The opening of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is possibly the most iconic moment in classical music; the interpretation of these bars as Fate knocking at the door has always resonated very powerfully in the popular imagination.
So strong are these associations that Rachmaninov used the figure as the basis of his song Sud’ba (Fate); the text literally depicts Fate’s taps on the door, so the connotations of the motif in this new context are impossible to mistake.
I have always felt, however, that Beethoven’s music is more ambiguous than this stereotype allows: to be sure, the tragic intensity is very much present, but it exists alongside a playfulness which is far harder to pin down with extra-musical images. Indeed, E.T.A. Hoffmann identified this duality as one of the work’s defining elements when he wrote in 1813 that “there alternate in restless flight the most marvellous pictures in which joy and grief, melancholy and ecstasy, come side by side or intermingled to the fore.” With this in mind, I have taken material from the Rachmaninov song as the basis of In Restless Flight, and, while preserving the violence which the song accentuates, have tried to recuperate the playfulness of Beethoven’s original Symphony.