Programme Guide

The concert offers an exciting journey from Beethoven’s first symphonic work to his testament to the genre. Significantly, the First Symphony was first performed in 1800, exactly at the beginning of the new century and is, also programmatically, in C major, a key without accidentals. However, Beethoven only finds his way to this after a series of harmonic surprises in a slow introduction which is unconventional in every way. You can already admire in the work of the 30-year-old composer the consummate command of orchestration and the art of building a complex motivic system from simple blocks. Almost a quarter of a century later, Beethoven completed his last symphony. The finale is a revolutionary act in the history of the genre, not only through the use of voices, but also in the recurrence of themes from all previous movements. And the number nine was subsequently to become the magical barrier for the successive symphonists Bruckner, Dvořák and Mahler.