The year 1812 marked the end of Napoleon's glory and the beginning of his downfall. After a dazzling invasion, he defeated the Russians and reached Moscow, but the victory was short-lived. He could not cope with the military technique of "scorched earth". After setting fire to Moscow, the Russians sat back and waited (that's putting it mildly) for Napoleon to retreat. During the retreat, the powerful Napoleonic army was annihilated at Vilna.
Beethoven meets Goethe
While the beginning of the end was brewing for his once idol, Beethoven traveled to Teplice to meet another model, the revered and great poet Goethe. He was invited. It was not an invasion. But the results were, in turn, also disastrous. Beethoven met, in his opinion, an aging courtier who was neither a fellow democrat nor even less an agitator, perhaps a dilettante. The poet, for his part, while impressed by Beethoven's personality, intensely disliked his coarse manners. It was all a great disappointment. However, it didn't stop the coarse-mannered maestro from sketching the first sketches of Symphony No. 8, just there, in Teplice.
Symphony No. 8, in F major, Op. 93
He completed it in Linz in the autumn of the same year. It was written "simultaneously" with Symphony No. 7, that is, when he started to write it he had already begun the Seventh, which was left for later. It seems that the Eighth functioned as an escape valve for the compositional problems presented by the Seventh. Scholars agree that the writing of the Eighth Symphony was for the maestro a task without difficulties, almost a divertimento, which would have been reflected in a pristine way in the general character of the work.
A " light-hearted" work
Indeed, compared to the Third, the Fifth, and certainly the Seventh, Symphony No. 8 has been called "benign," or "harmless," by acerbic critics. Others have jokingly described it as "Haydn's last symphony".
The truth is that Beethoven adopted this time a jovial, carefree scheme. He dispensed with the slow tempo and instead wrote two scherzos, the first of them a parody of the musical chronometer, of recent appearance, the device we know today as a metronome. And if it is a question of making comparisons, it is fair to say that not since Haydn's time had a more amusing resolution to a symphony been written than that offered by the allegro vivace with which the work ends.
The end
But as we can't always have rain on everyone's parade, a critical article of 1827 pointed out that the work depended "entirely on the final movement, destined to get applause at any cost; the rest is eccentric without entertaining, and laborious without any results."
Bad timing for such bitter criticism: the maestro died that same year.
Premiere
The work, without a dedication, and less than half an hour long, had its premiere on February 27, 1814, at the Redoutensaal, in Vienna, with Beethoven conducting. Audience impressions were not very enthusiastic either: the program included the Seventh as a poster work.
Sir George Grove, founder of the dictionary that to this day bears his name, recounted:
'It was not well received. Much more applauded was the Seventh, which puzzled Beethoven. But he took it philosophically: "That's because it's so much better than the other one," he observed.
Movements:
00:00 Allegro vivace e con brio
10:50 Allegretto scherzando
15:02 Tempo di menuetto
20:14 Allegro vivace
Daniel Barenboim conducts the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – a conductor's creation, made up of Palestinian, Arab, and Israeli musicians – during the 2012 BBC Proms.
