Series Concert II: Beethoven's 5th–Up Close
September 13, 2026
Mieczysław Weinberg, born Mojsze Wajnberg in Warsaw in 1919, lost most of his family in the Holocaust. In 1939, upon hearing that the Germans were on the way, he moved to the Soviet Union. Having survived the war, he found some success there and developed a lasting friendship with Dmitri Shostakovich. Weinberg’s music bears a surface resemblance to that of Shostakovich, but it departs quickly from his cool ironies, relying instead on the sounds and sources of Yiddish music. He was also heavily threatened by the Soviet campaign against art which did not satisfy the state’s ideological objectives, and he was imprisoned in 1948 for “Jewish bourgeois nationalism”. The intervention of Shostakovich eventually helped remove him from prison, and the death of Stalin in 1953 eased the situation further. His greatest public success came in the 1960s, crowned by his 1969 theme music for the Soviet version of Winnie-the-Pooh.
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Samuel Barber was born in 1910 in Pennsylvania and entered the Curtis Institute of Music at age 14. His cello Sonata (1933) is an early work, written for his fellow student Orlando Cole, who went on to teach at Curtis and in the Philadelphia area until he died at 101. (Many CCMF cellists would have worked with him at one point or another.) Barber’s career was hugely influential, especially in his forthright and passionate advocacy of neo-romantic tonal writing. A symphonic transcription of his Adagio for Strings, from the second movement of his string quartet, brought him exposure which established his position as one of the premier American composers of the 20th century.
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The fifth symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven is famous beyond any reasonable measurement. Its opening motive is universally associated with greatness, power, will, fate, etc., and it is ‘serious’ enough to be associated with seriousness itself. It’s a bit odd, though, that the only reliable story of its motivic origin would be more suitable for the coeval ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: his student Carl Czerny wrote that “the little pattern of notes had come to him from a yellow-hammer’s song, heard as he walked in the Prater park in Vienna.” It does sound more like fate than it sounds like a little bird, but the idea of ‘fate knocking at the door’ seems to have come from hagiography rather than reality.
In any case, ’greatness’ has suited the work well. Moreover, popular revolutionary ideas were never so far from Beethoven’s early and middle works, so there’s no harm in keeping big ideas in mind. The fifth symphony became most overtly political in the twentieth century. The BBC used its opening motif to open special broadcasts, using its Morse encoding (V = short short short long) its roman numeral representation (V = 5th symphony) as a call to Victory over fascism. Perhaps the most famous political presentation of the symphony came from Arturo Toscanini: he performed the first movement to mark the death of Mussolini in 1943 and said that he would perform the rest when Germany had been defeated, which he duly did in 1945.
–Tim Summers
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Samuel Barber was born in 1910 in Pennsylvania and entered the Curtis Institute of Music at age 14. His cello Sonata (1933) is an early work, written for his fellow student Orlando Cole, who went on to teach at Curtis and in the Philadelphia area until he died at 101. (Many CCMF cellists would have worked with him at one point or another.) Barber’s career was hugely influential, especially in his forthright and passionate advocacy of neo-romantic tonal writing. A symphonic transcription of his Adagio for Strings, from the second movement of his string quartet, brought him exposure which established his position as one of the premier American composers of the 20th century.
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The fifth symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven is famous beyond any reasonable measurement. Its opening motive is universally associated with greatness, power, will, fate, etc., and it is ‘serious’ enough to be associated with seriousness itself. It’s a bit odd, though, that the only reliable story of its motivic origin would be more suitable for the coeval ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: his student Carl Czerny wrote that “the little pattern of notes had come to him from a yellow-hammer’s song, heard as he walked in the Prater park in Vienna.” It does sound more like fate than it sounds like a little bird, but the idea of ‘fate knocking at the door’ seems to have come from hagiography rather than reality.
In any case, ’greatness’ has suited the work well. Moreover, popular revolutionary ideas were never so far from Beethoven’s early and middle works, so there’s no harm in keeping big ideas in mind. The fifth symphony became most overtly political in the twentieth century. The BBC used its opening motif to open special broadcasts, using its Morse encoding (V = short short short long) its roman numeral representation (V = 5th symphony) as a call to Victory over fascism. Perhaps the most famous political presentation of the symphony came from Arturo Toscanini: he performed the first movement to mark the death of Mussolini in 1943 and said that he would perform the rest when Germany had been defeated, which he duly did in 1945.
–Tim Summers