Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, was described by Richard Wagner as a veritable ‘apotheosis of the dance’, thus underscoring the primacy of rhythm and bodily impulse within the very architecture of the work.
André Boucourechliev
Of the nine symphonies composed by Ludwig van Beethoven between 1799 and 1824, the Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, is, without question, the one that lends itself most readily to dance, if only because rhythm so often prevails over melody.
As in a delicate play of reflection, the performance opens with a sequence of electronic music entitled Freiheit/Extasis, composed by Diego Noguera and danced by the company Sasha Waltz & Guests. “Freedom” and “ecstasy” evoke both the context in which the Seventh was created and the choreographer’s own project in this work, which sets in tension the relationship between individual liberties and social constraints.
It was indeed towards the end of his life, when he was losing his hearing, that Ludwig van Beethoven created the Symphony No. 7. The composer was then engaged in a dialogue with the inventor of the metronome, Johann Nepomuk Maelzel. And the question of rhythm lay at the very heart of his work, even as he stood as a powerless witness to the failure of the French Revolution and to an enforced return to former traditions. As the desire for social transformation met with the era of the European Restorations, freedoms gradually contracted and horizons began to narrow.
These revolutionary ideals, which shaped the political, philosophical and aesthetic experiments of the nineteenth century, still cast a long shadow over present-day history, and Sasha Waltz grasped them in the summer of 2021 in Delphi, when she was creating a choreography to two of the four movements of the Seventh as part of a European artistic project for the television channel Arte: Mit Beethoven durch Europa (Through Europe with Beethoven). She had then worked in close collaboration with the conductor Teodor Currentzis and, upon her return, resolved to complete her choreographic journey on the entire work.
Conceived for fourteen dancers, Beethoven 7, created in Berlin in 2023, offers a reading of the master of the symphony’s score through movement: music and dance are articulated and interwoven as rarely before, combining seamlessly across the two parts of a performance that, time and again, draws the audience’s attention to the question of freedom, beginning with freedom of expression.
