Which is your favourite of the BBC Ten Pieces? We have a KS2 Music quiz on each of the ten composers, along with a quiz on the specific pieces too. This one is all about the 1st movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.
The opening movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 has to be one of the most enduring 'ear-worms' of all time. It is known all over the world and regularly appears in culture including pop music, film and television. Even Walt Disney used it in the film Fantasia 2000. If you haven't heard it before - where have you been?!!
How well do you actually know the piece, though? Let's find out.
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You can find more about this topic by visiting BBC - KS2: Ludwig Van Beethoven - Symphony No. 5 (1st movement)
Counting from the actual score (including the repeated first section), and depending only slightly on what you accept as a strictly recognisable repeat, your present analyst reckoned about 315 iterations. You are welcome to check for yourself!
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... 'V' also being the Roman numeral for '5' (the number of this symphony within the sequence that Beethoven wrote).
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The man with 100-odd to his credit was Haydn, the inventor of the form. As its pioneer he clearly deserves vast credit, but it might not unfairly be pointed out that his early examples were inevitably less complex or elaborate than what Beethoven and others did with the form ~ when they came along later.
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Answers 1-3 are all substantially true and surely relevant; No.4 is complete make-believe.
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This was the 'V for Victory' sound-signal, perhaps linking with Churchill's famous finger gesture. The German-language word for Victory does not begin with this letter (although the flying-bombs were 'V-weapons', this was in fact short for Vergeltung [= 'revenge']); their word is Sieg (as in their chant Sieg heil! ['Hail, victory!']).
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At different points it may be a major or minor third, but at the outset it is definitely three notes wide altogether (try setting it against Three Blind Mice). A quaver (Answer 4) is a rhythmic measure rather than one of pitch or potential harmony.
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You can check this fairly simply by listening and counting: there are pauses on the end of the two first statements of the motif, and another one a little later on. After these apparent ~ yet deliberate, and ear-catching ~ false-starts, the movement largely continues steadily from the rhythmic point of view until the change into the middle, 'development' section; the repeat towards the end; and the very final passage.
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There is a very loud, clear solo cue for the horns just before Beethoven introduces his second 'subject' (the rather smoother tune, first played by the strings). This short section of the piece is technically known as a 'bridge passage' since it leads between two distinct, usually contracting chunks of musical material.
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Even an orchestra of the size Beethoven would have known, and playing instruments as they were in his day (probably not quite as loud or strong as ours in a larger 'full modern symphony orchestra'), at full-throttle can produce an unforgettably impressive body of sound.
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JS Bach had 13 surviving children (of 20 altogether) by his two wives; many of them became substantial musicians in their own right, and were differentiated from their father by their initials (JC, CPE and several others); 'PDQ' is fairly transparently an affectionate 20th-century spoof within this tradition. The 'sportscast' does actually shed quite interesting and accessible light on what Beethoven's 'players' are up to, at least some of the time.
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