An 1816 Christmas benefit concert for the Hospital of St. Mark and an 1819 concert to benefit widows and orphans of the University of Vienna’s law faculty were two occasions at which Beethoven, making one of his increasingly rare appearances as a performer, led his Seventh Symphony.  The Seventh Symphony, now no more than six years since its première, received a tepid response.  Beethoven’s biographer Maynard Solomon writes that it “was faintly applauded and the beloved Allegretto failed to receive its customary encore, facts which Beethoven’s friends…quaintly attributed to the ‘dense crowding of the audience [which hindered the free use of the hands.”’  Vienna’s wild adulation of Beethoven was dying down for the time being.  Nevertheless, Beethoven’s creativity was not dying down, indeed, he was exploring new paths just at a time of personal turmoil over his deafness and the custody of his nephew.  The Seventh Symphony belongs to the end of the period of his heroic compositions epitomized by the Third (“Eroica”) and Fifth Symphonies.
    Elsewhere in the biography, Solomon collected brief impressions about the Seventh Symphony by those who followed Beethoven in the nineteenth century.  The imagery and character of these impressions is remarkably similar:

Berlioz heard a “Ronde des Paysans”  [Peasants’ Circle Dance] in the first movement; Wagner called it the “Apotheosis of the Dance”; Lenz saw it as a second Pastoral Symphony, complete with village wedding and peasant dances; Nohl visualized a Knight’s Festival and Oulibicheff the masquerade or diversion of a multitude drunk with joy and wine.  For A. B. Marx it was the wedding or festival celebration of a warrior people.  More recently, Bekker called it a “bacchic orgy,” and Ernest Newman described it as “the upsurge of a powerful dionysiac impulse, a divine intoxication of the spirit.” 

A festive character pervading the symphony makes an impression on each of the writers no matter how it is expressed.  The Introduction, the most extensive symphonic introduction that Beethoven composed thus far, begins with a bang and creates an almost unbearable sense of anticipation of the festive happenings waiting to unfold.  The Introduction produces two seemingly contradictory impressions: first, it is highly directed to the famous A-major theme in the flute, and second, it drifts from one key to another.  But Beethoven interrupts this apparent drift and seizes just the harmonies needed to restore anticipation of the theme, putting his listeners on the edge of their seats.  As soon as the solo flute begins to pipe in the characteristic rhythm of the first movement, the dance begins and continues unabated.  In rehearsal once, the conductor Bruno Walter commented that he conducted this work many times, but never once had the rhythm right all the way through.  Indeed the rhythm is as intricate as it is relentless.
    The second movement, Allegretto, may be slower than the others, but by slow movement standards, this is not a slow movement.  Rhythmically, the second movement features a steady dactylic (long, short, short) pattern in a haunting A minor that becomes increasingly intense and elaborate with each repetition.  This is the movement that audiences perennially demand as an encore.  The theme is not much: mostly we are aware of a single repeated note.  But what Beethoven achieves with harmony and variation around that note is what continues to appeal to audiences.
   I have heard the scherzo in countless documentaries, generally as background music to films on Romantic art.  This is the most frenzied of the dances, and it alternates with a contrasting section, a trio, that is somewhat less driven.  Toward the end, the trio makes an unexpected, untraditional additional appearance, though briefly.  This is one of Beethoven’s plays at deforming musical convention.
   Some thought Beethoven must have been drunk when he wrote the finale, or else it created the picture of someone intoxicated.  There are spots where one might imagine a scene among people arguing in confusion over some item that no one either has or can find.  The effect is comic; things go haywire then return to equilibrium in ongoing and restless alternation.