Phrasing in Beethoven 5

One of the most frequently performed pieces in the symphonic literature is Beethoven's fifth symphony. It is powerful, but also very popularized. It is so much a standard in every conductor's repertoire that is it sometimes assumed known and understudied by conductors (especially student conductors). Gunther Schuller made this same point in his book The Complete Conductor. He has a significant chapter on this symphony, spending much of it on phrasing. I like to combine his thoughts with the theories of Edward T. Cone in Musical Form and Musical Performance.

The focus here is the presence of hypermeter, or a large scale (or, to be more schenkerian, a deeper, more background) meter. Most will agree that Beethoven constructs this piece in four bar phrases. What is most interesting for me is how he plays around with the surface level structural downbeats and hypermeter.



This first snippet comes from the first five measures of the piece. I have marked in upbeat and downbeat motion of these phrases. It should be understood that at any point in this movement, the "and two and" figure should always be read as a local upbeat. It is always going somewhere else and never is inactive as a motive. Now, look at the following measures (mm. 6-14).



Reading the first figure as a "four" in a 4 beat hypermeter, we get two clean four bar phrases. In fact, Schuller, notes that all phrases are four bars except for two instances of a five bar phrase and a number of 6 bar phrases (4 bars with 2 bar extensions).

Now think of a standard four bar measure. The strongest beat is beat 1, followed by beat 3. 2 serves as an upbeat to 3, and 4 an upbeat to 1. While each of the string entrances should be played with the three eight notes as an upbeat feeling to the sustained pitch, the first entrance (vnII here) should be the strongest with the others coming away from the downbeat in bar one.

In both instances, the top voice (vnI) is a stronger felt entrance than the alto voice (viola), but weaker than the first entrance of the second violins. In the second phrase, the first violins have the fourth bar upbeat, which could support a small crescendo on bar three of this phrase for that voice as they become the primary voice, taking the lead away from the second violins (who have be thus far placed strongest metrically).



This last example is a reduction of mm. 33-63. The phrases are marked with double bars (you see here an example of a phrase extension in bars 38-43).

What I find most interesting about this passage is the complete metrical displacement of the motivic chain. In the opening, the motive was first introduced on bar four of the hypermeter, then repeated twice after the phrase downbeat. In this section, the motive is played in bar one of the hypermeter and repeated four times, leading forward in a downward spiral to the strong beat one. Each of the red boxes shows the upbeat unit and where it leads to. The green boxes represent the final upbeat motion into the strong structural downbeat of each phrase. These parts occupy the strongest place metrically in the hierarchy of the hypermeter, and should be played as such.