The program also included the Fourth Piano Concerto, with Beethoven as soloist, parts of the Mass in C, a concert aria and the Choral Fantasy, which was composed for the occasion to end the evening. The orchestra was under-rehearsed, the hall was cold, and the Choral Fantasy fell apart and had to be restarted. The audience struggled to take it all in. Yet the Fifth Symphony, with its four-note opening motif, soon became one of the most famous works in Western music.
Beethoven organized the concert himself, as a benefit to earn money, in a theatre he had hired for the night. It fell during a busy season, and many of the best musicians were engaged elsewhere. He had quarrelled with members of the orchestra, who refused to rehearse with him in the room, and the composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt, who sat in a box with Prince Lobkowitz, wrote that they had endured the bitter cold from 6:30 until 10:30.
The Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, was played first, and the Fifth came in the second half. By the time the Choral Fantasy began, the players were tired, and a missed repeat led to such confusion that Beethoven stopped the performance and started again. Reichardt noted that one can have too much of a good thing.
The Fifth's reputation grew quickly after its publication. In 1810 the writer E. T. A. Hoffmann published an enthusiastic review, calling it one of the most important works of the age. During the Second World War its opening rhythm, short-short-short-long, matched the Morse code for the letter V, and the BBC used it as a signal for victory.
Key people: Ludwig van Beethoven