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But the public liked the “companion piece” too, and the composer Louis Spohr, one of the violinists in the orchestra for the whole series of concerts, reports that the second movement was encored each time. To Beethoven’s annoyance, the critic of the Wiener Zeitung referred to the Seventh as having been composed “as a companion piece” to Wellington ’ s Victory. So great was the success that the entire program was repeated later in the month, again in January 1814, and once more in February. Between the Seventh Symphony and Wellington ’ s Victory, another gadget of Maelzel’s, a mechanical trumpeter, played marches written for the occasion by Dussek and Pleyel. The Panharmonicon was an invention of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, whose most enduring contribution to music was the first dependable metronome. In the battle of Hanau, that October, Napoleon thrashed the mostly Bavarian army that attempted to block his retreat toward the southwest.) (At Vitoria, in northeast Spain, an army of English, Spanish, and Portuguese troops under the Duke of Wellington defeated the French on June 21, 1813. What caused the excitement was not, however, Opus 92, the new symphony, but Opus 91, Wellington ’ s Victory, or The Battle of Vitoria, originally written for a mechanical instrument called the Panharmonicon but presented even at this, its first performance, in the version for orchestra. The concert at which the work had its premiere-it was a benefit for Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the recent Battle of Hanau-was probably the most wildly successful of his career. THE BACKSTORY The Seventh Symphony is Beethoven’s last word for quite a few years on the subject of the big style he had been cultivating since the early 1800s. INSTRUMENTATION: 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, with timpani and strings Ureli Corelli Hill conducted it at the Apollo Rooms, New York, at a concert of the Philharmonic Society WORLD PREMIERE: December 8, 1813, at the University of Vienna It is a work with a positive, optimistic, (…….BORN: Probably on Decem(his baptismal certificate is dated December 17, 1770). For one of the pieces, the Symphony nr.7 in A-major, that is an apt description. It is understandable that in the euphoria of that moment, the Austrian victory on the French, Beethoven’s works that were performed were considered victory music. The proceeds of the two concerts accrued to the widows and orphans of the fallen Austrian soldiers.
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It had been a terribly bloody battle with many victims on both sides. In the fall of that year the combined Austrian and Bavarian troops had beaten the French troops in the decisive battle at Hanau, ringing in a long expected beginning of the end of the Napoleontic wars. What a contrast! Iván Fischer On 8 and 12 December 1813, two charity concerts took place in Vienna during which Ludwig von Beethoven conducted some new orchestral works.
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It must have been quite an ‘ear opener’ to hear a symphony start with gentle wind chamber music supported by massive accents of the rest of the orchestra.
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This was the environment in which Beethoven developed his strikingly original ideas. The slow movement of Weber’s clarinet concerto for example sounds more operatic than instrumental in character. He created a completely new vocal style that influenced many other musicians. The most popular composer of the day was undoubtedly Rossini. His 5th symphony, composed a few years earlier had been published during the time when Beethoven worked on his masterpiece. Wilhelm Wilms followed the classical tradition of Haydn and Mozart with some innovative moments. What would it have been like to hear Beethoven’s seventh symphony at the first performance? How did listeners react to hearing the endless repetition of the first movement’s dotted rhythm? Would they have been shocked to hear the melody of the second movement which repeats the same note twelve times? How did they respond to the finale’s obsessive rhythmical drive which must have seemed like the rock music of the nineteenth century? It’s ‘exciting’ to hear this well known symphony together with contemporary works which may have been performed in the same year.