It was a bold step for Beethoven to write his first symphony when Haydn’s final work in the same form was just five years old and Mozart’s Jupiter just twelve. But this was perhaps the best—and certainly the riskiest—way for Beethoven to stake his claim to their territory.
Beethoven had moved to Vienna in 1792, the year after Mozart died, and he intended to study with Joseph Haydn. Beethoven learned much from the example of Haydn’s music, but the actual lessons he had with the master didn’t go well, and Beethoven quickly understood that if he was to play a role in this great Viennese tradition, he would have to carve out a place for himself, all by himself.
Beethoven began to sketch a symphony in C major in 1795, and he was still struggling with it during a concert tour to Prague and Berlin the following year. But Beethoven apparently wasn’t quite ready to succeed with this musical form yet, and he turned his attention primarily to the piano sonata, which became the vehicle for his most advanced ideas.
In 1799, the year he composed one of his real watershed works, the Pathétique Sonata, Beethoven decisively returned to the idea of writing a symphony. The C major symphony he finished early in 1800 is the first of eight others which followed.
Here is conductor Sir Georg Solti leading the Chicago Symphony in Beethoven’s Symphony #1:
