The effect of this cessation of the rapid movement that has thus far animated the music is very dramatic, and the startling interruption of its peaceful flow by the loud chords at measures 228-231--as if they were impatient to begin the turmoil again--gives the whole passage a peculiarly vivid effect. This device is analogous to that employed in the novel when the author prepares his readers, by a page or two of peaceful narrative, for his most dramatic episode. The significance of this passage is, of course, due to its connection with the introductory phrase from which it sprang, but it should be noted that the whole passage is a re-creation from the original motive and not a restatement of it in another key. And its position in the movement is exactly at the point where some relief is needed from what might otherwise be a too great insistence on the first theme, and just before the beginning of the recapitulation, where the first theme is to appear in its original form. It will be found that such passages are usually placed in this position.
The themes in Beethoven's finest works are not only hammered out, as it were, from the rough metal, but we may say of them--as we cannot say of those of Haydn's and Mozart's--that they are pregnant with possibilities which are not fully realized until the composition is finished. With Haydn and Mozart the development section is usually a string of different versions of the original theme--as is the latter's G-minor symphony, first and last movements. With Beethoven the development section reveals what was latent in the original theme, but what had not been before realized. In the development section of the Fifth Symphony he not only convinces us by his logic, but overpowers us by the sweep of his eloquence.
IV. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF THE FIFTH SYMPHONY.
It is impossible to express in words the significance of this music, but it runs almost the complete gamut of human feeling. The opening theme is so incisive and has such a tremendous energy that it takes us into a new world. If we compare it with Mozart's first movement themes we realize at once that it deals with things that music had never attempted to express before. The second theme is not by any means a fine melody, being made up of a constantly reiterated phrase, but it has an appealing beauty of its own that we would not exchange for perfection. Occasionally the terrible asserts itself, as in those ominous chords with empty fifths in the coda (measures 481-482), while the whole movement seems to have been struck off at white heat.