Light On Dark Water

The 5^th is to classical music as the Mona Lisa is to painting: a work so often seen, popularized, parodied, used in advertising, and in general made to serve as a representative or stereotype of its entire art form that it’s difficult to see it for itself anymore. It helps, then, in such a case not to look at it for a while, perhaps for a few decades. I didn’t set out to do that with the 5^th, but I really can’t remember when I had last heard it before this weekend. I’m pretty certain that it must have been at least twenty years, and possibly thirty or more.

What I find, coming back to it with fresh ears and an open mind, is pure musical gold. This may well prove, in the end, my favorite of the symphonies, despite my earlier statements that the 4^th and 7^th were the ones I remember liking best. It seemed to me, as I listened to this one a little while ago, that there is no human emotion which is not expressed here. I don’t feel able at the moment to sort that out any further, to describe what seems to be the shape and meaning of those emotions. But to give one example: there is a beautiful moment in the second movement where a loud and dissonant chord which lands in the mind as a sudden outburst of dismay or fear produces a sort of mental pivot by becoming the opening of a joyful song. This, I think is the sort of thing that makes people feel a love for the man behind the music; anyone who can put this much of life into music seems like someone we want to know, or at least someone for whom we have a respect that goes beyond admiration for his art.

I’m sometimes a bit impatient with Beethoven’s repeated climaxes and near-endings, but here they seem to work perfectly. I don’t know if it’s technically a coda or what, but near the end of the last movement there’s a point where it seems that the symphony is about to end, and you think no, not yet, that’s not good enough. Then it comes back with another minute or two of intensity, ending with a sequence of—I’m sorry, I don’t have the technical vocabulary for this—what I can only call power chords that really do end it with the assurance and emphasis that everything previous seems to have led us to expect. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but to illustrate how carried away I was: I applauded at the end, though I was sitting in a room alone.

The recording I listened to was this one, Christoph von Dohnányi with the Cleveland Orchestra. I’ve been getting this set from eMusic over a period of several months with the idea that it should be a good choice for both convenience and quality, but for some reason I have not, so far, been very excited about it. It seems vaguely mechanical somehow. That’s probably just me; everyone who’s reviewed it at Amazon.com says it’s great.

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