Klaus Mäkelä Ludwig van Beethoven

On 14 October 1670, the comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, written by Molière and with music composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, was first presented at the court of Louis XIV. The story revolves around a middle-class man, M. Jourdain, who dreams of becoming an aristocrat. His daughter’s suitor cannot live up to Jourdain’s high expectations, so passes himself off as the son of the Sultan of Turkey. At the end of the play, Jourdain is “ennobled” in a ridiculously formal (but false) ceremony, to the sound of Lully’s March for the Turkish Ceremony.

While his two previous symphonies are known as the Fate Symphony and the Pastorale, Beethoven’s seventh is simply known as Symphony No. 7. Beethoven composed it in 1811 and 1812, and he himself conducted its premiere performance in 1813. The concert, which was held to raise funds for soldiers wounded in the Battle of Hanau, was a great success, marked by enthusiasm over the progress in the Napoleonic wars that had riven Europe for over a decade. The 2nd movement was so popular that audiences demanded an encore, and Beethoven himself regarded the symphony as one of his best works.