Beethoven's Symphony No. 4

In summer 1806, Beethoven had to give up his summer vacation home in order to pay off his and his family’s debts.  Despite the financial turmoil, the year was an extraordinarily productive one for him: the composer wrote many of his great works in that year, including the Razumovsky string quartets, the revision of what became Fidelio (including the Leonore Overture No. 3), the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies.  The Fourth Symphony, often overshadowed by the Third and the Fifth, is perhaps his least frequently performed symphony.  The work is a return to the grace and relative simplicity of Beethoven’s earlier classical style.  At the middle of the second movement stands an episode that distinguished musical analyst Donald Francis Tovey called “one of the most imaginative passages anywhere in Beethoven.”