ABOUT THE MUSIC

friend, the impresario Johann Mälzel had assembled an all-star orchestra. The virtuoso violinist Schuppanzigh was the leader, Dragonetti (the father of modern bass technique) led the basses, and the composers Spohr, Meyerbeer and Romberg sat in the strings, as did the guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani (on cello). Johann Nepomuk Hummel was on timpani, and just offstage, cuing the special effects in Beethoven’s other contribution to the evening, the so-called “Battle-Symphony”, was living legend Antonio Salieri. But even a super-group of this calibre couldn’t cope with the Seventh Symphony. The future music publisher Franz Glöggl was at rehearsals, and witnessed the problems. Music that couldn’t be played, protested the violinists, shouldn’t be written.

Contrary to expectations, Beethoven kept his cool. Anticipating the words of a thousand amateur orchestra conductors, he “begged the gentlemen to take their parts home with them” to practise. They did – and the performance was one of the supreme triumphs of Beethoven’s career. The Allegretto was even encored, and a delighted Beethoven wrote to the Wiener Zeitung to thank his “honoured colleagues” for “their zeal in contributing to such a splendid result.”

There do seem to have been dissenters. According to Beethoven’s (admittedly partial) assistant and biographer Schindler, Weber’s reaction to the first movement was to declare Beethoven “ripe for the madhouse.” Schumann’s father-in-law

Friedrich Wieck concluded that Beethoven must have composed it while drunk. Even if these anecdotes are apocryphal, they must have had the authentic ring of contemporary opinion. Still, they did nothing to dampen the symphony’s enormous popularity – which prompted some early nineteenth-century conductors to insert its slow movement into less popular Beethoven symphonies in order to guarantee their success, and which made this chamber arrangement, published in London in the 1820s, a commercial proposition. The arranger – the brilliant young Italian violin virtuoso Nicolas Mori (1796-1839) - led practically every major orchestra in London during his lifetime. It’s safe to suppose that he had his finger on the pulse.

Clearly, the Seventh Symphony captured something that was in the air. It’s not just the rough-cut humour (after the massive accumulation of energy in the first movement’s introduction, the Vivace launches not with a breaking storm, but a bright country-dance tune). And it’s not just the way every movement is driven by colossal build-ups of dance rhythm (even the haunting second movement has the rhythm of a pavane). It’s the sheer, elemental energy with which Beethoven brings the whole thing off: exuberance is written into the Symphony’s very texture. Even the quieter, slower music is compelling – that melancholy Allegretto is both one of the simplest and most sophisticated movements Beethoven ever wrote. Perhaps that Leipzig audience had a point after all. Listen to the torrential gallop of the finale, and then consider, if you like, what may or may not have been Beethoven’s own words, related to Goethe by Beethoven’s sometime friend and correspondent Bettina Brentano: “Music is the spirit that inspires us to new creation; and I am the Bacchus, who presses out this glorious wine to intoxicate all mankind.”

Richard Bratby

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“Sophisticated… [depicts] a Shakespeare more credibly the author of supreme art than any I recall: a man intense in both life and art.”

- The Sydney Morning Herald

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“A luscious, visual feast and a remarkable achievement.”

- Limelight Magazine

BY DAMIEN RYAN

Released as a feature film in 2020 and making its world premiere on stage, this original play by Damien Ryan hurls us into history’s most influential masterpiece of love, copiousness, and copulation. A passionate howl on behalf of storytellers everywhere, Venus and Adonis is Sport for Jove at its best.