, now fading, now rising, and it bears us with it in its rising and in its falling, from world to world and from heaven to heaven, in a grandeur that belongs to Beethoven alone, and in a bold harmony that "becomes" none but Beethoven—as though every obscure thought or deep emotion, every dim feeling or strange dream, everything that can pass through a man's mind or his heart or his imagination like a fleeting phantom, were a thing plain and clear in Beethoven's mind, which he can shape and express as he pleases, and with which he can adorn his world at his own whim; so that we grasp it in his music as something of our own more than we grasp it in our own souls, and we grasp our souls in him more than we grasp them in life. We can only say: Praise be to Him who made from among men a teacher for men, an ideal of the best that can be in their souls—a human being in whose extraordinary powers is gathered in order all the knowledge and truth that can revolve in a human mind, all the love and beauty that can stir in a human heart, all the perfection and hope that can move in a human soul, and all that is in nature which can carry mankind a new step toward perfection.

This piece which we hear now, the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, begins with beats like the knocking on the door at the coming of a strange guest; they are repeated twice in succession, and our hearts throb; then they continue at broken intervals, forming the strangest and simplest melody of this knock. If we follow with our listening these knocks upon the door, or this melody, and picture a man in a solitary room at midnight, waking in terror at the sound of these knocks and knowing that they are the knocks of Fate, or of the angel of death; trying not to hear them, while they increase; swiftly reviewing the history of his world and the worlds of goodness that might save him from the punishment of that knocker; listening for a moment—and behold, the sound goes on; trying to shut his ears against it, but the knocker is still at the door, sounding the same knocks with a stubborn, cold insistence, at intervals that draw near and draw apart, while his heart throbs as though it were beating to the fall of those knocks. The tormented man flees from world to world and cannot escape the sound; he tries to fight it with louder sounds, as though heartening himself, but the knocking on the door rises with the rising of the sounds! If we picture that, and picture that these worlds through which he roams in flight from that terrifying knocker are all the worlds of beauty and goodness and truth to which a man such as I—a believer who fears God—may take refuge: if we can do all that, then tonight we are at a heavenly feast which Beethoven has offered us in this first movement that we hear of the Fifth Symphony.