Symphony No. 4 (Beethoven) facts for kids
The Symphony No. 4 in B♭ major, Op. 60, is the fourth-published symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. It was composed in 1806 and premiered in March 1807 at a private concert in Vienna at the town house of Prince Lobkowitz. The first public performance was at the Burgtheater in Vienna in April 1808.
The symphony is in four movements. It is predominantly genial in tone, and has tended to be overshadowed by the weightier Beethoven symphonies that preceded and followed it – the Third Symphony (Eroica) and the Fifth. 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.
Background
Beethoven spent the summer of 1806 at the country estate of his patron, Prince Lichnowsky, near Glogau. In September Beethoven and the Prince visited the house of one of the latter's friends, Count Franz von Oppersdorff. The Count maintained a private orchestra, and the composer was honoured with a performance of his Second Symphony, written four years earlier. After this, Oppersdorff offered the composer a substantial sum to write a new symphony for him.
Beethoven had been working on what later became his Fifth Symphony, and his first intention may have been to complete it in fulfilment of the Count's commission. There are several theories about why, if so, he did not do this. According to George Grove, economic necessity obliged Beethoven to offer the Fifth (together with the Pastoral) jointly to Prince Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky. Other commentators suggest that the Fourth was essentially complete before Oppersdorff's commission, or that the composer may not yet have felt ready to press on with "the radical and emotionally demanding Fifth", or that the count's evident liking for the more Haydnesque world of the Second Symphony prompted another work in similar vein.
The work is dedicated to "the Silesian nobleman Count Franz von Oppersdorff". Although Oppersdorff had paid for exclusive rights to the work for its first six months, his orchestra did not give the first performance. The symphony was premiered in March 1807 at a private concert in Vienna at the town house of Prince Lobkowitz, another of Beethoven's patrons. The first public performance was at the Burgtheater in Vienna in April 1808. The orchestral parts were published in March 1809, but the full score was not printed until 1821. The manuscript, which was for a time owned by Felix Mendelssohn, is now in the Berlin State Library and can be seen online.
Recordings
The symphony has been recorded, in the studio and in concert performances, more than a hundred times. Early recordings were mostly issued as single sets, sometimes coupled with another Beethoven symphony, such as the Second. More recently, recordings of the Fourth have often been issued as part of complete cycles of the Beethoven symphonies.
Monaural recordings, made in the era of 78 rpm discs or mono LPs, include a 1933 set with Felix Weingartner conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, a 1939 version by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini, recordings from the 1940s conducted by Willem Mengelberg, Serge Koussevitzky and Sir Thomas Beecham, and from the early 1950s under Georg Solti (1951) and Wilhelm Furtwängler (1952).
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).
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. These pioneering efforts were followed in later decades by recordings of performances in what was currently regarded as authentic style, often played by specialist ensembles on old instruments, or replicas of them, playing at about a semitone below modern concert pitch. 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).
More recently some conductors of modern symphony or chamber orchestras have recorded the Fourth (along with other Beethoven symphonies), drawing to a greater or lesser degree on the practices of the specialist groups. Among these are Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1992), and Sir Charles Mackerras (2007). 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. Among conductors of more traditional recordings have been Leonard Bernstein (1980), Claudio Abbado (2000) and Bernard Haitink (2006).
See also
In Spanish: Sinfonía n.º 4 (Beethoven) para niños
