(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Music open thread: Fifth Symphonies [1] ['Alonso Del Arte', 'News Corpse', 'Greg Dworkin'] Date: 2026-06-01 German-born composer Ludwig van Beethoven is international. A melody from his Ninth Symphony is now the anthem of the European Union. During World War II, the first four notes of his Fifth Symphony were used as a motto by the Allied Forces in their fight against the Germans. “Although it is perhaps ironic that a German piece of music became a source of solace, in particular to British troops during the bombings of England, many people relished the irony of German music providing a galvanizing force for the war effort,” writes Daisy Fancourt in an article for ORT’s Music and the Holocaust series. There are a couple of coincidences at work here. First, the rhythm dot dot dot dash is Morse code for the letter V, for Victory. And the number 5 happens to be V in Roman numerals. “Beethoven was himself a champion of personal liberty and a symbol of resistance to dictatorship, turning away from Napoleon in 1804 when the latter named himself Emperor of the French.” Fancourt’s article drew my attention to “la chanson des V,” in which Maurice van Moppès fit lyrics to the first few measures of Beethoven’s Fifth. Il ne faut pas Désespérer On les aura Il ne faut pas Vous arrêter De résister N’oubliez pas La lettre V Ecrivez la Chantonez là V, V, V, V Sur le murs et Sur les pavés Faites des V Mais vous pouvez Faire endêver Les Doryphores Et sans remords Et sans danger Vous sifflerez Et chanterez V, V, V, V The victory isn’t until the finale, though. A gradual crescendo links the darkness of the scherzo to the glorious sunshine of the finale. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor obviously had to be first in this open thread about Fifth Symphonies. There is no shortage of very good performances on YouTube. I haven’t heard every one of them. To help narrow it down, I decided first to check if there was a performance with Nathalie Stutzmann conducting. Despite the deficient audio engineering, I was very impressed by her performance of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor. The performance is preceded by remarks from the conductor. This recording of Beethoven’s Fifth is a much better engineered recording of a performance that is also powerful. It would seem logical to mention Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 95 in C minor. But I like No. 97 in C major better, and I justify including it here as it is the fifth of his London Symphonies. And maybe both symphonies are spiritual forebears of Beethoven’s Fifth. Plus I don’t intend to go too far past 10 with these open threads. Anton Rubinstein’s Symphony No. 5 in G minor, Opus 107, has been compared to his pupil Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony, also in G minor. I’ve only heard one interpretation of Rubinstein’s Fifth, and it’s probably the same one used in the score videos and the videos with irrelevant beautiful landscapes on YouTube. I am far more familiar with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, but due to the organizational gimmick I’m using, I’m presently proceeding to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 5 in D major instead. I like this symphony, I think it has something to do with a film score Vaughan Williams wrote. But unlike with the Seventh Symphony, the movie has not interested me enough to look it up on Netflix. I guess this is where I should put Shostakovitch’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor, a major mood whiplash from the serenity of the Vaughan Williams. My memory might be playing tricks on me as I picture the album cover having, instead of the composer’s name and the title of the composition or any of the performer’s names, the words “a Soviet composer’s reply to justified criticism” and nothing else. Shostakovitch had come under fire for being too “formalist” and not “social realist,” whatever the hell those terms mean. Maybe the former is art Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin did not like, and the latter is what he liked. In a guest blog post for Grammophon, Laura van der Haijden writes that Stalin thought that art has so much influence that it needs to be controlled, which shows how highly regarded it was – and is – in Russian culture. He wanted to make music understandable by everyone. By making it more populist it wouldn’t challenge them or inspire them to rebel. He was incredibly well read and in the meetings of the board that decided who would get the Stalin Prize, he was always the one who had read the entire book, studied the painting properly, and listened to all the music. So in his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovitch tried to outwardly comply, to literally save himself from the gulag. The symphony ends in a triumph that has always felt hollow to me. I’d like one of the commenters to suggest a recording of this symphony. In another coincidence of numbering like we saw with Third Symphonies, both Joseph Haydn’s and his brother Michael’s Fifth Symphonies are in A major. Though in Michael’s case the numbering is not as certain. Lothar Perger catalogued what some now call his Fifth as his Third. Those are all nice symphonies which I enjoy but don’t stand out in my mind all that much yet. Okay, now on to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor. Like Beethoven’s Fifth, there’s a move from a minor key to a major key. Tchaikovsky makes this move more obvious by using the same melody from the first movement in the finale, but changed to E major. But unlike Beethoven, Tchaikovsky does not write a transition. Tchaikovsky’s Fifth has inspired several rock songwriters. Queen’s “We Will Rock You” is perhaps the most obvious example, demonstrated in this short clip. Do you like the riff from “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes? I’ve heard it somewhere before, like, played by an orchestra. But it doesn’t come from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s from some other E minor symphony? Because, you see, E minor is a very good and resonant key for the guitar, even the electric guitar. Oh well, gotta move on to a Fifth Symphony in a different key. Let’s see, B minor, there’s a very good one by Johann Wenzell Kalliwoda, but as I can’t find a video on YouTube showing the orchestra playing. Change of course, I’m going to go to B-flat major instead. Some say Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major is the hardest of his symphonies to get into. Even the always arrogant music critic David Hurwitz admits that he didn’t get Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony the first time he heard it, he still didn’t get it after listening to Herbert von Karajan’s recording, and he didn’t get it until listening to Wolfgang Sawallisch. The first interpretation I ever heard of Bruckner’s Fifth must have been Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, it was part of the Deutsche Grammophon set of Bruckner’s complete symphonies (minus the Study Symphony, No. 0 and the finale of the Ninth). Legend has it that audio engineers asked Karajan what should be the maximum duration of a compact disc (CD). Karajan wanted the CD to be long enough to hold his performance of Beethoven’s Ninth plus maybe a little encore. So it had to be at least 70 minutes. But if he had based it on his performance of Bruckner’s Fifth, the maximum duration of the CD might be 82 minutes. It’s a long symphony if you’re looking at the clock. But to me it goes by fast, and I’m one to get impatient before Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart even gets to a repeat sign. There are no repeat signs in Bruckner’s Fifth. But there is some material that gets repeated for structural significance. The slow introduction by strings to the first movement is repeated to begin the finale, but with impatient interjections from the clarinet. Far more subtly, the Adagio and the Scherzo are based on the same melody, which is reviewed in the finale before launching into a grand fugue. I had also wanted to include a performance of the inauthentic version by Franz Schalk. Quite famously, or infamously, Bruckner allowed his well-meaning students to make ill-advised changes to his music. Supposedly that was for lack of confidence in his own abilities. But someone who writes a symphony like the Fifth in the absence of popular acclaim for his previous efforts in the genre is not lacking confidence. Bruckner made sure to preserve his original score while at the same time allowing Schalk’s changes in the hopes this music could at least make a small impression on the public. To make the finale more exciting, Schalk added an offstage brass band and cymbals and triangle. But the symphony works quite well without those, in my opinion. I listened to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, K. 22, once or twice several years ago. I do like it better than really anything of his on his Greatest Hits album. Very good performance, but it feels like it’s missing the thoroughbass. They should have sprung for a harpsichord, since they bothered to use natural horns. Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 5 in F major could very well have been titled “Pastoral,” except that the finale begins in an unexpectedly dramatic mood. Even now that I’ve listened to the whole symphony in a few different interpretations, this change still surprises me. But I have never doubted that this finale belongs in this symphony. With this symphony I had an unexpected variety of videos to choose from, including two with Ruth Reinhardt conducting. Both good performances, so my decision to link one and embed the other is entirely arbitrary. I have listened to the finale of Charles-Marie Widor’s Symphony No. 5 in F minor several times. The old WQRS used to play it fairly frequently, though perhaps not as much as Saint-Saëns’s Third. A lot of those times it was in the Deutsche Grammophon recording by Simon Preston. But it wasn’t until I bought the whole recording fairly recently that I finally listened to Widor’s whole Fifth Symphony, beginning to end. Honestly, I was bored by the unfamiliar first three movements, and then the finale felt like it came out of nowhere. But unlike with Dvořák’s Fifth, I’m having a hard time hearing the connection. It was like a half hour of vague, amorphous noodling followed by the shocking contrast of a well-defined composition. Or maybe it’s one of those things that might grow on me if I listen to it in a few different interpretations. Hurwitz not getting Bruckner’s Fifth after listening to Karajan’s interpretation might be parallel to me not getting Widor’s Fifth after listening to Simon Preston’s performance. By the way, Karajan and Preston were both Deutsche Grammophon recording artists. I’m sure you can find Simon Preston’s performance on YouTube, probably with some irrelevant still image for the duration of the video track. But here I’m going with Donald Hunt’s performance at the Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria, British Columbia. You can see his hands on the manuals and his feet on the pedals. I tried to skip over the minute of introductory remarks and the minute of silence. But I don’t blame you if you only want to hear the famous toccata finale. That starts at 36:05. Okay, I confess, by skipping over the introductory remarks I also skipped over a request for donations. Both Bruckner and Widor played organ, but Bruckner left almost nothing for solo organ. Naturally, some enterprising organists have taken it upon themselves to arrange Bruckner’s symphonies for solo organ. Hurwitz is very dismissive of the results, and in this instance we should just take his word for it. If you find Bruckner’s Fifth boring, it’s going to be much worse on solo organ. Or take my word for it, I can only stand to listen to those transcriptions for not even a full minute. Maybe it’s not a matter of Simon Preston not having the right approach to Widor’s Fifth Symphony, maybe it’s that it will take me some repeated listening to understand how the movements of Widor’s Fifth are organized. So far no one has commented on the scheme that I’ve been using to organize the symphonies in these open threads. To get to Bruckner’s Fifth required a little tweak, and now to get to Mahler’s Fifth requires a tweak in the opposite direction. We could endlessly debate whether Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 really is in C-sharp minor. That’s the key it begins in, but certainly not the key it ends in. A very strong claim could be made for D major. Like Widor’s Fifth, Mahler’s Fifth has a movement that frequently gets played out of the context of the symphony, the tender Adagietto which precedes the most genuinely happy music Mahler ever wrote. For this one I really wanted to choose a woman conductor. The closest I could find was a YouTube short of Marin Alsop talking a little bit about Gustav Mahler and his wife, Alma. Cate Blanchett starred in Tár as Lydia Tár, a fictional conductor but also a thinly veiled and unwarranted insult to Marin Alsop. I gave that movie only one star. Cate Blanchett actually conducts a tiny bit of the symphony in the movie, and it’s about as much as the plot requires. Lydia Tár has a mental breakdown and physically assaults the substitute conductor at the concert. Marin Alsop has conducted the whole symphony in concert, with the same professionalism and excellence that she brings to every score. If YouTube had her performance of the whole Mahler Fifth, that’s what I would go with. But instead I’m going with Andrés Orozco-Estrada. Three composerss of Fifth Symphonies that I want to mention but which I wasn’t sure how to fit per the organizational gimmick are Vagn Holmboe, Peter Mennin and Carl Nielsen. Two Danes and an American. The two Danes are often compared to each other, frustrating some listeners that Holmboe isn’t more like Nielsen. These three Fifth Symphonies are all heroic in character. Nielsen ends with a triumph that sits somewhere between where Beethoven and Shostakovitch end up. Holmboe’s triumphant finale is perhaps more conventional than listeners would expect from him, making this symphony somewhat more accessible than his other ones. And Mennin ends not with triumph but simply with this is where the adventure ends. The open thread question: What is your favorite Fifth Symphony? [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/1/800021650/community/music-open-thread-fifth-symphonies/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/