Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67

The premiere was a disaster. December 22, 1808, at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna — four hours of new Beethoven, including the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Choral Fantasy, and several other pieces, all performed in an unheated theater during one of the coldest winters on record. The orchestra had barely rehearsed. The audience was freezing. A mishap during the Choral Fantasy forced Beethoven to stop the orchestra and restart the piece from the beginning, in front of a paying crowd. The reviews were mixed. The Fifth Symphony barely registered amid the chaos.

And yet those four notes — da-da-da-DUM — became the most famous musical phrase in human history. Beethoven's student Anton Schindler later claimed the composer described them as 'fate knocking at the door,' though Schindler was a notorious fabricator who forged entries in Beethoven's conversation books, so take that with a quarry's worth of salt. What's beyond dispute is that no one had ever structured a symphony like this before: a single rhythmic motif that drives the entire first movement, transforming and reappearing in different guises like a recurring dream that keeps changing costumes.

Here's the detail that rewires your brain: Beethoven was going deaf when he wrote this. Not metaphorically deaf, not 'had some hearing trouble' deaf — genuinely, progressively, irreversibly losing the one sense his entire life depended on. He had written his Heiligenstadt Testament six years earlier, essentially a suicide note addressed to his brothers, in which he described the humiliation of asking people to repeat themselves at parties and the terror of a musician who could no longer hear birdsong. He didn't kill himself. He wrote the Fifth Symphony instead.

During World War II, the BBC used the opening motif as a broadcast signal to occupied Europe — three short, one long, the Morse code for V, for Victory. A German composer's rage against his own fate became the sound of liberation from a German army. History has a sense of humor that would embarrass a novelist.