World Premiere: April 7, 1805
Last HSO Performance: October 8, 2017
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings
Duration: 47 minutes
The year 1804 — when Beethoven finished his Third Symphony — was crucial in the modern political history of Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte had begun his meteoric rise to power only a decade earlier after playing a significant part in the recapture in 1793 of Toulon, a Mediterranean port that had been surrendered to the British by French royalists. Britain, along with Austria, Prussia, Holland and Spain, was a member of the First Coalition, an alliance that had been formed by these monarchial nations in the wake of the execution of Louis XVI to thwart the French National Convention’s ambition to spread revolution (and royal overthrow) throughout Europe. In 1796, Carnot entrusted the campaign against northern Italy, then dominated by Austria, to the young General Bonaparte, who won a stunning series of victories with an army that he had transformed from a demoralized, starving band into a military juggernaut. He returned to France in 1799 as First Consul of the newly established Consulate, and put in place measures to halt inflation, instituted a new legal code, and repaired relations with the Church. It was to this man, this great leader and potential savior of the masses from centuries of tyrannical political, social and economic oppression, that Beethoven intended to pay tribute in his majestic E-flat Symphony, begun in 1803. The name “Bonaparte” appears above that of the composer on the original title page.
Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor of France in 1804, and he was crowned, with the new Empress Josephine, at Notre Dame Cathedral on December 2nd, an event forever frozen in time by David’s magnificent canvas in the Louvre. Beethoven, enraged and feeling betrayed by this usurpation of power, roared at his student Ferdinand Ries, who brought him the news, “Then is he, too, only an ordinary human being?” The ragged hole in the title page of the score now in the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna bears mute testimony to the violent manner in which Beethoven erased Napoleon from this Symphony. He later inscribed it, undoubtedly with much sorrow, “To celebrate the memory of a great man.”
The “Eroica” (“Heroic”) is a work that changed the course of musical history. There was much sentiment at the turn of the 19th century that the expressive and technical possibilities of the symphonic genre had been exhausted by Haydn, Mozart, C.P.E. Bach and their contemporaries. It was Beethoven, and specifically this majestic Symphony, that threw wide the gates on the unprecedented artistic vistas that were to be explored for the rest of the 19th century. For the first time, with this music, the master composer was recognized as an individual responding to a higher calling. After Beethoven, the composer became regarded as a visionary — a special being lifted above mundane experience — who could guide benighted listeners to loftier planes of existence through his valued gifts. The modern conception of an artist — what he is, his place in society, what he can do for those who experience his work — stems from Beethoven. Romanticism began with the “Eroica.”
The vast first movement opens with a brief summons of two mighty chords. At least four thematic ideas are presented in the exposition. The development is a massive essay progressing through many moods, all united by a titanic sense of struggle. It is in this central portion of the movement and in the lengthy coda that Beethoven broke through the boundaries of the 18th-century symphony to create a work not only longer in duration but also more profound in meaning. The beginning of the second movement — “Marcia funebre” (“Funeral March”) — with its plaintive, austere themes intoned over a mock drum-roll in the basses, is the touchstone for the expression of tragedy in instrumental music. A development-like section, full of remarkable contrapuntal complexities, is followed by a return of the simple opening threnody. The third movement is a lusty scherzo; the central section is a rousing trio for horns. The finale is a large set of variations on two themes, one of which (the first one heard) forms the bass line to the other. The second theme, introduced by the oboe, also appears in the finale of Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, Contradanse No. 7 and Variations and Fugue, Op. 35. The variations accumulate energy, and, just as it seems the movement is whirling toward its final climax, the music comes to a full stop before launching into an Andante section that explores first the tender and then the majestic possibilities of the themes. A brilliant Presto led by the horns concludes this epochal work.
©2024 Dr. Richard E. Rodda