THE HALLÉ ORCHESTRA
Conducted by SIR HAMILTON HARTY
HABOLD WILLIAMS (Baritone)
Relayed from THE QUEEN'S HALL, London
THE FIRST MOVEMENT of Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony is troubled, nervous sort of music—'the disordered sentiments which overthrow a great soul, a prey to despair,' said Berlioz. Its first four gruff notes, known as ' Fate knocking at the door,' are famous among musicians, as a concentrated, significant, and entirely unique idea.
The SECOND MOVEMENT is a scries of connected
Variations on a long-drawn Theme that has two distinct sections, the first a sinuous melody, and the second suggestive of a fanfare.
The THIRD MOVEMENT is a Scherzo, a word that means ' a jest,' and became attached, as a formal term, to the light-styled, quick Movement that was usually found in the middle of a Symphony. Here, however, it is grim jesting, and there is no feeling of relaxed tension. It was by such movements as these that Beethoven raised the Scherzo from the air of triviality with which it first entered into the Symphonic scheme, and brought it to full rank as a musical composition,
At tho end of it comes a mysterious, whispered passage that gradually takes the music out of C Minor into C Major and leads into the blaze of the FOURTH MOVEMENT, a triumphal psean that sustains the note of exhilaration from beginning to end, except for a moment where Beethoven brings in a few bars of the Scherzo. The ending is a rattling and a pounding of C Major chords without a parallel in music.