IN THE LIST OF COMPOSITIONS OFFERED BY BEETHOVEN TO HIS PUBLISHER THE FIRST SYMPHONY FIGURES AT THE PRICE OF £10.
In hearing this Symphony, we can never forget that it is the first of that mighty and immortal series which seem destined to remain the greatest monuments of music, as Raffaelle’s best pictures are still the monuments of the highest point reached by the art of painting, notwithstanding all that has been done since.
Schumann has somewhere made the just remark that the early works of great men are to be regarded in quite a different light from those of writers who never had a future. In Beethoven’s case this is most true and interesting, and especially so with regard to the First Symphony. Had he died immediately after completing it, it would have occupied a very different position from what it now does. It would have been judged and loved on its merits; but we should never have guessed of what grander beauties and glories it was destined to be the harbinger, or have known the pregnant significance of its Minuet.
The autograph of the Symphony is lost, and no evidence is known to exist by which the date of its completion can be determined. Probably it is only mislaid, and some day will be revealed with that of Schubert’s Gastein Symphony, Beethoven’s own Eroica, and other such treasures.
Meantime sketches for the Finale are found among the exercises which Beethoven wrote while studying counterpoint under Albrechtsberger in the spring of 1795. One of these is quoted by Nottebohm, in his edition of Beethoven’s studies, as occurring, with sketches for ‘ Adelaide,’ amongst the fugues alla decima and duodecima; and they probably show how the impatient student relieved his mind when the counterpoint became too tiresome for him.
It was five years later before the Symphony came to a hearing; since it was first performed in public in 1800, on the 2nd April, at a concert given by its author in Vienna.
It is not only the first Symphony which he performed or published, but apparently the first which he completed. Its date brings home to us in an unmistakable manner the deliberate progress of Beethoven’s creations. In 1800 he was thirty years old, and it is startling to recollect that at that age (in 1786) Mozart had written the whole of his Symphonies save the three masterpieces; and that though Schubert was but thirty-one when he died, he left a mass of compositions, including certainly nine, and probably ten Symphonies behind him.
The work is scored for the usual orchestra of Haydn and Mozart, with clarinets in addition, which they very rarely employed in their Symphonies, but the use of which Beethoven probably learned from Mozart’s operas. The ease with which he handles the orchestra in this his first large work is somewhat remarkable.
