When Did the Second Movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony Become "Sad Music"?

On 8 December 1813, in the large hall of the University of Vienna, Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, received its premiere at a charity concert for Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the Battle of Hanau. The event was organized by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, the impresario best remembered for the metronome. Coming just weeks after Napoleon's decisive defeat at Leipzig, the concert was an overwhelming success — so much so that a repeat performance had to be arranged four days later, on 12 December.

Within that success, the enthusiasm for the second movement, the Allegretto in A minor, stood apart. The audience demanded it be encored on the spot, and kept demanding it — "as always," one reviewer noted — at performance after performance. By 1814, the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung had crowned it "the crown of contemporary instrumental music." Even as parts of the symphony drew complaints about its "vagaries and dissonances" (as an 1824 critique put it), the second movement's popularity never wavered.

So far, a familiar story. But read those early reviews closely and something odd emerges.

The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, praising the premiere, wrote that "the Andante (A minor) was called out da capo and delighted both connoisseurs and aficionados." A review of the concert of 2 January 1814 admired the "enthralling Andante"; the report on the 27 February repeat again spoke of "the Andante (A minor), the crown of contemporary instrumental music." By November of that year, the Vienna Friedensblätter had drifted further still, describing "an easy Adagio in A minor" (van der Zanden 2025).

What Beethoven wrote in the score is "Allegretto."

Allegretto: a trifle lively. Distinctly faster than Andante, let alone Adagio. The metronome mark Beethoven himself published in 1817 is crotchet = 76 — a tempo that flows rather than treads. And yet for two centuries this movement has mostly been performed at a solemn, almost funereal pace. As the pianist Charles Rosen summed it up near the end of the twentieth century: "Many conductors prefer a heavier and more portentous tempo."

To head off a misunderstanding: the premiere itself was apparently not slow. Beethoven conducted these concerts in person, and Louis Spohr — who, as we shall see, played in the orchestra at the premiere — remembered the tempo as crotchet = 72, almost exactly the published 76. The explanation lies elsewhere: in Beethoven's day, "Andante" had a second life as a colloquial catchall for "the relatively calm second movement of a symphony," independent of tempo (the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung wrote of the Eroica that "instead of the Andante there is a funeral march"). What the reviewers recorded, in other words, was not a tempo report but a nickname (van der Zanden 2025).

The trouble is that the nickname took on a life of its own. The label "Andante" settled in first; then, over the decades, it dragged down the actual tempo — and, with it, the meaning of the movement. Who wrote the "Andante" that Beethoven never did? This article follows the question through two hundred years, guided principally by a recent study that traces the movement's reception in full (van der Zanden 2025).

A Movement Made of Rhythm

First, the music itself.

The protagonist of this movement is not a melody. After an unstable wind chord opens like a curtain, the lower strings begin to tread: "DUM–da-da–DUM–DUM" — long, short-short, long, long — a figure that barely moves from a single pitch. It is too plain to call a melody; it is closer to a walking pattern. That gait persists from the first bar to the last, while countermelodies wind themselves around it.

This "long–short-short" and "long–long" happen to be the two basic feet of ancient Greek verse — the dactyl and the spondee — and the musicologist Maynard Solomon has read into the symphony a deliberate revival of the rhythms of antiquity (Solomon 2003). Richard Wagner's famous description of the whole work as "the apotheosis of the dance" points at the same underlying fact: in this music, rhythm, not melody, is the main character.

The theme's origins hold a surprise of their own. As the nineteenth-century sketch scholar Gustav Nottebohm discovered, the melody was first jotted down in 1806, intended for the String Quartet Op. 59 No. 3 (van der Zanden 2025). Material that had slept in a drawer for more than five years became, inside a symphony, one of the most beloved pieces of music in Europe.

And one detail matters here: neither the sketches nor the autograph betray any hesitation about tempo. The word "Allegretto" in the autograph shows no trace of a revising pen (van der Zanden 2025).

Popularity Out of Control

Once the score and parts were published at the end of 1816, the second movement's fame burst out of the symphony altogether. Arrangements appeared for piano solo, piano four-hands, string quintet; the movement began turning up on programmes by itself.

Among those who cashed in was the elderly Viennese composer Joseph Gelinek, famous for keyboard variations on popular tunes. Gelinek issued a variation set on the movement, and the advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung of 16 December 1816 is worth reading closely: "Variations for the Pianoforte on the sublime Andante in A minor from the new grand Symphony in A major by Ludwig van Beethoven" (van der Zanden 2025).

A colleague who knew perfectly well what the score said marketed it as an "Andante" — and the advertiser was Steiner, the very publisher who had just issued the symphony. Van der Zanden (2025) suggests the reason was commercial: a comfortable, exalted "Andante" made a better sales pitch than a less pliable "Allegretto."

In Paris, something bolder was under way. In 1821 the conductor François-Antoine Habeneck, later the founder of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, performed Beethoven's Second Symphony with its slow movement replaced by the Allegretto of the Seventh (van der Zanden 2025). Among those raised on such editorial performances was the young Hector Berlioz. For Berlioz, the Seventh was a work "célèbre par son adagio"; the movement was a "miraculous elegy" opening with a "sorrowful sigh," a "valley of tears" whose immense suffering he compared to the Lamentations of Jeremiah. In later years he upgraded "Adagio" to "Andante," but he heard a dirge entwined with prayer to the end of his life.

Another layer of association then arrived from an unexpected direction. In 1823 Schubert published his Wanderer Fantasy. The theme of its Adagio section, a self-quotation from the song "Der Wanderer," pulses with the very same long–short-short rhythm — and Schubert deployed it, in a hushed, frozen pianissimo, as a gesture of death and darkness. Van der Zanden (2025) suggests that the associations of that much-loved work may well have seeped into how Beethoven's movement was heard — even though the two pieces have nothing whatever to do with one another.

By the 1820s, then, an image had settled in — an "Andante (or Adagio) in A minor," slow, sorrowful, vaguely sacred — quite independent of what the score said.

The decisive blow, however, was still to come. It was delivered by the man who had stood closest to Beethoven.

Schindler's "Pious Andante"

Anton Schindler: Beethoven's sometime factotum in the composer's last years, author of the first full-scale biography after his death — and the man who took possession of the conversation books, the notebooks through which the deaf composer communicated.

In 1831 Schindler launched a campaign asserting that "poetic ideas" lay behind Beethoven's music. The first movement of the Seventh, he explained, enacted the drama of a "moral hero who succeeds in conquering fate," and the second movement followed accordingly:

Now the mourning soul throws himself down before God and sends a prayer in the Andante quasi Allegretto, which is expressed in an incomparably beautiful manner in the violins and cellos.

— Anton Schindler, 1831 (via van der Zanden 2025)

Note what has happened: Schindler has quietly rewritten the tempo marking itself as "Andante quasi Allegretto." Beethoven, he claimed, had been dismayed in later years to hear the movement rushed, had resolved to change the marking and to fix the metronome at crotchet = 80 — and the evidence, he added, was "recorded in a notebook which I have in my possession."

Schindler called the movement the "pious Andante" (religiöse Andante). The A major middle section was "a star in the darkness of night," the awakening of faith in an afterlife; and in the closing pages, where winds and strings pass fragments of the phrase between them, celestial voices were whispering: "Peace be with you, calm now, calm" (Friede sey mit euch).

At the Lower Rhine Music Festival in Aachen in June 1840, this conviction produced a public incident. The Seventh was conducted by Louis Spohr, no less, and Schindler — outraged by what he heard as reckless speed — confronted him afterwards. The quarrel spilled into the press, where Schindler complained that Spohr's second movement had "drifted into an ongoing Allegro" by its final section. Spohr's reply was devastating in its simplicity: he reminded readers that in 1813 he had played in the orchestra at the symphony's premiere under Beethoven's own direction, and that the tempo he remembered for the Allegretto was crotchet = 72 — steady, with no fluctuations (van der Zanden 2025).

The memory of a musician who had sat in the orchestra matched Beethoven's own published metronome mark (76) almost exactly. Schindler did not yield. In the 1845 revision of his biography he produced what looked like incontrovertible proof: entries from the conversation books, allegedly from 1823 — "Thus, Andante crotchet = 80, no longer 'quasi allegretto'"; "For me, the Andante is the optimum ideal of sacredness and divinity."

That these entries were forged — written into the conversation books by Schindler himself after Beethoven's death, probably between 1840 and 1845 — would not come to light for roughly a century, when twentieth-century scholarship exposed his wholesale falsifications (van der Zanden 2025). Until then, the story that Beethoven had wanted to slow the movement down circulated as the master's own words. Even George Grove, in 1896, passed Schindler along, writing that Beethoven had been "most anxious that this movement should not be taken too fast" (Grove 1896).

The forgery was never only about tempo. It was a forgery about meaning — prayer, piety, celestial peace. The "pious Andante" was of a piece with the image of the master that Schindler curated after his death.

What Is This Music About? A Century of Competing Answers

Schindler was hardly the only dreamer. In the German-speaking world of the 1820s and 30s, when he began his campaign, critical opinion was converging on the idea that instrumental music was not a mere "play of sounds" but the bearer of some narrative or idea (van der Zanden 2025). Since Beethoven himself said almost nothing about the "meaning" of his works, critics competed to supply stories of their own. And every one of those stories pushed the music toward slowness and weight.

The theorist Adolf Bernhard Marx (1824) heard a "lofty mourning procession": captured soldiers dragged through the streets, their entreaties moving the hearts of their victors — a reading that turned the walking rhythm into the shuffle of exhausted prisoners. A writer in the journal Cäcilia (1825) heard, in the same music, the opposite scene: a village wedding, with a cello theme delivering the moving address to the bridal couple. That reading was taken up in 1835 by the twenty-five-year-old Robert Schumann, who dreamed in print of choirboys with burning candles, a priest at the altar, and a bride pronouncing the "yes" that determines all eternity. Schumann at the time was being kept from marrying Clara Wieck by her father — a reading, in other words, that projected his own longing onto the music (van der Zanden 2025).

A funeral procession and a wedding. That two opposite stories could be read from the same bars says less about the music than about the listeners: these were not explanations but self-portraits.

Wagner mocked the "church procession and blessings" school — and then offered an image of his own: the ceaselessly striding rhythm is a mighty oak, and the plaintive countermelody the ivy that winds around it, ivy that without the trunk would only tangle wildly on the ground (via van der Zanden 2025). Poetic, certainly. But it is worth noting what Wagner, for once, had heard accurately: the protagonist of this movement is the stride itself.

In France, meanwhile, interpretation crossed over from words into practice. The movement came to serve as a de facto requiem, performed at memorial services for the composer Antonin Reicha (1836), the painter Hippolyte Flandrin (1864) — and for Berlioz himself (1869) (van der Zanden 2025). A Paris programme note of 1893 went further than anyone:

The souls of the dead leave their sepulchres. They whisper, and their doleful sounds become more and more distinct as they advance toward the nave. Continuing their funeral procession, they rise and unfurl into the higher galleries. Slowly, life returns into them.

— Paris concert programme, 1893 (via van der Zanden 2025)

Music for the souls of the dead rising from their graves. Heard through stories like these, the tempo could only sink. There was no longer anywhere for "Allegretto — a trifle lively" to live.

Rehabilitation, and the Sadness That Remains

In the twentieth century, the first major figure to push against the current was Arturo Toscanini, who in the 1930s performed the movement at something like its written tempo — and found the ears of his time unwilling. The tide only began to turn in the 1980s, when the period-performance movement set about scrubbing away the nineteenth century's accumulated "traditions" (van der Zanden 2025). Today, performances close to Beethoven's metronome mark are no longer rare.

Even so, mainstream concert life still favours the heavier tread, and scholarly writing continues to describe the movement as carrying "associations with death and graveyard" (van der Zanden 2025). Film does the same. When the Allegretto swells under the climax of The King's Speech (2010), what we are hearing is the direct descendant of the nineteenth century's sublime, sorrowful "Andante."

Is the correct hearing, then, a brisk Allegretto — and all the sadness simply a mistake?

Not quite. As we saw at the outset, the nickname "Andante" was born at concerts Beethoven himself conducted. Beethoven himself, dashing off corrections to his publisher Steiner in 1816, referred to the movement in passing as "im Andante" — evidence of how natural the colloquial "Andante" was (van der Zanden 2025). The A minor shading, the relentless tread, the entwining countermelody — everything in the music that sounds like sorrow was there from the beginning. That is why the audience demanded an encore on the very first night.

But fixing that sorrow into a "pious prayer," dragging the tempo down, and forging the master's posthumous testimony to sanctify the result — that was not Beethoven. That was Schindler, and the century he spoke for.

Where does the sadness in the performance you hear come from — the score of 1812, or the interpretations the nineteenth century layered on top of it? Learning to tell the two apart sharpens the resolution at which you hear this movement. Listen with the tread of crotchet = 76 in your ears, and what emerges is not music that stands still and mourns, but music that keeps walking with its sorrow.

Sources

• Jos van der Zanden, "Peace Be With You, Calm Now: On the Fate of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony 'Allegretto'," Nineteenth-Century Music Review 23/1 (2025), pp. 1–25 — open access
• Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination (University of California Press, 2003), Chapter 6, "The Seventh Symphony and the Rhythms of Antiquity"
• Nicholas Mathew, Political Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
• George Grove, Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies (1896)
• Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849) — source of "the apotheosis of the dance"