TIC Senior Contributors
Please enjoy this symposium on the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, with contributions from our distinguished panel, including composer Michael Kurek and Principal Trumpet of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Balio. Clicking on the CD cover art next to each symphony will guide you to a listening recommendation on Spotify; at the bottom of the essay is a link to the complete playlist of these recordings (Spotify subscription required).
First Symphony in C major, Op. 21 (premiered 1800) — by Stephen Klugewicz, Editor of The Imaginative Conservative
Beethoven did not embark on writing a symphony until he was 29 years old, when he was still known primarily as a great piano virtuoso who also composed. Though he would achieve immortality in this genre, to contemporary audiences the First would not have sounded like a radical break with the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, in whose shadow Beethoven was clearly working. Indeed, the opening of the second movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony is nearly identical to the slow movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor. Hector Berlioz said of the First Symphony: “This is not Beethoven. We are about to meet him.”
Yes, the First Symphony runs a modest, classical length—about 25 minutes—and contains the typical four movements of the classical symphony, in the prescribed formula. Set in the key of C major, it is bright, musical, and generally untroubled. Yet there are those Beethovenian touches everywhere: At the very opening of the piece, for example, Beethoven teases his audience by having an uncertain, quiet exchange among the woodwinds, with plucked strings, as the players seem to cast about for the correct key of the piece. In the third-movement Minuet—which Berlioz called “the only really novel piece in this work”—Beethoven, that unkempt upstart from small-town Bonn, seems to be poking fun at the proper,  » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/03/mighty-nine-reflections-beethoven-250-symphonies.html