The meaning of the Allegretto is not carried by words. It is carried by a repeated motion that refuses both spectacle and collapse. The tread keeps returning until recurrence feels like a moral fact: keep moving, keep bearing weight, keep the form intact.

That is why the movement can sound elegiac without needing a story of grief. If the listener hears mourning here, it is mourning organized into discipline. The music does not picture loss as breakdown. It turns loss into measured continuation, where dignity comes from carrying the same step through changing pressure.

The second movement was famously powerful enough at the Seventh Symphony's premiere to be encored, and that public force makes sense. Its argument is immediately legible in the body. A simple repeated figure becomes memory, burden, and release because the listener stays with it long enough for motion itself to become meaning.