- Composer
- Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770–1827) - Work
- Symphony No. 4 in B♭ major, Op. 60
- Composed
- Summer 1806, Martonvásár, Hungary (Brunsvik estate)
- Movements
- Four
I. Adagio — Allegro vivace (b♭ minor → B♭ major)
II. Adagio (E♭ major)
III. Allegro vivace · Trio: Un poco meno allegro (B♭ major)
IV. Allegro ma non troppo (B♭ major) - Instrumentation
- flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings (1st and 2nd violins, violas, cellos, double basses)
- Premiere
- March 1807, Lobkowitz Palace, Vienna (private concert)
Conductor: Ludwig van Beethoven - Dedicatee
- Count Franz von Oppersdorff
- Duration
- ~33 minutes
Vienna, Lobkowitz Palace, March 1807. Count Oppersdorff has just made the long carriage trip down from Silesia, and tonight he gets to sit in a borrowed palace and watch the Fifth Symphony — the one he paid for — premiere under another patron’s name. The advance he wired Beethoven for the Fifth never came back, either.
The piece that did get its premiere on his stage that night is what we now politely list as Symphony No. 4. Call it what it actually was: a consolation prize stuffed into the box after the bait-and-switch.
The 500-florin trap — what Oppersdorff thought he was buying wasn’t the Fourth
Count Franz von Oppersdorff was a Silesian aristocrat with a serious music habit. He kept a private orchestra on his estate and treated patronage as a thing you did with both hands. In 1806, he wired Beethoven 500 florins for a new symphony. That was the Fourth. So far, so dignified.
The trouble was that one symphony was never going to be enough for Oppersdorff. He came back almost immediately and put a second deposit down on the next one — the Fifth. Beethoven cashed that check too. And then he turned around and effectively re-sold the Fifth to Counts Razumovsky and Lobkowitz, who were closer, richer, and Viennese.
The Beethoven scholar Lewis Lockwood files this away under “double dedication” in Beethoven: The Music and the Life (2003, p. 213), which is a lovely euphemism. The functional word is “double-sale.” Oppersdorff bought the Fifth and got handed the Fourth. He wrote two checks and walked away with one piece of paper.
If you’ve ever read a concert program note about Beethoven 4, you’ve seen this whole episode boiled down to a single neutral sentence: “dedicated to Count Oppersdorff.” That sentence is doing a lot of work. The dedication wasn’t a flourish of friendship. It was hush money in score form — a piece handed over to plug the hole left by another piece that the count had already paid for. From the count’s chair, this was somewhere on the spectrum between sharp business and outright fraud against a paying patron.
And the indignity didn’t stop with the missing Fifth. The same March 1807 Lobkowitz concert that premiered the Fourth also rolled out the Coriolan Overture and the Fourth Piano Concerto. Oppersdorff, who had paid into the next two slots on Beethoven’s symphony shelf, sat in the room and watched his replacement piece share an evening with two other works he hadn’t bought either. The Fifth’s slot, the one he had paid down on, was simply filled with a different piece while he was watching.
A summer in Martonvásár — the Fifth’s first bars were already on the page
In the summer of 1806 Beethoven was not in Vienna. He was on the Brunsvik estate at Martonvásár, in Hungary, and what he was mostly doing was being head-over-heels for the count’s sister, Josephine Brunsvik. He was, as he liked to do periodically, behind on his composing because he was busy losing his mind over a woman.
He was also, simultaneously, working on the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. The sketchbook known to Beethoven scholars as “Mendelssohn 15” already contains the famous four-note C-minor figure — short-short-short-LONG — before the Fourth Symphony existed at all. The standard concert-program shorthand of “the Fourth is between the Eroica and the Fifth, so naturally it was written between them” gets the chronology backwards in a way that matters: the Fifth was conceived first.
And then Beethoven stopped working on it. He set the Fifth aside and pulled the Fourth out of nowhere, in a hurry, in a Hungarian summer he wasn’t even supposed to be composing in. Whether that was a mood swing, a debt he had to clear with Oppersdorff, or whether the air in Martonvásár just ran a different color from the air in Vienna, nobody knows. What we know is exactly one thing: if Beethoven hadn’t paused the Fifth, the symphony we now call No. 4 would not exist.
The Fourth, in other words, is an interruption. It’s the piece that delayed the birth of the Fifth, and that interruption survived as a thirty-three-minute symphony of its own. Barry Cooper, in his 2008 Beethoven (chapter 13), is blunt about it: that famous four-note knock was already in the notebook, sitting there in pencil, before Beethoven shoved everything aside to write the piece Oppersdorff was waiting on.
38 bars of B♭ minor — an introduction designed to lose you
The first sound of the Fourth’s first movement is meant to disorient you. Beethoven engineered it that way on purpose.
Start with the key. The whole symphony is in B♭ major. The first thirty-eight bars are not. They sit in B♭ minor. In 1806, opening a symphony’s first movement with a slow introduction in the parallel minor was not a thing people did casually. Haydn and Mozart, working in the same decade, almost never tried it. Beethoven did.
Then there’s where the introduction goes, which is: nowhere stable. The harmony keeps slipping out from under you. You think you’ve found a tonal center, you lose it, you brush past something that almost sounds like the dominant of somewhere else, and then you’re back in B♭ minor, except now darker than before. The most basic question a listener asks of a piece in its opening seconds — what key am I in? — sits unanswered for thirty-eight full bars. That’s not a hesitation. That’s a strategy.
And then bar 39 happens. The whole symphony lurches up into B♭ major Allegro vivace like somebody threw the curtains open in a dark room. “From darkness into light” is the standard cliché here, and the cliché doesn’t quite catch it — it’s closer to being lost in a maze for a long time and then having someone grab your wrist and yank you out into a square full of sun.
Donald Tovey, writing in his Essays in Musical Analysis (1935), called these thirty-eight bars “perhaps the most mysterious passage in the symphonic literature.” Tovey did not throw that kind of sentence around carelessly. From Tovey, “perhaps the most mysterious” is roughly equivalent to a normal critic screaming. And the shadow of this introduction shows up again, seventeen years later, in the opening of the Ninth Symphony’s first movement — Beethoven going back to a trick of his own.
📜 악보 지점: 베토벤 교향곡 4번 1악장 마디 1~38 도입부 (IMSLP 링크 미등록)
For a conductor, those thirty-eight bars are the sorting hat of the whole performance. Some conductors leave the darkness as darkness and stab into bar 39 like they’re cutting it open. Others smooth the introduction into something elegant and decorative and call it tasteful. The same Fourth, in different hands, can sound like a lost half-minute followed by an explosion, or like a polite warm-up followed by a polite tune. Same notes, completely different piece.
Eight bars every major orchestra audition asks for
From the audience seat, the fourth movement is the lightest thing in the symphony. Sixteenth notes scampering, perpetuum mobile, fast and bright and grinning.
From the bassoon chair, it is the opposite of light. Around bar 184, just after the development closes and the recapitulation is about to walk back in the door, the first bassoon gets handed a solo. Eight bars. Almost everyone else in the orchestra steps out of the way. The bassoonist has to spin sixteenth notes alone, fast, exposed, in the middle of an otherwise frothy movement.
Fast bassoon solos are not, in themselves, that rare. What makes this one a particular kind of nightmare is two things working together. First, the bassoon is mechanically among the worst-suited instruments in the orchestra for fast passagework — its long key throws and its reed combine to make every sixteenth note a small physical commitment. Second, the solo doesn’t announce itself. There’s no slowing down, no “and now: bassoon.” It just appears in the texture and then it’s there and the bassoonist either has it or doesn’t.
Which is why these eight bars sit, more or less permanently, on every major orchestra’s bassoon audition list. The International Musician excerpt guides include them. IMG Artists’ audition prep materials include them. Vienna Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic — if you want to play first bassoon in any of them, you walk into the audition with bars 184 through 191 of Beethoven 4 in your hands and probably in your nightmares.
The audience, of course, hears none of this. To the audience it’s a cute moment in a cute movement. If you’ve ever caught a first bassoonist quietly rolling their shoulders during applause at the end of the Fourth, that’s why. The relief in that small motion is the relief of having survived the eight bars that everyone in the bassoon world has been quizzed on.
📜 악보 지점: 베토벤 교향곡 4번 4악장 마디 184~191 바순 솔로 (IMSLP 링크 미등록)
Why Beethoven specifically dropped this on the bassoon is debated in two flavors. The aesthetic answer says the bassoon’s reedy color cuts cleanest against the silvery sixteenth-note backdrop, and that’s true; nothing else in the orchestra would have stood out the same way. The other answer, less polite, is that Beethoven was needling bassoonists on purpose. Take your pick. The result is the same — for two centuries now, professional bassoonists worldwide tense up the second they see Beethoven’s Fourth on a program.
🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Beethoven Symphony 4 Kleiber Bavarian
Four faces in four movements — what’s actually happening
I. Adagio — Allegro vivace
The thirty-eight bars are dealt with above, so let’s pick up at bar 39. The first theme leaps in light-footed, almost cheeky — the kind of melodic gait that made Schumann reach for the word that’s still ricocheting around program notes (more on that below). It’s elegance with a wink in it.
Then something interesting happens in the development. Beethoven hauls the B♭-minor introduction back into view. Briefly, mid-movement, the music asks: did you forget where this started? The darkness gets one more cameo before the recapitulation steps back into B♭ major and resumes the bright work.
Even the ending refuses to be merely graceful. In the coda, Beethoven twists the harmony one more time before he lets the movement land. The lightness of the first theme is real, but the introduction’s shadow keeps showing up in the margins like a footnote you can’t ignore.
II. Adagio
Cellos lay down a steady pulse. Over them, the first violins unspool a long-breathed song. The structure is simple on paper, but Beethoven keeps the heartbeat absolutely regular underneath while the melody on top breathes wherever it wants to. The discipline of the accompaniment is the entire reason the freedom up top works.
Hector Berlioz, in À Travers Chants (1862), described this movement as sounding “as if the angel Israfel were drawing a bow across the strings of his heart.” Israfel is the Islamic angel of music — and the fact that a French Romantic critic reached past his own Catholic vocabulary into Islamic eschatology to describe a Beethoven slow movement tells you what kind of grip this Adagio had on him. Berlioz was not given to small reactions, but this one is unusual even by his standards.
The reaction in the modern hall splits cleanly. Some listeners call this the dullest stretch in the symphony. Others call it the deepest single song in any Beethoven symphony. Both responses are correct, in a sense — they describe people who are following the melodic line over the heartbeat versus people who aren’t. The Adagio rewards close listening more than it rewards background-music listening, which is an honest description and not a sneer.
III. Allegro vivace · Trio
It’s labeled a Menuetto, but please don’t stand up to dance. By 1806 Beethoven had effectively turned the polite minuet into a scherzo while leaving the old label on the box. The tempo is fast, the accents are off-balance, the dignified 18th-century courtly thing is gone.
The Trio in the middle is where the woodwinds get a moment to talk. Oboe, clarinet, and bassoon trade short phrases — and yes, the bassoon part here is friendlier than the booby trap waiting in the finale. You can almost read the Trio as a trailer for bar 184: Beethoven nudging the bassoon out into a little cameo before he hands it the actual exposed solo two movements later. He warns you, at any rate, that he’s been thinking about the bassoon.
The structural sleight of hand here is that Beethoven repeats both the Menuetto and the Trio twice each, stretching out the conventional ABA shape into something closer to ABABA. He extends the form, and he hides the fact that he extended it. Mozart and Haydn would not have done this. Beethoven does it without saying anything about it.
IV. Allegro ma non troppo
Sixteenth-note perpetuum mobile, start to finish. Once the engine is on, it does not turn off until the final chord. The bassoon-solo trap at bar 184 has its own section above, so let’s look instead at the coda.
Around eighteen bars before the end, Beethoven does something funny: he disrupts the rhythm. The perpetual motion stutters. For a few seconds the engine hiccups. Then it realigns, the sixteenth notes click back into formation, and the symphony lands. It reads almost like a joke — we’ve been running this fast all movement, why don’t we catch our breath for half a bar before the curtain.
When the finale ends, most listeners can’t quite believe thirty-three minutes have gone by. That’s the Fourth’s largest single asset, and it’s also the reason the Fourth gets buried in concert seasons next to the Fifth and the Eroica. It doesn’t make a strong first impression because it’s not trying to. The hardness of its construction shows up on the second hearing, not the first.
“A slender Greek maiden” — what Schumann actually wrote, and what every program note gets wrong
If you read program notes about Beethoven 4, you’ve read the Schumann line. “A slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants.” You’ve read it because nearly every program note pulls it out, and you’ve read it framed, almost without exception, as a backhanded compliment. Mostly that framing is wrong.
Schumann published the line in 1835, in the Leipzig journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The German is “eine schlanke griechische Maid zwischen zwei Nordlandriesen” — a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants. The two Norse giants are the Eroica and the Fifth. That part everyone gets right. What gets dropped on the way to the program note is the rhetorical direction of the sentence.
The standard summary in English-language commentary is roughly: Schumann thought the Fourth was the weak link between two stronger symphonies. Read in context, the meaning is closer to the opposite. Schumann’s point is that grace stands out more, not less, when it’s flanked by two giants. The Greek maiden is not embarrassed to be in that company; she’s the one your eye catches. And Schumann himself programmed Beethoven 4 frequently at the Leipzig Gewandhaus during his years there — not the behavior of a man who privately considered it a step down.
Where exactly the inversion of meaning entered the standard reading is hard to trace. It’s the kind of thing that happens to one-line quotes once they break free of their paragraph and start traveling alone. But the consequence is real: the sentence you’ve probably read about Beethoven 4 in half a dozen liner notes is not just a paraphrase of Schumann, it’s actively a mistranslation of his point. He didn’t call the Fourth weak. He said the elegance was visible specifically because of where it stood.
Whether the Greek maiden is more beautiful than either giant — that’s a taste question, and it’s yours to answer. It was never Schumann’s job to answer it for you, and he didn’t try to.
Why the Fourth survived between the Third and the Fifth
The Eroica is fifty minutes long. The Fifth is thirty-five and it grabs you by the collar in the first four notes. The Fourth is thirty-three and, instead of grabbing you, it takes your wrist gently and walks you in.
That difference matters more than it should. If you ask a newcomer to start with Beethoven’s Ninth, the choral movement scares them off. If you ask them to start with the Fifth, the famous opening either flattens them or, just as often, makes them tense up because they know what they’re “supposed” to feel. The Fourth is the symphony you can hand someone who has never sat through Beethoven start to finish, and once they’re past the mystery of the thirty-eight-bar introduction, the rest of the piece keeps a lighter hand on their shoulder. As an entry door into Beethoven the symphonist, very little else in the catalogue is more humane.
Wagner, in Über das Dirigieren (1869), basically doesn’t mention Beethoven’s Fourth. There’s no heroic narrative for him to graft onto, no Promethean shouting, no transformation of the soul, and so it didn’t fit his aesthetic catechism and he left it alone. Mendelssohn, on the other hand, conducted it constantly at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. The pattern that emerges is honest: the Fourth tends to be loved by people who are skeptical of heroic narratives, and overlooked by people who require them.
If your mental image of Beethoven is the boxed set of Heroic, Fateful, and Joyful — the trinity that fills the merchandise table — the Fourth is the symphony that breaks that frame. It tells you there was also a Beethoven who could be light, and that being light is not the same as being shallow. Underneath the surface gleam of this piece sits thirty-eight bars of B♭ minor that nobody else in 1806 would have written.
Recommended recording
If you can have only one Beethoven 4 in your life, make it Carlos Kleiber and the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, live, 1982 (Orfeo). I have run through the alternatives in my head several times. The choice doesn’t really change.
Kleiber, across his entire career, formally recorded fewer than ten symphonies. Fewer than ten. That fact alone does most of the explanatory work — for a conductor that selective to spend a slot of his life on Beethoven 4 is, in itself, a recommendation. Gramophone‘s “Greatest Recordings” lists have repeatedly returned to this album. It’s the consensus pick across critics who don’t otherwise agree on much.
Listen to the first thirty-eight bars and you can hear Kleiber’s whole reading immediately. Most conductors try to soften the B♭-minor introduction, to make it pretty, to ease it toward the major-key resolution. Kleiber leaves the dark as dark and then knifes into bar 39 instead of melting into it. The lurch from minor to major is not a transition under his baton, it’s a snap. By the time you hit the bassoon solo at bar 184, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester’s principal bassoon has already executed the eight bars cleanly enough that the whole audition-circuit anxiety I described above sounds like nothing at all from the outside, which is, of course, exactly the way it’s supposed to sound.
🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Carlos Kleiber Beethoven Symphony 4 Bavarian State 1982 live
I put this recording first for a simple reason — it’s almost the only Fourth that doesn’t try to dissolve the darkness of the introduction. That said, if your ear wants the Fourth as a graceful, light, well-balanced symphony rather than as a piece with a knife hidden in its first thirty-eight bars, Kleiber’s hardness might actually irritate you. In that case, Karajan’s 1962 cycle with the Berliner Philharmoniker (Deutsche Grammophon) sits much closer to your taste. Polished, balanced, every line lined up. The Karajan reading sands the corners off, and if that’s what you want, his is the cleanest job available.
A third reference point worth keeping in your back pocket is Wilhelm Furtwängler with the Vienna Philharmonic, live, 1952. If you want to know how the Fourth sounded in the hands of an old master from before the modern recording era, this is one of the documents. The audio quality is what 1952 audio quality is, and you have to be willing to listen past the hiss, but the performance underneath is the kind of thing that can ruin you for tidier readings.
The bottom line is uncomplicated. Start with Kleiber 1982. Karajan’s polish and Furtwängler’s gravity can wait. There is no recording in print that’s a smaller risk for a first hearing of Beethoven 4 than the Kleiber.
Listen with the score
The two passages worth following with a score in hand are the first-movement introduction (bars 1–38) and the bassoon solo in the finale (bars 184–191). They show, more clearly than any analysis can describe, what Beethoven was actually doing. The Breitkopf & Härtel 1862 edition is on IMSLP, free to download and print, and it’s the standard reference.
For the introduction, follow the harmonic drift through B♭ minor and mark, with a pencil if necessary, where bar 39 lands you in B♭ major Allegro vivace. The boundary between the dark and the light becomes visible as a measure number, not a vibe. For the bassoon solo, run a finger along the sixteenth-note line through bars 184 to 191. From the audience that exposure is invisible. On the page, with no other instrument’s part to hide behind, the eight-bar tightrope walk is the entire content of the staff.
📜 악보 지점: 베토벤 교향곡 4번 1악장 마디 1~38 도입부 b플랫단조에서 B플랫장조 폭발 (IMSLP 링크 미등록)
📜 악보 지점: 베토벤 교향곡 4번 4악장 마디 184~191 바순 노출 솔로 (IMSLP 링크 미등록)