Benedetta Saglietti is a music historian, essayist, and specialist in musical iconography. Her work combines rigorous scholarship with a distinctive sensitivity to images, texts, and the cultural contexts that shaped the musical world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A long‑standing friend of the C.R.M.B., she has contributed essays, research, and insights that enrich our understanding of Beethoven and his visual legacy.

Her first book, Beethoven. Ritratti e immagini (EDT–De Sono, 2010), received significant critical acclaim and led to an invitation to the Beethoven Festival in Chicago (2011). She later edited Una visita a Beethoven by De Vienney (La Scuola di Pitagora, 2014) and contributed to the catalogue of the major exhibition Ludwig van. Le mythe Beethoven (Gallimard, 2016) at the Philharmonie de Paris. She also co‑edited the new edition of Alfredo Casella’s Strawinski (Castelvecchi, 2016).

Her multimedia project on Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire, created with semiologist Valentina Manchia and inspired by the work of French graphic designer Massin, debuted at the Stresa Festival in 2018. More recently, Donzelli published her volume La Quinta Sinfonia di Beethoven recensita da E.T.A. Hoffmann, with a preface by Riccardo Muti.

Saglietti’s research extends to the relationship between music and colour, Glenn Gould’s radio dramas, and the autobiographical writings and travels of German‑speaking musicians. She is active as a music critic, lecturer, translator (DE/EN > IT), and digital strategist for classical music institutions in Italy and abroad.

“Every passion, just as a work presents it to us, is clothed by music with the purple shimmer of Romanticism, and what we experience in life leads us out of life into the realm of the infinite. So strong is the magic of music, and ever more powerful its effect, that it ought to free itself from every other art. Beethoven’s instrumental music opens for us the realm of the titanic and the immeasurable. Fiery rays dart through the deep night of this realm: we perceive gigantic shadows that lengthen and contract, enclosing us ever more tightly, annihilating everything within us, without extinguishing the pain of infinite longing, in which every pleasure, rising swiftly in exultant sounds, sinks and perishes.” — E. T. A. Hoffmann

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is one of the most important and celebrated works in the history of music: as soon as it is mentioned, its incisive opening motto immediately resounds in our minds. And yet, as this book recounts, the composition made its way into the ears and hearts of listeners in a rather unusual manner. The story of the Fifth began in Vienna on 22 December 1808, when it was performed for the first time, among countless other pieces, in a concert as famous as it was unfortunate. The difficulty of the compositions, an insufficient number of rehearsals, the length of the programme, and the cold in the theatre resulted in a partial fiasco. Despite the composer’s fame, a journalist wrote: “No one is a prophet in his own land.” Beethoven became angry: “Despite a few mistakes, the audience received everything with enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the scribblers of Vienna will certainly not fail to write their venomous articles against me.” But he was mistaken.

Seven months later, in fact, the director of the most important German music journal sent the four‑hand piano reduction of the symphony to Bamberg, asking one of his collaborators — then unknown — E. T. A. Hoffmann, who would soon become the most important writer of German Romanticism, to review it. It was Hoffmann who first realised, without the slightest doubt, that the Fifth was a masterpiece, and who proclaimed it loudly in a lengthy essay, thereby determining the destiny of this extraordinary work.

Previously unpublished in its complete form, this review — one of the most inspired ever written — now appears in Italian, translated and annotated by the music historian Benedetta Saglietti, together with other testimonies concerning the first performance and writings by Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Hector Berlioz. Opening this journey is Riccardo Muti, who, in conversation with the author, recounts — from the interpreter’s perspective — the masterpiece‑symphony that, from its very first performance, has continued to fascinate those who listen to it: a work still capable today of surprising and at the same time stirring the deepest regions of the human soul.