For better or worse, the work has entered the popular culture, having
been used in Disney’s “Fantasia 2000” and “Mickey,
Donald and Goofy: The Three Musketeers,” in which the cartoon’s
narrator sings “This is the end” to the symphony’s
first four notes. There is a disco version called “A Fifth of
Beethoven,” and even long-running animated TV series “The
Simpsons” has used the Fifth, for an episode in which the town’s
residents build a concert hall.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris, in his new
book, “Beethoven: The Universal Composer,” “Of all
the great composers, Beethoven is the most enduring in his appeal to
dilettantes and intellectuals alike. What draws them is Beethoven's
universality, his ability to embrace the whole range of human emotion,
from dread of death to love of life -- and the metaphysics beyond --
reconciling all doubts and conflicts in a catharsis of sound.”