Beethoven's orchestra 1/1
For all the Third Symphony’s scale as a composition, Beethoven didn’t, at this stage, enlarge upon the orchestra that Mozart or Haydn would have been familiar with in their last symphonies: double woodwind, three horns, a pair of trumpets, timpani and strings is all he has to create his ‘heroic’ soundworld. He only began adding to this Classical ensemble with Symphonies no.5 (trombones) and no.6 (piccolo).
Although the broad capabilities of the string family had long been exploited (the golden age of Italian instrument-making by Stradivari and his contemporaries had been the 17th and early 18th centuries), the wind and brass instruments of Beethoven’s time were still relatively rudimentary. The woodwind instruments – flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons – were little more than fairly basic tubes of wood with simple finger-holes, a couple of mechanical keys and limited ranges. The brass (horns and trumpets), meanwhile, had no valves and were restricted to the notes of the harmonic series of a given key, or those others that could be approximated with a bit of deft lip and hand tweaking of the air blown through the metal tube.
Beethoven’s trumpets and horns for this symphony are designated ‘in E flat’ for movements one, three and four and ‘in C’ for the slow movement, which means that they are required to use a ‘crook’ or bent piece of tubing inserted into the instrument that tunes it to those keys (and the first horn is also instructed to use an F major crook on two brief occasions). This means that they cannot play much more than the basic notes of the E flat major (or C major) triad, but given Beethoven’s main theme (see below) it proves not to be too much of a restriction in this instance. Modern instruments pose none of these problems and are what are used for the vast majority of today’s performances and recordings, though you’ll invariably see valve-less and key-less instruments in use by historically conscious period-instrument orchestras.
Below are two conventional orchestral layouts for this symphony, depending whether the conductor chooses to split the violins across the front of the stage or the more conventional seating plan in the second image:
