Classical Hour
Eva Ollikainen Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) sketched his Symphony No. 5 in 1804 and composed it alongside his Sixth Symphony. Both works premiered on the same evening in Vienna, just before Christmas in 1808—a bitterly cold night featuring both the summer-like Pastoral Symphony and the dramatic Fate Symphony.

Two years later, the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann hailed Beethoven’s Fifth as a milestone in music history, a status it has retained ever since. “Beethoven’s music evokes terror, fear, reverence, and pain, awakening the infinite longing that is the essence of Romanticism.”