The First Four Notes - Beethoven's fifth and the the human imagination (Matthew Guerrieri, 2012)

The author came up with the idea of building an entire book around the first four notes of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.  277 pages, plus extensive notes and a detailed index.  Some reviewer made it sound interesting to me.

I'll agree that pretty much everyone recognizes the four-note sequence, that Beethoven was of course a very important figure, etc.  But the author was really straining to connect all sorts of events in political, cultural and musical history to this sequence - which quickly became tiresome to me.

So I blew through this one rather rapidly, and didn't learn much.

Postscript:  watching Diamondbacks play Dodgers for parts of a series on May 6 through May 8 - not sure if this happens regularly at Dodger Stadium - but quite often during these games the stadium sound system was booming out "The First Four Notes."