Over the spring months, my friend and I did a listening project, listening to all of Beethoven’s symphonies, one per week, as many times as we wanted to in that week. We then listened to all of them back to back. I also listened to each accompanying episode of the Sticky Notes classical music podcast and the ScoreMan videos on YouTube, which show the score as it plays, breaking it down into movements and sections. And now, after all that listening, here are my rankings and tiers, plus some favorite movements and moments.
I originally said I was going to rank the symphonies, but it’s quite hard to rank them. It’s much easier to tier them. If I were to rank them, though, I think I’d do this:
7
9
5
6
4
3
8
2
1
The seventh symphony emerges as my favorite, and I’m doing the crazy thing of ranking 4 over 3. I didn’t expect that at first, but when I listened to them all together, I liked 4 more as a whole. However, a tiered system is a more accurate representation of my feelings on them:
Tier one:
7, 9, 5
Tier two:
6, 3, 4, 8
Tier three:
2, 1
I’d probably still stick with my rankings in tier one, though they are pretty close, but in tier two, they are interchangeable.
Here are some particular movements that stand out to me (I love many movements, but I want to call these out in particular):
Symphony 2, Movement 1
Symphony 4, Movement 3 (this sounds like the theme to the movie The Witches, anyone else?)
Symphony 9, Movement 2
And now a couple of my favorite moments that I want to highlight:
Symphony 3, Movement 1 Coda
Symphony 5, Transition from Movement 3 to Movement 4
I love a good listening project, and I’m so glad I’m now familiar with all the symphonies. I had previously only known 5 and 7, and had heard the last movement of 9 many times (I know I played it in elementary school orchestra, well, a version of it), and 6 from Fantasia. And I highly recommend the Sticky Notes podcast and ScoreMan when getting to know a classical piece. The only other listening project like this that I have done is Mahler’s symphonies, one per year over 9 years! But that was years ago, and I think I need to revisit them. And I’ll take recs for more listening projects.