Beethoven composed the Fifth Symphony on the heels of the completed Eroica, and at a time when many works were coming to fruition: the Rasumovsky Quartets, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto and the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies. Yet in the economy and intensity of its first movement, and in its overall expression of a path from crisis to triumph ("per aspera ad astra"), the Fifth Symphony distinguishes itself from these other compositions. Its fame has only been abetted by its conciseness by which somehow the first five measures have become an abbreviation for all of Western culture.
    In a newly published book, BEETHOVEN: THE MUSIC AND THE LIFE, the distinguished musicologist Lewis Lockwood suggests that: "It would not be wrong to call the Fifth a 'sinfonia quasi fantasia.'" He notes further that an early sketch of Beethoven's symphony shows a three-movement plan in which the slow movement and minuet would be integrated as one movement (something Brahms does in the F# minor Piano Sonata); the symphony would then close with a c minor finale. This would be a very different Fifth indeed from the one we know which has four movements and a C major finale. Yet certain elements of fantasia do occur in the finished work, such as the mysterious migration from the third movement to the fourth. In making this connection, the timpanist, like a skilled artisan whose hammering can produce a facial expression on a sheet of metal, uses steady hammer blows to remake the expression of the music from one of gravity and despair to one of transcendence. Beethoven’s contemporary, composer Louis Spohr, admired this formal touch greatly, even though he castigated the symphony as a whole. It is one of Beethoven's most striking transformations of the so-called Fate motive that opens the symphony. In this sense, the wanderings and re-creations of the Fate motive partake of the poetic sense of fantasia and might be heard in that spirit rather than in the spirit of determinism or fatalism.
    Though difficult to imagine today, Beethoven and his Fifth Symphony were not entirely embraced by the music establishment of the early nineteenth century. A young Hector Berlioz had to insist that his professor attend a performance of Beethoven's Fifth. His professor was adamantly anti-Beethoven, and Berlioz thought surely the Fifth would turn him. After the performance, Berlioz could not wait to hear his teacher's impressions. Berlioz reports that the professor found the music so “amazing,” “wonderful” and “disturbing,” that as he tried to put on his hat, he exclaimed, "I couldn't find my head!!" Ultimately, the professor concluded that such music ought not to be written. Spohr thought similarly, as perhaps did Goethe who heard the first movement played by Felix Mendelssohn at the piano. Mendelssohn reports that the first thing Goethe said was: “This arouses no emotion; nothing but astonishment; it is grandiose.” But he said further: “It is very great; quite wild; it makes one fear that the house might fall down; what must it be like when all those men play together!”