Switched on Pop - THE 5TH — MOVEMENT I, A Battle Brewing

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

You know Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. You’ve heard it in films, advertisements, parodied in Saturday morning cartoons and disco-ized in Saturday Night Fever. The Fifth Symphony is a given, so much so that it blends into the background. You know this piece, but how well? Of all the symphonies of the bewigged classical "greats," why is this one still stuck in our heads over two centuries later? To answer these questions, we’re giving Beethoven’s famous symphony the same treatment we give to pop songs. And we’re doing so with the help of an orchestra that’s been performing this piece since 1842, the New York Philharmonic. In Movement I, we hear how the famous opening notes of the symphony aren't just melody: they’re the main character in a drama that will unfold over four movements. Featuring: Frank Huang, Violin Anthony McGill, Clarinet Sherry Sylar, Oboe Recording of The New York Philharmonic performing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 conducted by Jaap van Zweden used by permission from Decca Gold. New episodes of our four-part miniseries The 5th drop every Tuesday and Friday starting September 8th. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Attention Spotify. Has arrived the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera, a fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolvent, toffee caramelized and tonka-tosted.

A combination that seduce from the first instant and a dejauella. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute hypnotica irresistible. Discoveredla hoy and let you envolver for their sensia.

Bo may know Diddley, but Mr. Robinson knows Beethoven. VEVVIMCREMA with micro spec I'm on a date I'm on a date We're on a date The girl named Jane

She must be staring At my stain I totally Charlie, what do all of these ads have in common? They're utterly ridiculous And they have bastardized Beethoven's Fifth Symphony Yes, they all make use of the iconic opening four notes of Beethoven's Fifth, from Japanese noodles to Nike sneakers, to Italian cleaning products,

to tide detergent. This symphony is still part of popular culture over 200 years later. Yeah, I feel like it's become the commercial soundtrack of overwhelming frustration. You've got to buy this thing to solve your problems. And it's in the public domain, which never hurts. But it makes me ask a question, why? Why do we know this four, note theme. Why are we so intimately familiar with the four movement symphony written many centuries ago? Why can't we get this melody out of our heads? Over the next four episodes, we're going to try and answer this question with the help of an orchestra that's been playing this piece since 1842, the New York Philharmonic. Because this year would be Beethoven's 250th

birthday. And for someone so old and so dead, he still manages to stir up controversy in 2020. On this anniversary, people are asking questions like, how does Beethoven's legacy create a culture of elitism and classical music? And is it finally time to retire this piece once and for all? In order to address these issues, we need to go back to the piece that started it all and hear how those opening four notes aren't just a meme. They're the beginning of an epic musical story about light and dark, struggle and victory, and even life and death. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan, and I'm a songwriter Charlie Harding. And this is Switched-on-Pop-The-fifth. I don't know about you, but for a long time, I didn't get classical music. How come?

I would try and follow a piece, and then inevitably I would just end up kind of count. the tiles on the ceiling and just lose track of everything. Attention waivers. Beethoven 5 was the first piece that I felt like I really understood. It was the gateway into classical music for me. And part of what did it was seeing this piece live. Let's try and recreate that live experience right now. Okay?

So take my hand. All right, I'll reach through the video. Yeah. Ooh, soft. Wow, do you do you moisturize? We'll walk down the aisle, take our seats. The orchestra is tuning up. Now the lights go down. The conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Yop van Svaden.

He walks out, everyone applauds, and then it gets very quiet. Once the audience is settled and the conductor comes out and you're ready to go, there's a lot of tension in the air. For first violinist and concert master Frank Huang, this moment is full of anticipation. Although the notes the orchestra is about to play are pretty simple. The tricky thing about it is that the very first note is actually silence. What do you mean? It's a rest.

There's a rest. This piece starts on a rest. Yeah, I love the way Frank describes this. You've got this tension holding, and then there's this explosion. of a downbeat where nothing happens and then the whole orchestra comes in. The conductor puts his bow down

and then there's this pause and then the whole orchestra together goes Are you feeling the tension, Charlie? This orchestra has to come out of nowhere and deliver this perfectly synchronized blasts of sound. Oh yeah, you have to come in

at the exact right moment altogether. Here's how clarinetist Anthony McGill described. it. It's almost like a crash. You're crashing in from silence. It's almost, it could, you could imagine that it's interrupting the natural state of the world, which is like, you know, just the sounds of nature or something. And, you know, or, you know, or just absolute silence, which we never experience. Nate, who might be fading off in the crowd, is immediately woken up stirred by this crash. No more counting tiles. You might not be aware of it listening from the audience, but this is no

easy feat. Here's Frank again. I thought that was really cool when I first realized how tricky the opening is to get a hundred or so people to come in off of a rest together with the same energy and the same character. It's very easy for it to be not together. You know, you can hear like, blah blah blah blah. Oh, that would be such a disappointment. Yeah, exactly. It's so, important to get these opening notes right. And the reason is that these four notes are actually more than just a melody. These four notes are really a character. Huh. What do you mean? What I mean is that when the orchestra comes in, we're not just being introduced to a melody, we're being introduced to a protagonist that we are going to follow over the course of this symphony. Okay. Hello,

hero. So let's get to know this character a little bit better. Maybe we can give them a name. I'm thinking, but-de-p-ta-da-to-pajama Joe. Oh, really? No, you're not happy with that? I mean, I feel like it kind of turns into a little bit of a cloud. Dramatic Joe. I like that. Okay, we'll go with Dramatic Joe. then. Because I think this is a dramatic opening figure. What do you hear when you listen to this, Charles? Actually, the first thing I heard was like a foot stomp. It was the rest. Well, we're listening to a live recording of the Philharmonic. So we're going to hear a little bit of crowd noise and rustling and stuff.

It's almost like the conductor like stomped their foot and then boom, it started. I hear anguish. I agree. This is like kind of a stormy emo kind of opening motive here. It's almost like the rest is almost like a strike of lightning, and then the four-note motif is like a roll of thunder. I love that. And now that we've met our first character, we're going to get to know them a little better. Beethoven is just going to kind of build off this motive.

Dramatic Joe. You ask me, how do I know this work so well? I think one way in which it comes into my ear is that it's cinematic. This is used all the time in film. It has its own sort of narrative thrust, right? We have this moment of intense anguish that then quiets down. And we can hear this person quietly storming around the room. It's moving fast.

It's getting louder until it comes back to that big, wild hit again. And so you can almost imagine that character because it feels like there's a film that this is narrating. I love that and I think that's a great description because, you know, just like any great film, you meet one character and then what happens next, you meet another character. We're building, we're building Dramatic Joe, Dramatic Joe, da, da, da, da, and then suddenly everything kind of comes to a screeching halt. Stop at its tracks. It's almost like, okay, everyone, pay attention because we are about to meet our next character. I think you called our first character Dramatic Joe. How did you describe him again?

Kind of anguished, I think. Yeah, he's feeling some anguish. There's something amiss. Let's have violinist Frank Huang introduce this second character. Yeah, I think you're talking about when it goes, and then it starts to spill up. It's so tranquil, much more peaceful. Right? So we have Dramatic Joe, and now we have da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Little Abigail Panini. You gotta give me some better than Panini. But you like Little Abigail. Sure, why not? Little Abigail Chabata. I'm just thinking of Italian.

I'm clearly... It's also confusing because he's German. Okay, okay. Little Frowline Henrietta. Lovely. Yeah, there we go. We got it there. Frowline Henrietta.

And our first character, very stormy, anguished, dramatic. Now it's kind of light, lyrical, and floating. And this new melody gets passed between the different members of the orchestra. Frank plays it on the violin, and then it gets passed to the clarinetist, Anthony. Because of the range on the clarinet that it's in, it's like hopeful.

It's sound of shining. It's a little bit sweet. And it's just a tiny little thing that you play. You know, just those couple bars that you kind of are, of bringing hope to a bad situation. Storm clouds are parting. Yeah. And for Frank, this is like one of the joys of playing this piece, is these contrasting characters. I think of it as either different people having conversations or, you know, as we often do,

as human beings, we have contrasting thoughts all the time. Yeah, we are walking contradictions, aren't we? Yeah. Makes sense to bring that together in the music. multiple sides of our personality. Totally. And what we're listening to right now, this dual theme,

this is how movements in symphonies work. And I'm going to have to drop an S-bomb here, Charlie. Oh, whoa, okay. It's a style called sonata form. The thing you need to know about sonata form is that you meet two characters and then one of them goes on a journey. Hero's journey, if you will.

Exactly. And in this particular movement of this particular symphony, that character is Dramatic Joe And then what happens next Character 1 takes a trip Ooh gets passed around the orchestra Exactly, and we're watching this right

We're hearing all these different instruments Pick up this theme It's moving through different keys, different registers To the bass now It's like we're seeing this theme And all these different lights All these different filters are passing over it Life is just being thrown at this theme

But the core rhythm is all always present that short, short, short, short, long. Ooh. It's like we're in the middle of a fight. We don't know who's going to win right here. The orchestra going back and forth. Yeah. Shortening.

And now it's quieting down and it sounds like we're building up to something and that's because we are. We're building up to the final moment of a sonata form. It's called the recapitulation and it's when we go back to the beginning of the piece. And this is why sonata form. is so satisfying and was so popular, like so many symphonies to use this structure. You meet two characters, one of them goes on a journey, and then you return, but you kind of see them in a new light, right? There's a beautiful kind of arc to that.

It's kind of like our hero has rediscovered who they are and found their core inner being that they had at the very beginning, but with all the wisdom of experience. Whoa, Charlie, getting deep, I like it. And you know, at the beginning I said, classical music can be really hard to follow. I think this is part of the reason why. We have to kind of track these characters and they evolve and they return. It's very different than pop music, which we usually cover on our show. The violinist in the Philharmonic, Frank, I think he really kind of nails the difference between classical and pop in this respect.

Pop songs, you know, again, I love them, but, you know, one song is usually one character. So either you're kind of upbeat and dancing, where you're kind of chilled out. But with the symphony, it's like, you know, you see them go up and down, up and down. It makes sense that there is more that we have to track. It's also more satisfying if we successfully do so. Perhaps we go on a particular journey. Let's see if we can. We're about to get to this crucial moment in the first movement,

in the sonata form where we get back to the beginning. It's been building up, and we're going to hear that theme from the very beginning of the piece one more time. Triumphant but dark. Yeah, that's the beginning of the piece, but it's got a little more sauce on it. Yeah, a lot more. Here was the very beginning of the piece. It's like, hello, my name's Dramatic Joe. And then here it is when it comes back in the final third.

Let me be clear about how dramatic I really am. We know this character, but they've been transformed. And again, that's like kind of the power of this structure. It has this built-in drama to it. You know, I feel like the Dramatic Joe has not gone through the journey that I hoped that he might. Because in this case, it felt like we had character one who had anguish and character two who was more tranquil. You thought maybe they would intertwine Dramatic Joe would like learn to simmer down. But instead, through all of that development section where all this fighting has happened, just that anger and all that anguish feels to coalesce.

and build up to this point of overflowing. Yeah. I love this interpretation because you're right. There's like a drama that's starting to unfold here. And that's what's so kind of game changing about the symphony. That kind of transformation that you might want, we're going to have to wait for it. Up to this point, Beethoven has been following the rules of sonata form. But it's at this moment that he's about to flip the source.

script and just kind of go haywire on everything that you would expect to hear from a symphony, you know, premiering in Vienna in 1808. Huh. Okay. I'm interested. We're going to hear Beethoven break all the rules after a quick break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast. called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits.

I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Charlie, we're back. It's the end of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a crucial moment in this piece. But before I hit play, I want to listen to something completely different. I might seduce your dad type. I'm the bad. Duh.

What's up, Billy? That's one of our favorite songs of 2019, Bad Guy by Billy Eilish. Love it. I remember when you first played this for me, you were flipping out because of something that happens at the end of this song.

The song goes completely off the rails and into some other, like, dark underworld. I like when you get mad. I guess I'm pretty cool. And do you remember how you felt when you first heard that? Probably terrified. Because it is the monsters under our bed. Right. At this moment in Bad Guy, you're expecting one thing and you get something completely different.

Let's rewind 211 years. This is exactly what Beethoven does at the end of the first movement of this fifth symphony. And we're back to theme one. dramatic Joe That's what sonata form would do. Right. Beethoven has kind of been following the conventions of this music, following sonata form to the letter. And we're building up to another appearance of theme two, character two,

Little Frowline Henrietta. But on the way, Beethoven gets lost and takes a side road and just drives us into like a big field where there's something really bizarre happening. It's an unexpected, unaccompanied obo solo. I cannot stress this enough. This is a WTF moment in this piece. This is an intera bang moment here.

I have no idea what you're talking about. A question mark and an exclamation point at the same time. The interrobang. In 1808, you are like grabbing your powdered wig and your monocle is falling to the floor because this is so unexpected. Yeah. And for the oboists, this is an intense moment, right?

You are alone on stage, playing by yourself in an orchestra of a hundred people. All eyes are on you. I wanted to know what this moment was like. So I asked the principal oboist of the Philharmonic, Sherry Seiler, what it feels like to be in the spotlight. You're dealing with your heart rate and that it makes your heart go faster. And at that moment, you really have to have your heart rate a little bit lower.

So I'm really thinking, okay, it's getting about time. Just really calm down because it's a long moment and you have to be ready to play the solo. And I love her description because it captures the physicality of playing this music. These are like athletes up there, right? Their heart is racing. The music is so fast and then just like zooms in and all of a sudden you just have to be perfect and on your spot.

After Sherry crushes that obo solo, the piece gets back on track. And we're building up to another appearance of theme two, character two, Little Frowline Henrietta. Okay, so now you're like, few, powdered wig back in place, Monocle safely secured, things are going back to normal, and what's going to happen next. We're going to end this piece. That was fun.

Let's all proceed to the next moment. Except that's not what Beethoven does. This is got me dad right here, right? Yeah, here we go, right? Ending of the piece, can't wait. Where are we going? What just happened? Okay, I don't know what's happening anymore.

DJ make the beat drop. The powdered wig is back off. The monocle is shattered on the floor. What is going on here? It's happening. Still, back and forth. Okay, this is going to be the ending, right? Oh.

We have gone back to the very beginning of the piece. What? This is unprecedented. Kind of like, what's even the point? Why do we go on this whole journey if you're just the same person? That is exactly the question that you would have listening to this in 1808. And I think you'd be asking yourself, is there a method to this madness? Is there a point to all of this rule breaking?

to this inexplicable obo solo, to this fake ending, to this return of the first theme at the very end of the movement? Or are you just a toddler with a marker just like drawing all over the staff paper? And what you don't know yet is that Beethoven is laying the groundwork for something that's about to change the course of music history as you know it. What you're about to discover is that these two characters that we've met, stormy dark anguish theme one, da-da-da-da-da and kind of bright lyrical insoucient theme two.

They're having a battle over Beethoven's soul. That minor first theme represents darkness, struggle, and death, and that second major theme represents light, triumph, and life. At the end of the first movement, the dark minor theme has won. But it's only the first movement, Charlie. There's still three to go. Who will come out on top by the end of this piece? Do you want to know?

Yeah, of course I want to know. Great, because the stakes are huge. It's not just about whether major or minor comes out on top at the end of the symphony. It's about how this work creates the entire classical culture as we know it today. And that culture is undergoing a major reckoning. Thanks to Jen Luzzo, Adam Curry. and all the members of the New York Philharmonic who joined us. The New York Philharmonics live recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony used by permission

of Decker Records. Switched on Pop, the Fifth is made by Nate Sloan and me, Charlie Harding. Our producers are Megan Lubin and Bridget Armstrong. Brandon McFarlane engineers the show. Illustrations and artwork by Iris Gottlieb and Victor Ware and Abby Barr run social media or part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow us at Switched on Pop on Twitter and Instagram, where we'll be continuing the conversation with essential articles and illustrations.

on the 5th. The 5th is running for two weeks in September, every Tuesday and Friday, twice as much switched on as usual. And until the next movement, thanks for listening. See you in Movement 2.