No. 2071 Subscription (Program C)

This 2026/27 season of the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo (hereafter NHKSO) has invited its audience on a journey through all of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)’s nine symphonies. This cycle is to mark the 200th anniversary of the German composer’s death and the 100-year milestone of the NHKSO since its 1926 foundation. In 1927, the newborn orchestra commemorated the 100th anniversary of Beethoven’s death performing seven of his symphonies and three of his piano concertos. The NHKSO has since deepened its relationship with his great musical legacy, particularly through the full cycles of his symphonies in 1936–37 and in 1970.
Compared to Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) who both left us a significant number of symphonies, Beethoven composed only a handful. Each of his nine symphonies are nevertheless monumental in their own way and represent watershed moments, not only in his career but also in music history. For many composers after Beethoven, writing the “first” symphony was a synonym with confronting a nemesis, not to mention Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) who spent over twenty years to complete his No. 1.
Beethoven wrote the Symphony No. 1 mostly in 1799 at age 29, after he had moved to Vienna in 1792 from his hometown Bonn. During these first seven years in Vienna—the city had mourned Mozart’s death since 1791—, Beethoven first made his name as a virtuoso pianist-composer and a peerless keyboard-improviser, while completing his composition studies under the city’s musical figures including Haydn. Meanwhile, the Viennese audience and music-loving aristocrats awaited Beethoven’s symphonies more and more eagerly to hold him in high regard as a thoroughly established composer. In other words, his Symphony No. 1 is not a student work from his youth but, instead, an ambitious one unveiled to the Viennese music scene only after he was fully prepared.
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 is molded into a conventional fast-slow-minuet-fast structure following Haydn and Mozart. However, it occasionally brings a touch of unexpectedness and inventiveness offering a glimpse of how eager Beethoven was to impress the Viennese. The most surprising thing is how the symphony opens, as the slow introduction doesn’t begin in C major, the home key, but with a dissonant chord (a dominant seventh of F major). On top of that, the establishment of C major is postponed until the main vivacious sonata section of the first movement starts. Full of contrasts and at a fast tempo, unexpectedly, the third minuet movement gives the impression of a scherzo. This foretells Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 (1802), where he will replace the traditional courtly minuet movement with a lively scherzo for the first time in his symphonies. The orchestration also seemed to be unusual to the composer’s contemporaries. Indeed, a newspaper review following the 1800 premiere pointed out that the symphony sounded more like a wind ensemble than an orchestra owing to its heavy wind scoring.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Friend of liberty, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) saw Napoleon Bonaparte as the embodiment of the French Revolution’s ideal. He originally composed Symphony No. 3 in honor of the First Consul of France. After the completion in 1804, however, the German composer was disappointed at the news of Napoleon declaring himself emperor, and famously erased the title “Bonaparte” as well as the dedication on the manuscript’s title-page. The symphony was eventually published under the title “Sinfonia Eroica (Heroic Symphony), Composed to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man.” With regard to who is “a Great Man,” experts have mentioned various possibilities including Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia (1772–1806) who fought in the French Revolutionary Wars.
This colossal, unconventional work was a big step for Beethoven trying to break from the traditional Classical style established and developed by Haydn, Mozart and himself. The first movement in E-flat major is an extended sonata with an exceptionally long development. The fleeting introduction lets the whole orchestra resound only twice the tonic chord of E-flat major. Immediately after that, the cellos sing the first theme, a simple broken chord, which will be elaborately developed through the entire movement. We then hear, in the place of a mellifluous movement, a grave funeral march in C minor.
Beethoven chose for the third movement a lively scherzo instead of a graceful minuet as he had already done in his Symphony No. 2. The trio (central) section with three horns evoking a hunting scene is a highlight. The truly heroic last movement is also unconventional as it is not a rondo but a set of variations on a theme. The theme given by the pizzicato low strings had been used previously in Beethoven’s Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (The Creatures of Prometheus)(1801), a ballet about the heroic Greek god who stole the fire from Zeus to give it to mankind, as well as in his Variationen und Fuge für Klavier (Variations and Fugue for Piano) op. 35 (1802) nicknamed Eroica-Variationen (Eroica Variations).

[Kumiko Nishi]