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The Seventh Symphony (1812) was, at the time, Beethoven's last and vibrant word on the big style he had cultivated in the previous decade. In the Eighth Symphony (1814) he does something new by seeming to return to something old. He writes, that is, a symphony shorter than any since his First. It is almost as though he wanted to call his entire development throughout that decade into question. Indeed, over the remaining years of his life he would confidently explore in opposite directions, writing bigger pieces than before and ones more compressed, his most rhetorical music and his most inward, his most public and his most esoteric, compositions that plumb the inexhaustible possibilities of the sonata style and those that propose utterly new ways of organizing material, music reaching extremes of the centered and the bizarre.

If, however, we think of the Eighth as a nostalgic return to the good old days, we misunderstand it. To say it is 1795 revisited from the vantage point of 1812 is not right either. What interests Beethoven is not so much brevity for its own sake—and certainly not something called “classicism”—as concentration. It is as though he were picking up where he had left off in the densely saturated first movement of the Fifth Symphony to produce another tour de force of tight packing. He had already done something like this two years earlier in one of his most uncompromising works, the F-minor String Quartet, Op. 95. But a symphony is not a “private” connoisseur's music like a string quartet; by comparison, the Eighth Symphony is Opus 95's friendly, open-featured cousin, even though its first and last movements bring us some of the most violent moments in Beethoven.