As early as the spring of 1798, so the legend goes, the French ambassador to Vienna, General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, suggested that Beethoven write a symphony about Napoleon Bonaparte. At the time, Napoleon was one of Beethoven's idols, but it wasn't until 1801 that the composer first sketched “Third Symphony, written on Bonaparte.” 

The title page originally read “Grand Symphony composed on Bonaparte,” but in May, 1804, Beethoven heard the news that Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor. Beethoven flew into a rage, tore up the title page, and gave the symphony a new title, “heroic symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man.” The Third Symphony received its first public performance in Vienna on April 7, 1805. 

Paul Henry Lang called Eroica “one of the incomprehensible deeds in arts and letters, the greatest single step made by an individual composer in the history of the symphony and the history of music in general.” For Richard Wagner, “the first movement embraces, as in a glowing furnace, all the emotions of a richly-gifted nature in the heyday of unresting youth.” When, in 1821, Beethoven heard the news of Napoleon's death, he remarked: “Well, I've written the funeral oration for that catastrophe seventeen years ago,” referring to the second movement, a funeral march. Donald Francis Tovey said the third movement is “the first in which Beethoven fully attained Haydn's desire to replace the minuet by something on a scale comparable to the rest of a great symphony.” The Finale is a set of twelve variations on a tune Beethoven first used in a little country dance in 1801, then again in The Creatures of Prometheus ballet and also in the Eroica Variations for piano. Edward Downes comments that “each variation is a little cosmos in itself and the sum of them is overwhelming.”

~ Program Notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2021.