Symphony No. 4 (Beethoven)
Although later composers including Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Schumann greatly admired the work it has not become as widely known among the music-loving public as the Eroica, the Fifth and other Beethoven symphonies.
According to George Grove, economic necessity obliged Beethoven to offer the Fifth (together with the Pastoral) jointly to Prince Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky.
[2] Other commentators suggest that the Fourth was essentially complete before Oppersdorff's commission,[5] or that the composer may not yet have felt ready to press on with "the radical and emotionally demanding Fifth",[1] or that the count's evident liking for the more Haydnesque world of the Second Symphony prompted another work in similar vein.
Leonard Bernstein described it as a "mysterious introduction which hovers around minor modes, tip-toeing its tenuous weight through ambiguous unrelated keys and so reluctant to settle down into its final B♭ major.
"[17] The development section takes the tonality towards the remote key of B major before returning to the tonic B♭, and the recapitulation and coda follow the conventional classical form.
[25] After some 340 bars of what Grove describes as a perpetuum mobile, Beethoven concludes the symphony with the Haydnesque device of playing the main theme at half speed, interrupted by pauses, before a final fortissimo flourish.
In 1809 Carl Maria von Weber, never an admirer of Beethoven, wrote: Other critics were less hostile, praising the composer's "richness of ideas, bold originality and fullness of power" though finding the Fourth and the works premiered alongside it "rough diamonds".
[29] When Beethoven's younger contemporary Hector Berlioz heard the symphony he wrote that the slow movement was the work of the Archangel Michael, and not that of a human.
In a study of the Fourth written in 2012 Mark Ferraguto quotes a 1994 description of the work as "a rich, verdant valley of yin expressiveness … poised between the two staggering yang peaks of the Third and the Fifth".
[35] According to the musicologist Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music: The symphony has been recorded, in the studio and in concert performances, more than a hundred times.
[37][39] Recordings from the stereo LP era of the mid-1950s to the 1970s include those conducted by Otto Klemperer (1957), Pierre Monteux (1959), Herbert von Karajan (1963) and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt (1966).
[37][38][40] The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the first recordings based on recent musicological ideas of authentic early-19th-century performance practice: Hermann Scherchen (1958) and René Leibowitz (1961) conducted sets of the symphonies attempting to follow Beethoven's metronome markings, which up to then had been widely regarded as impossibly fast.
Among conductors of such versions of the Fourth Symphony have been Christopher Hogwood (1986), Roger Norrington (1988), Frans Brüggen (1991) and John Eliot Gardiner (1994).
[38] In a survey of all available recordings in 2015 for BBC Radio 3 the top recommended version was in this category: the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, conducted by David Zinman.
