Here a few thoughts I had as I was working through the three Beethoven pieces. As always, some amount of salt is called for.
Beethoven is not the classical composer I like or listen to the most, not even close. But he is maybe the one I admire the most. At his best, I think he outshines all the others. (His output is wide-ranging. Sometimes it sounds to me like amped up Haydn or Mozart: more intense, with sharper contrasts in loudness. At its worst, I find it a bit chaotic, too much going on at the same time.)
The three pieces presented here are quite unique, unlike anything else in the classical repertoire I know of. What they have in common is that they each derive from a short rhythmic figure that is repeated with variations throughout the piece. Everybody knows the four-note figure that carries the first movement of the 5th Symphony: di-di-di-DUM. (It's the "V" for "Victory" in Morse code.) Beethoven uses the same idea of working out from a simple rhythmic pattern like this in many other pieces, including the other two here.
The first bars of the 5th symphony are the most recognized in all of Western classical music. The piece is so well-known that it is tough to perform it or listen to it as actual music that somebody had to compose from scratch. It all seems so inevitable. And yet the use of the four-note rhythm over various notes and in various guises is nothing short of brilliant.
There are so many recordings of this movement that it can feel like all the interpretive options have already been explored. Perhaps the main unresolved issue is tempo, where there is a bit of a problem. Beethoven indicated a metronome marking of 108 half-notes per minute, but that's really too fast. Maybe it was typo, and should be quarter-notes per minute, but that's too slow. So the timings we get in actual performances are all over the map. There are a slew of recordings of the piece on Spotify, and many of the best-known conductors (Kleiber, Karajan, Toscanini, Bohm, Rattle, Harnoncourt, Abbado, Szell, Muti, Masur) finish the job in 7:30, give or take 10 seconds. (My own version falls in this range.) But there are just as many highly-regarded conductors who go their own way: at one extreme, Norrington zips through at 6:21, and at the other, Furtzwangler ambles in at a leisurely 8:39. A very wide spread!
What is the mood of this piece? Beethoven is reported to have described it as Fate knocking at the door. I don't buy it. There's too much of a sense of tension and struggle to be about something abstract like Fate. What I hear is something much more physical, like being chased on foot in the woods, say. There's heart-pounding, shortness of breath. It's relentless, but exhilarating too. You can hide to catch your breath at 3:50, and there's even a moment of serenity in the oboe solo at 4:40, but otherwise, the chase is on! In the end, the effort is successful, it's a triumph, but very hard won.
The second movement of the 7th symphony is totally different in tone. It's a melodic piece that has a slow five-note repeating rhythm: DUM-di-di-DUM-DUM. But that figure is not telegraphed with percussive attacks. It's played mostly gently, like the rhythmic figure in the Moonlight Sonata. The first three minutes of the piece is nothing but that figure over and over, with beautiful counterpoint weaving back and forth between major and minor. This is the heart of the piece, the part that invariably gets used when the music appears in films or videos. (Beethoven actually starts the movement with a blast from the woodwinds. He uses openings like this elsewhere. Listen to the first bar of the 3rd Symphony or the 5th Piano Concerto. My sense is that he just wanted people to stop talking and pay attention before he got to business.)
How to describe the mood of this piece? One senses that it is strongly emotional, even if unable to pinpoint the emotion involved. Like so much of Beethoven, it's complex. What I hear (and you may not) is the recounting of grievances, hurt feelings, humiliation, although too proud to come out in weepiness or self-pity. After three minutes, the second theme of the piece arrives with much less drama, a recollection of better times, maybe. But I hear it as feigned nonchalance, like someone whistling a bit too casually. It doesn't take much for the first theme to return in force, although an attempt is now made to lay it out in a more matter-of-fact way, adding some sober observations (in a fugue), and maybe even shrug the whole thing off at the very end. The facts remain, but the sting is gone. In my opinion, this is the kind of emotional journey that is simply beyond the reach of other composers.
The second movement of the 9th symphony is magic. Fans of the 9th tend to focus on the fourth movement where the singers make their first appearance and the "Ode to Joy" theme is laid out. But the second movement is a show stopper. It starts off with a very fast three-note figure, DUM-di-di, what would be called a "dactyl" in poetry. The relative durations of the notes are three, one, two, in eighth notes. The three notes are all the same, except that the first is an octave higher. And that's it. It's hard to believe that anybody could do much with so little, but Beethoven uses this figure to astounding effect. And it's not as if he uses it a few times and then moves on to something else. The three-note rhythm with the octave jump appears in the score a whopping 1638 times over all the instrumental parts (according to a counting program I wrote)! And the end result is a piece of incredible drive and determination.
And what is the mood of the piece? For me, there is a clear sense of exalted bravado. This is a composer who realized that he could achieve things well beyond the standards of the day. Stopping mid-phrase, throwing in spurious hits of the tympanis, why? Because he could make it work. "Listen to this, you composers out there!" I can't help but think how different this movement is from anything Haydn or Mozart ever composed. I'm not sure they'd get it. They might have gone storming out of a performance the way Saint-Saens did at the first performance of The Rite of Spring!
So that's my take on the three pieces: di-di-di-DUM, DUM-di-di-DUM-DUM, and DUM-di-di. It's all incredible, beautiful music, even if you can't make a steady diet of it.