Claudio Abbado conducts Beethoven's Symphony No. 8

The welcoming smile of the Eighth Symphony

Symphony No. 8 in F Major Op. 93 is as different musically from the Seventh Symphony as it is close in time since it was finished only five months later. It was written during the composer's stay in a spa town where he fell in love with Amélie Sebald, a singer from Berlin. It was premiered before a Viennese audience on February 27, 1814. Like the Fourth Symphony, it appears to be caught between the Dionysian scale of the Seventh Symphony and the titanic universality of the Ninth Symphony. The carefree nature of the "little symphony," as the composer called it himself, should not make one forget its welcome smile.