Josef Danhauser, Liszt at the Piano (1840)

by Julia Grella O’Connell, D.M.A., Director of Education and Community Engagement

Tonight’s concert ushers in the end of The Beethoven Project, the Philharmonic’s multi-year exploration of the man and his music. This season we tackle Beethoven’s three late symphonies, beginning with the last of his middle “Heroic” period, Symphony No. 7. “Heroic Journeys” frames this beloved work with two later pieces, making tonight’s program a miniature sketch of music history from the revolutions of Beethoven to the innovations of today. 

Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers” was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra for the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's birth in 2020. It is thus a kind of musical metanarrative, an intimate conversation that engages the two composers both as musicians and as men. Simon was inspired by a Homeric quotation Beethoven copied into one of the notebooks he always carried: the copied text is from a stunning passage in The Iliad in which Achilles chases Hector three times around the walls of Troy before slaying him. Turning to face the Greek hero, Hector declares, “Fate now conquers: I am hers, and yet not she shall share in my renown; that life is left to every noble spirit.” As Simon explains, “Using the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, I have composed . . . the unpredictable ways of fate [with] jolting stabs . . . an agitated groove . . . [and] frenzied arpeggios . . . In the end, Beethoven [submitted] to fate. Fate now conquers.”

In making Beethoven’s Homeric transcription the genesis of his swirling sound-world, Simon compares the composer’s courage to that of the Trojan general and suggests that Hector’s prediction of future glory is mirrored by Beethoven. “Fate Now Conquers,” with its inexorable rhythm and soaring melodies, forges a link in the chain of musical remembrance and transformation from Beethoven to the present. 

After a brilliant career as a virtuoso pianist, Franz Liszt retired from the stage at 35 to devote himself to composition. Liszt had already written many dazzling showpieces highlighting his legendary technique, but once freed from the burden of performing he began to apply himself to larger works. While the First Piano Concerto reflects Liszt’s extraordinary technical skill, its fiendish demands are not empty display, but transcend “pianism” to open new directions for both the instrument and the form. 

The concerto begins with a rhythmic, fate-like theme, explored by the piano and orchestra in a dialogue by turns stormy and tender, with rapid-fire exchanges of rigorous restraint and rhapsodic emotion. The martial rhythm of the triangle in particular in the third and fourth movements lends an austere counterbalance to the dreamlike, quasi-improvisatory atmosphere spun by the piano, suggesting that freedom must always be limited by fate.

Beethoven was also preoccupied by the idea of fate. A decade before copying Homer’s words, in despair over his encroaching deafness, Beethoven wrote a letter to his brothers in which he mused, Hector-like, on his own fate: “If [death] comes before I have had the chance to develop all my artistic capacities, it will come too soon . . . yet even so – Come when thou wilt, I shall meet thee bravely.” He also challenged fate in his writings, declaring: “I will take fate by the throat; it shall not wholly overcome me.” His Symphony No. 7 is a musical manifesto, at once valiant and joyful, of freedom pushing against fate’s boundaries. 

The Seventh Symphony was premiered in December 1813 at a benefit concert for veterans of the Battle of Hanau, a critical Austro-Hungarian victory in the Napoleonic Wars. In the first movement, the oboe – an instrument Beethoven often foregrounded for its deeply expressive capacities – leads the orchestra from chaos and confusion into a clear, orderly, joyous dance. And in fact the entire symphony is dance-like, generated out of rhythms rather than melodies, with fate appearing in the stern tread of the second movement. This section’s somber motif invokes the text of the ancient litany “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis” (Holy Mary, pray for us), hinting at a sacred timelessness in the midst of the symphony’s bacchic celebrations. After this fateful gesture, Beethoven returns to his themes of motion, dynamism, and speed in the third and fourth movements, with the revels of the dance restrained only by his relentless rhythmic order. This sense of almost disturbing abandon corralled by form would reappear eleven years later in the Ninth Symphony, which the Philharmonic will play in our 70th Anniversary Concert in March 2026. 

Richard Wagner was a great admirer of the Seventh Symphony. In a touching reminiscence, Wagner’s son Siegfried described a visit from Franz Liszt a few weeks before his father’s death, during which Liszt played the fourth movement of the symphony on the piano and the young Siegfried observed as his father, hidden in the shadows, “danced to the music in the most skillful and graceful way.” 

Wagner called the Seventh Symphony “the Apotheosis of the Dance itself." And the German poet Friedrich Schiller, whose “Ode to Joy” Beethoven would set in the Ninth Symphony, called dance the perfect metaphor for an ideal society, in which “each seems only to be following his own inclination, yet never gets in the way of anybody else . . . [incorporating both] one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.” In the same notebook in which he sketched out this most dancelike of symphonies, Beethoven made notes for another in D minor – the key of the Ninth – and jotted down the opening lines of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”: “Freude, schöner Gotterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium” – Joy, beautiful spark of the Gods, daughter of Elysium. In the Seventh Symphony, we hear all of Beethoven’s Hector-like courage in the face of fate and all of his joy in the ultimate freedom of the human spirit. As we listen this season to the culmination of his symphonic output, let us partake of both.