At the premiere of Beethoven’s 8th Symphony, the audience reaction was disappointing compared to the premiere of the previous symphony.
Beethoven was philosophical about it: “That’s because it’s so much better than the other,” he told Carl Czerny.
There is much to love in Beethoven’s witty and playful 8th Symphony, a look back or an homage to the era of Haydn and Mozart. It is the shortest of all of Beethoven’s symphonies, and it’s only the Beethoven symphony since No. 1 to have a Minuet movement.
#Beethoven250 Day 255
Symphony No. 8 in F Major (Opus 93), 1812
Daniel Barenboim with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at the 2012 Proms.
The joyful opening of the Symphony No. 8 brings us back to the realm of the peasant dances of the 6th and 7th Symphonies, this time in a more neo-classical spirit. But if there’s a party going on, Beethoven also takes us into its more disturbing peripheries.
The 8th Symphony doesn’t have a slow movement. Instead, the 2nd movement is labeled “Allegretto scherzando.” It begins by combining a metronomic beat with a charming little tune that play back and forth with each other until the startling and endearing coda.
Beethoven doesn’t quite call the 3rd movement of his 8th Symphony a “minuet,” but rather “Tempo di menuetto,” which is close enough. The entrancing cantabile horn, cello, and clarinet conversation of the Trio section seems almost like its own little slow movement.
Lewis Lockwood says that the Minuet of the 8th Symphony “is not so much an imitation of Haydn and Mozart as a modernistic reflection upon the masterly third movements that abound in their symphonies and string quartets.” (“Beethoven’s Symphonies,” p. 182)
The exuberant finale of the 8th symphony barrels through at a very fast pace, battling bizarre interruptions of harmonically foreign chords to go in strange and surprising directions.
Donald Francis Tovey sees Beethoven’s playfulness with harmony in this finale as a “great compression of thought … Great poets can overawe us into taking mixed metaphors seriously. No one laughs at Shakespeare for making Hamlet talk of ‘taking up arms against a sea of troubles,’ nor at the wrathful Milton for describing the clergy as ‘blind mouths.’”
“It is certain that there are in Beethoven’s music certain deliberate anomalies which remain incomprehensible if one does not attach a humorous connotation to them, the sense of which inevitably goes beyond its purely musical significance.” — Paul Dukas
After finishing his Symphony No. 8 in October 1812, Beethoven would not compose another symphony for over a decade.