Rockport Music - Beethoven & Correia - SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN E-FLAT, OP. 55 (EROICA)

SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN E-FLAT, OP. 55 (EROICA)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), arr. Shai Wosner

SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN E-FLAT, OP. 55 (EROICA)

Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized Bonn, Germany, December 17, 1770; d. Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827), arr. Shai Wosner

Composed 1803, arr. 2025; 49 minutes

The Eroica is the first of the great works in which Beethoven portrays the nature of heroism – the freedom of the soul to triumph over adversity. Its spiritual underpinning rises from an iron will to emerge triumphant from personal tragedy. In 1802, the year before he began composition, Beethoven contemplated suicide – and rejected it. “It is impossible to leave this world until I have produced everything I feel it has been granted to me to achieve,” he wrote. “I was ever inclined to accomplish great and magnanimous deeds.” The renewed belief in himself and in his creative powers, which Beethoven lived through and set down in the village of Heiligenstadt in 1802, closely parallels the experience of the Eroica.

The original dedication was to Napoleon Bonaparte – a Sinfonia grande intitolata Bonaparte – in honor of a leader who at first seemed to embody Beethoven’s ideals of greatness and his deeply held libertarian and republican principles. Admiration turned to disenchantment when Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor. “Is he nothing more than an ordinary man?” Beethoven shouted with contempt. In a characteristic burst of rage, he is reported to have torn the dedication from the score. The manuscript is lost. A copy Beethoven used for conducting, preserved in the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, tells a similar story. There, he scratched out the final words of the dedication with such force that it tore a hole in the title page. By its publication in October 1806, the title read Sinfonia eroica – “Heroic Symphony composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” The message had become universal – and a new path opened, down which the symphony would evolve over the next century.

The opening movement is a vast structure, teeming with musical ideas across some 700 measures. In emotional power, the Eroica brings new weight to symphonic writing – a scale and force intended for a wide public. The solemn Funeral March, a funeral march for a fallen hero, reaches an intensity and depth previously associated with chamber music for connoisseurs or with sacred music written for the glory of God. Here, the tradition of French revolutionary music is transformed from slow military march to an expression of mourning on a universal scale.

What follows is a life-enhancing Scherzo. The Promethean spirit comes to the fore in the finale, where a civilizing, all-powerful force shapes humanity through art. Beethoven mirrors the narrative of his recent ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, drawing on one of its principal themes and expanding it into a series of seven grand variations. Richard Wagner later wrote that in this mighty finale Beethoven shows us “the man entire, harmoniously at one with himself, in those emotions where the memory of sorrow becomes itself the shaping force of noble deeds… The progress towards fulfilment is the heroic element in this work.”