The ‘victory-through-struggle’ symphony is an enduring monument of Western culture, albeit one which is now looking somewhat dilapidated and which has become encrusted in ways its creators could not have foreseen. Fifth symphonies seem to have been particularly vulnerable. Beethoven's C minor set the process in motion. Idolised by Nielsen as by practically every composer with ambitions to compose symphonies, it was the first great darkness-to-light journey in music, the first to allow separate movements to interpenetrate, the first to unify them motivically with a view to reinforcing dramatic cohesion; or if not literally the first, it was the first so to embed itself in the consciousness of audiences and composers. But it also received the most famous ‘encrustations’, first when Beethoven's pupils Czerny and Schindler disagreed over whether the famous four-note opening motif stood for the song of the yellowhammer or Fate knocking on the door, and later when the Allies in the Second World War used the same motif to signify Victory.

None of the other great victory-through-struggle or dark-to-light Fifth Symphonies has acquired the iconic force of Beethoven's, but each has been felt, or forced, to stand for something ideologically concrete. Before the 1939–45 War Hitler had already appropriated the finale of Bruckner's Fifth. Before that Sibelius's Fifth, along with his symphonic output in general, had been taken as the embodiment of Viking virility – a view the composer was content to endorse but which eventually provoked a violent critical reaction.