Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony traces a journey that the composer described as moving “from struggle to victory.” The work starts with a famously anguished opening melody and ends with a major-key tutti celebration. 

In the first three episodes of the podcast series The 5th, from Vox’s Switched on Pop, the musicians of the New York Philharmonic deconstructed the symphony’s musical drama and legacy. In the fourth and final episode, key players in the contemporary orchestral landscape reflect on how the Fifth continues to shape our understanding of the world of classical music.

It’s a crucial time for such discussions, because classical music, like so many areas of US cultural life, has undergone what the Washington Post calls a “long overdue” reckoning in relation to race and gender in 2020. One pressing issue is whose works are being performed and commissioned — and whose are not. Last year, only 8 percent of pieces performed by major symphony orchestras were composed by women. The Institute for Composer Diversity polled 120 orchestral seasons and found that fewer than 6 percent of performed works were by composers from “underrepresented racial cultural and ethnic heritages.” This leaves classical institutions grappling with two sets of obligations that often seem in conflict: righting an inherited history of classical music, and preserving the repertoire of the symphonic tradition.

Beethoven himself had little to do with creating the narrow culture of classical music that developed in the centuries following his death in 1827. His politics tended toward the revolutionary; he declared in an 1819 letter that “freedom and progress” was the aim of his art. But Beethoven’s sheer popularity — in 2019, he was the most-performed composer around the world — has made him a de facto symbol of classical music. 

With 2020 marking the composer’s 250th birthday, it’s an ideal time to rediscover the Fifth’s message of resilience and transformation, especially as classical institutions are working to mediate their goals of inclusion and preservation. As the New York Philharmonic’s CEO and president Deborah Borda says in The 5th, “one of the critical tasks in front of us as we guide these iconic artistic institutes is uncovering the right intersection between the social imperative and the artistic imperative.”

To that end, Borda and the Philharmonic have initiated the largest commissioning project for women composers in the orchestra’s history, Project 19. Nineteen women are creating original works for the orchestra to perform, including Tania León’s piece Stride, which was inspired by the life of Susan B. Anthony and premiered in February, right before the Covid-19 pandemic caused the Philharmonic to suspend its season. 

Though the pandemic has put all orchestras, the Philharmonic included, in a perilous position, it has also highlighted how such institutions might rethink the conventions of classical music. With its concert hall dark, the Philharmonic is trying to reach new audiences through its Bandwagon project, for which the orchestra retrofitted a pickup truck to bring Philharmonic musicians to all five New York City boroughs to perform “pull-up” concerts. For this series, it has commissioned new works including the mesmerizing string trio Loop by Carlos Simon, recipient of the 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence recognizing extraordinary classical Black and Latinx musicians.

In addition to increasing the representation of new composers, the Philharmonic is also commissioning new works that directly address classical music’s history. Last year, it premiered David Lang’s opera Prisoner of the State, which reworks Beethoven’s 1805 opera Fidelio to confront contemporary social issues. Lang fell in love with Fidelio — a work that is half prison drama and half comic love story — after seeing it in his 20s, but asked himself, “What would this piece be like if it didn’t pull its punches?” in addressing the darkness of the carceral state. With Prisoner of the State, Lang’s aim was to build on Beethoven’s work to create a beautiful, austere opera examining the emotional and political ramifications of imprisonment.   

Lang traces his freedom to create and recreate back to Beethoven’s Fifth and the way the symphony’s opening melody (dun dun dun DUNNNN) becomes a throughline that spans the whole multi-movement piece. “This idea that you have something that happens at the beginning of the piece that you have to hold on to as a listener for an hour, that’s a revolutionary idea,” he says. “Beethoven invented that and we take it for granted now, so I think there’s a way in which everything that we do — including me writing a piece that challenges something from the past — shows that we have inherited this legacy from Beethoven.”

Lang’s view shows how Beethoven’s Fifth still matters in 2020, and the importance of listening to it deeply and critically. This mode of listening is what motivated The 5th, our effort to hear this inescapable symphony with fresh ears, aided by insights from musicians who know the piece inside and out. 

Because no matter how many times they play it, the meaning of the piece continues to evolve.

New York Philharmonic horn player Leelanee Sterrett says that every orchestra member brings “a different interpretation to their parts each time.” When violinist and concertmaster Frank Huang performs the Fifth, he thinks about the wars and conflict raging in Europe while Beethoven composed: “To project this kind of triumph and joy … you have to feel like he was expecting the best in people. He had to have so much optimism and hope … to put something like that in music at that time.” For Huang, the work remains especially relevant given that “arguably, we’re kind of back in that similar environment these days.”

The Fifth is still essential listening because it carries an evergreen message of being unafraid to pursue the light during periods of darkness. For Anthony McGill, clarinetist and 2020 recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize for excellence and leadership in classical music, “this one, it wears well … it keeps its shine.” 

Commissioning new works, taking them to the streets, reimagining the classical canon, and continuing to perform and listen to the Fifth anew all are part of an effort for classical institutions and audiences to move forward while honoring the past. This effort doesn’t tarnish Beethoven’s legacy — in fact, it celebrates a composer who wanted to break all the rules in pursuit of a better world.

Listen to how Beethoven’s Fifth isn’t just a museum piece, but a living testament to revolutionary creativity and addressing social issues, on Movement IV of The 5th, available now.  

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Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony starts with an anguished opening theme — dun dun dun DUNNNN — and ends with a glorious, major-key melody. Since its 1808 premiere, audiences have interpreted that progression from struggle to victory as a metaphor for Beethoven’s personal resilience in the face of his oncoming deafness. 

Or rather, that’s long been the popular read among those in power, especially the wealthy white men who embraced Beethoven and turned his symphony into a symbol of their superiority and importance. For some in other groups — women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color — Beethoven’s symphony may be predominantly a reminder of classical music’s history of exclusion and elitism. One New York City classical music fan wrote in the 1840s, for example, that he wished “all women shall be gagged by officers duly licensed for the purpose before they’re allowed to enter a concert room.”

Before Beethoven’s time, classical music culture looked and sounded quite different. When Mozart premiered his Symphony 31 in the late 1700s, it was standard for audiences to clap, cheer, and yell “da capo!” (Italian for “from the beginning!”) in the middle of a performance. After Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony debuted in the early 1800s, these norms changed — both because the rising industrial merchant class took ownership of concert halls and because of shifts in the music itself. 

As we explored in episodes I and II of the Switched On Pop podcast series The 5th, the musical complexity of Beethoven’s symphony required a different kind of listening. The Fifth’s four-note opening theme occurs and recurs in variations throughout the symphony, slowly shifting from minor to major keys and mirroring Beethoven’s experience with deafness. The Fifth’s creative rule-breaking — subverting the classical sonata form in the first movement, for example — requires close listening to fully grasp.

In Mozart’s day, each movement in a symphony was self-contained, like a collection of short stories. Beethoven’s Fifth acted more like a novel, asking audiences to follow a single story that unfolded over an entire four-movement symphony. New norms of concert behavior developed in turn. Sitzfleisch, or “sitting still,” became the ultimate desideratum for showing one’s understanding of the new language of classical music. Over time, these norms crystallized into a set of etiquette rules (e.g., “don’t clap mid-piece”) to enhance the new listening experience. 

In the third episode of The 5th, we explore how Beethoven’s symphony was used to generate the strict culture of classical music — and the politics that undergird those norms of behavior.

Though concert etiquette that evolved in response to the Fifth may have had the goal of venerating the music, it can also act as a source of gatekeeping. “Polite society” first emerged as a set of cultural standards developed during the mid-18th century as bourgeois class signifiers. In Beethoven’s time, new social etiquette extended into the concert hall.

Today, some aspects of classical culture are still about policing who’s in and who’s out. When you walk into a standard concert hall, there’s an established set of conventions and etiquette (“don’t cough!”; “don’t cheer!”; “dress appropriately!”) that can feel as much about demonstrating belonging as appreciating the music. 

For classical music critic James Bennett II, Beethoven’s popularity and centrality in classical culture is part of the problem. “As you perpetuate the idea that the giants of the music all look the same, it conveys to the ‘other’ that there’s not a stake in that music for them,” he says.

New York Philharmonic clarinetist Anthony McGill, one of the few Black musicians in the ensemble, agrees that Beethoven’s inescapability can make classical music appear monolithic and stifling. He likens the inescapability of the Fifth Symphony to a “wall” between classical music and new, diverse audiences. 

“If you pretend like there’s no other music out there, that Beethoven is the greatest music that ever will matter,” says McGill, then orchestras will alienate new listeners, since “we’re not promoting any of the composers alive today that are trying to become the Beethovens of their day.”

Find out how Beethoven’s Fifth went from symbolizing freedom to a more complicated legacy — and how the symphony’s original meaning might be recovered — in Movement III of The 5th, available now.

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Update, September 16: This article has been updated to clarify some of the historical views of the Fifth Symphony and problems of representation in classical music.

In the first movement of his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven set up a battle between hope and despair. The dark side of that spectrum is represented by the symphony’s anguished opening notes: dun dun dun DUNNNN. Over the course of the next three movements, Beethoven tries to overcome a dark real-world fate with bright, major-key melodies — and keeps getting defeated.

With each high and low, the arc of the symphony becomes clear: This battle isn’t just about major and minor harmonies, it’s about the will to live in the face of adversity. 

In the second episode of our four-part podcast series The 5th, a collaboration between Vox’s Switched on Pop and the New York Philharmonic, we break down exactly how Beethoven keeps listeners on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear whether the symphony will end in darkness or light. 

After the stormy first movement, the second movement introduces a hopeful C major passage played by the Philharmonic’s French horn player, Leelanee Sterrett. Sterrett says every time she performs that melody, it feels like she’s “crashing the party,” bringing some joy and life to the somber proceedings. But as quickly as her part appears, it “sort of dies away.” 

In the third movement, the same thing happens: A bright major melody gets silenced by dark minor chords. By the time we get to the final movement, the suspense is palpable. How will this story end? Can hopeful major chords win out? 

Spoiler alert: The answer is a resounding “ja!” The Philharmonic’s concertmaster and first violinist Frank Huang describes the symphony’s final movement as “euphoric”: “The horns have this beautiful, heroic melody, and then the orchestra has these big chords and it just feels like you’ve conquered something that’s been bothering you your whole life … like when you finally reach the destination you’ve been working for for years.”

That feeling of relief, for both the orchestra and the audience, is palpable. “Every time I get there, I look around and see everybody kind of enjoying themselves,” Frank says. “You look out at the audience, and people are just mesmerized.”

For Beethoven, the symphony’s ending wasn’t just about delivering a bright, major-key melody. It was about persevering in the face of hardship, with contrasting harmonies and melodies acting as metaphors for life and death.

Right before Beethoven composed the Fifth Symphony, he wrote to his brothers that his oncoming deafness had “brought me to the verge of despair.” He questioned whether he could go on: “but little more and I would have put an end to my life.” What saved him? “Only Art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured.”

Listen how Beethoven overcomes his musical and personal perils in Movement II of The 5th, available now. 

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They say you should never meet your idols — that you’ll only be disappointed. We had this possibility in mind going into our first interview with Carly Rae Jepsen, the pop star who inspired us to start our podcast Switched on Pop back in 2012. Back then, Jepsen’s hit “Call Me Maybe” was the soundtrack for our conversion from rock and jazz snobs to true pop believers. As we analyzed the ubiquitous summer bop, we were blown away by how Jepsen’s musical choices reinforced the lyrics’ sense of nervous anticipation.

The narrator of “Call Me Maybe” switches from past tense in the verse (“I wasn’t looking for this”) to present tense in the chorus (“here’s my number”). As she does, her vocal melody explodes into dynamic motion to underscore the plunge into real time. We were hooked. From then on, our ears could be described as pre-Carly Rae and post-Carly Rae. We would seek to better understand the sounds of Top 40 pop in our weekly podcast, all under the watchful eye of the artist we referred to as “Saint Jepsen.”

Six years and hundreds of pleading emails later, the time had come to meet the muse and unpack her latest offering, Dedicated Side B. In the course of composing her last two albums, Emotion and Dedicated, Jepsen wrote more than 200 songs. Many of her favorite works didn’t make it onto either final album, so she’s started a tradition of releasing “Side B” records on the one-year anniversary of her last release. Her newest collection of unreleased music fluidly crosses decades of musical history and spans a vast emotional range.

We spoke with Jepsen over Zoom about how she curated her latest B-side release from a massive body of work. Would this beatific figure, once described by poet Hanif Abdurraqib and the “most honest pop musician working,” live up to her reputation? Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

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Charlie Harding

It is the one-year anniversary of Dedicated. What were you wanting to accomplish on that record?

Carly Rae Jepsen

I had a mission statement to start off with, but I ended up straying very far away from that. I had this fake album title called Music to Clean Your House To. I thought, that’s when I listen to music at this age. It’s not raging, it’s chill, disco kind of sounds [that] sounded interesting to me.

But the idea of it being exclusively disco was sort of pigeonholing me ’cause it wasn’t coming out naturally. I think “Julien” [the first song on the record] is the closest thing I got to it, but the rest of the album went in different directions — ’90s, ’80s, all the colors. I let go of the rules of knowing exactly what I was going to make and just allowed myself to play in all the genres of pop that I was attracted to.

Charlie Harding

You have a brand new release, Dedicated Side B. How did it come together? 

Carly Rae Jepsen

I have a reputation with my label that I think, at this point, it’s kind of common knowledge that I’m a bit of an overwriter.

Charlie Harding

What do you mean by that?

Carly Rae Jepsen

Well, I write all the time. Even when I don’t have a project right now, I’m writing. It’s very therapeutic for me. It’s my greatest joy. So it’s not like this is just my job. Songwriting is something that I am very passionate about. The truth is, by the time Emotion was ready, I had 200 songs to select from. And same with Dedicated. That’s a lot, right?

My publisher says I store songs in my cheeks like a chipmunk. But it was really hard to select [which ones to put on the album], because there were a lot of different places that I experimented with. … I always kind of knew that I wanted Dedicated to be a two-part album.

I once said when I was done with this album, “Would it be weird to release, like, a 50-song deluxe [edition]?” Like, yeah, that’s weird. No one does that. Okay. We’ll start with 17 and then we’ll get to the rest later. And it’s kind of fun to do it on the one-year anniversary. I’m kind of making a tradition with that.

Nate Sloan

You’re not alone in hoarding songs. The songwriter Irving Berlin [the grandfather of the American Songbook] had what he called his trunk songs, which was literally a trunk filled with hundreds of songs that had never been published. Occasionally, he would pull one out. For example, “God Bless America” was a song that sat in his trunk for 30 years. And then he was like, “Let’s try this.” The song almost became the national anthem.

Carly Rae Jepsen

That’s amazing. I call them albums that I’ve buried in my backyard. I have an entire album called Disco Sweat that no one will ever hear. It was really fun to make, though. “Cut to the Feeling” is a good example of that. It was never going to come out. And then I did a voiceover for the cartoon film Ballerina, and they were like, “Do you have any tunes?” And I’m like, “Well, this one’s very theatrical. I think it could work.” So that’s sort of how I roll. [The song made the year-end best lists on Billboard, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair.]

Nate Sloan

You have hundreds of songs buried in your backyard — how do you choose which ones go on the album?

Carly Rae Jepsen

I go a little crazy. That’s when I turn to my friends and my family. We have these listening parties at my house where I feed everyone and give them copious amounts of wine hoping that they’ll have opinions about the music. And then they all send in their votes to me, including my bandmates, my manager, and girlfriend Alex — she sends me notes in the night. There starts to be at least six to eight common songs that are all resonating with people. Then I pick the rest myself from my favorites and fill in the blanks of what’s missing from the album.

I take the album quite seriously as a whole body of work that I really, really want to get right. I’ll rate the songs for energy level, and if there’s too many fives, then I’ll think, what’s a two? Where do we put the one? And I also rate the songs on subject matter. I’ll give each song a word — like “In My Room” was sex — and I’ll look for all the different emotions.

Nate Sloan

Is there color-coding involved?

Carly Rae Jepson

I could show you the boards. They’re embarrassing.

Nate Sloan

There’s a board? Like you’re trying to catch a serial killer or something?

Carly Rae Jepsen

Yeah. It’s like A Beautiful Mind. Actually, it’s embarrassing, because I have them out about my house and I forget. Then if I ever have somebody come over, beforehand, I would be like, “Don’t look at that, I promise.”

Charlie Harding

What are some of the other themes that people are going to hear on this Dedicated Side B record?

Carly Rae Jepsen

I tried to explore a lot of different things. The opening track, “This Love Isn’t Crazy,” only ended up making the album at the last minute and is now my favorite track. I wanted to open with something really theatrical. With “Julien,” the opening song on Dedicated, I went really subtle. So I wanted to flip the switch and just be like, “Welcome to love, everyone! We’re going to have a party! Stop cleaning your house!” 

I also wanted to acknowledge the loneliness that some people might be going through. So I slipped in a song called “Solo” for that very reason. It’s a song that sort of hooks on to, like, “So what? You’re not in love? We’re going to shine bright on yourself dancing solo!” I was looking for motivational, uplifting sort of feelings.

Nate Sloan

You described yourself as an overwriter, perhaps a workaholic in some ways. Which suggests that even though you’re just putting out this record, you’re still writing. What are you working on right now?

Carly Rae Jepsen

Tavish [Crowe, Jepsen’s main songwriting partner] and I have already made an entire quarantine album. And it’s very different. It’s kind of fun. We have to do it from Zoom. It’s been a challenge, but a really fun one. You write differently that way. You have more time to have space in between the decisions you’re making, and more time to be away from the song for a minute. So I find it to be a whole new style of writing. I really like it.

Charlie Harding

Well, that’s really encouraging for us, because we’re vibing off this Dedicated Side B record, and we are excited to see what continues to emerge. 

Carly Rae Jepsen

Thank you. I mean, maybe a little of the joint Disco Sweat in the backyard. We’ll see.

Nate Sloan

Carly, this has been so much fun. Thank you for joining us and thank you for giving us a reason to talk about pop music every week for the last five years. This is all your fault.

Carly Rae Jepsen

Well, I’m very sorry, but thank you so much.