The Theater an der Wien. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Vienna, Theater an der Wien, 22 December 1808, a Thursday of savage cold. The heating does not work, or does not exist; the audience keeps its coats on. The programme that Beethoven has organised for his own academy, the benefit concert for the composer, would make an artistic director faint today: the world premiere of the Sixth Symphony; the aria Ah! perfido; the Gloria from the Mass in C; the Fourth Piano Concerto with the composer as soloist; and that was only the first half. After the interval: the world premiere of the Fifth Symphony, the Sanctus from the Mass, a fantasy improvised by Beethoven at the piano, and as a finale the Choral Fantasy, written at the last minute expressly for the evening. Total running time: around four hours. In the cold.
It went, by ordinary standards, very badly. The orchestra, patched together and with a single full rehearsal, was at daggers drawn with the composer, who had quarrelled with them at an earlier rehearsal to the point of having to conduct from the wings; in the Choral Fantasy a misunderstanding over the repeats derailed the performance, and Beethoven stopped everything and made them start again, the supreme humiliation, in front of the paying audience. The accounts of those present, from the composer Reichardt down, swing between admiration and exhaustion: too much music, too new, too cold. In that lopsided evening, the audience heard for the first time, one after the other, the Fifth and the Sixth: the worst-organised evening in the history of concerts is also, for the density of masterpieces delivered to humanity all at once, the greatest ever.
Why we tell it today. Because the 1808 academy is the noble ancestor of a tradition dear to us: the marathon concert, music as an experience of shared physical endurance, the antipodes of the eighty-minute format with an interval that the twentieth-century museum has standardised. It is a tradition that never died: it runs through Satie’s marathons, through the all-nighters, and arrives at the experiences that blend concert and party until dawn, such as those from which the Classical Rave is born, which on 15 November brings this idea to the Sala Santa Cecilia. Duration, in music, is not a logistical detail: past a certain threshold listening changes nature, fatigue lowers the defences, and sound enters by doors the short format never opens. The Viennese audience of 1808 left frozen, exhausted, and with the Fifth and the Sixth inside them together: no reasonable evening would have given them as much. It is the lesson every era rediscovers when it has the courage to overrun: the right measure of music was not decided by the posted programme. Every so often, it is worth going back to check.