A new book, a new recording and some old instruments, all addressing the most memorable phrase in music: the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Matthew Guerrieri has written a book about this ...

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony — with its famous, jolting first four-notes — broke expressive ground and overturned many of the formal concepts on which the classical symphony had been based. The scoring ...

Ludwig van Beethoven performed Symphony No. 5, perhaps the world's most famous musical composition, for the first time in public in Vienna on this day in history, Dec. 22, 1808. Among other incredible ...

It's one of the most famous musical passages ever written. Ludwig van Beethoven starts his Fifth Symphony with four percussive notes, then spends the next four movements inventing new ways to make ...

The opening four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 are the most iconic in all of music. There’s an apocryphal story that Beethoven called those four notes “fate knocking at the door.” But the very ...

2020 is here and along with it, the 250th Anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the greatest geniuses and humanists the world has ever known. When many people hear the name ...