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Beethoven’s Fifth is at once the world’s most famous symphony and, with the Ninth, the blueprint for so many minor-to-major, darkness-to-light narratives of the Romantic era. The composer left no clue as to what the symphony was ‘about’. Yet, like the mighty ‘Eroica’ (No. 3), the Fifth combines a remorseless symphonic logic with an extramusical aura. Whatever the truth of Beethoven’s secretary Anton Schindler’s claim that the opening ‘motto’ represents ‘Fate knocking at the door’, the symphony does seem charged with an ethical and political dimension: the conquering of adversity through sheer willpower and, beyond that, an assertion in musical terms of the Enlightenment ideals of human progress and perfectability. For the Victorians the Fifth Symphony was morally edifying. Although today we are more likely to find it elementally thrilling, they may have had a point.

Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis with his orchestra MusicAeterna