Beethoven’s symphonies, masterpieces of musical architecture, offer with their everlasting power, in each new interpretation, a field of reflection on their value beyond the boundaries of the era in which they were created. A daring work, the youthful Symphony No. 1 for many bids farewell to the 18th century as it moves away from classicism, setting the tone for the composer’s genius personality and the revolution he was to bring to musical practice. The universal nature of this revolution, as a precursor to the dramatic climaxes of Romanticism, is expressed through the moving rhetoric of patriotism in Symphony No. 7, a work that for Wagner is the ‘apotheosis of the dance’. The Seventh was first performed in Vienna in 1813 at a charity concert dedicated to the veterans of the Battle of Hanau and has gone down in history because the audience was so enthusiastic about the second movement (Allegretto) that it demanded an immediate repeat performance. The works on the programme are performed on period instruments.