Symphony guide: Beethoven's Third ('Eroica')

Imagine if events hadn’t intervened, and Beethoven had stuck to his original plan, and his Third Symphony had been called the “Bonaparte”. Imagine the reams of interpretation and analysis that would have gone into aligning the piece with the Napoleonic project, its humanist ideals and its all-too-human historical realisation. Yet that is what Beethoven wanted the piece we know now as the Eroica symphony to be: this piece, during its composition and at its completion in 1804, and even when he was negotiating its publication, was a piece for and about Napoleon. Beethoven designed the piece as a memorial to the heroic achievements of a ruler who he hoped would go on to inspire Europe to a humanist, libertarian, egalitarian revolution. That’s why the piece, you could say, describes Napoleon’s heroic struggles (the huge first movement), then narrates the sorrow of his death in grand public style (the funeral march slow movement), and, with the open-air energy and teeming imagination of the scherzo and finale, demonstrates how his legacy and spirit were to have lived on in the world.

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Instead, the story of how the piece’s original dedication to Bonaparte was defaced by Beethoven is the stuff of symphonic legend, based on Ferdinand Ries’s memory of what happened when he told the composer that Napoleon had styled himself Emperor in May 1804. With that Napoleon became, for Beethoven - as Ries reports the composer saying - “a tyrant”, who “will think himself superior to all men”. (In fact, it’s even more complicated than that, since Beethoven the apparently great revolutionary was also willing to change the symphony’s dedication in order not to jeopardise the fee due from a royal patron.) Yet that scrawling out of Napoleon’s name doesn’t change the specificity of Beethoven’s inspiration in writing this symphony, the longest and largest-scale he had ever been composed, and the profound human, philosophical, and political motivations behind the musical innovations of this jaw-dropping piece.

And it’s those novelties that usually inspire the panegyrics with which the Eroica is often described: the shattering dissonances and rhythmic dislocations of the first movement, the expressive grandeur and terror of the funeral march, the ludicrously challenging horn writing of the scherzo, the gigantic expressive range – from comic to tragic to lyrical to heroic – in the fourth movement, a set of variations that in one fell swoop reinvent the symphonic finale in a way that arguably only the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth comes close to.

And yet, these musical revolutions are not so - well, revolutionary as they might at first seem. In this piece as much as anything he composed, Beethoven didn’t want to compromise his music’s communicative power. For his music to sound its message of change, to inspire audiences to consider a new world-view just as they are also asked to participate in a new scale of symphonic drama, Beethoven needed to make sure he was taking his listeners with him. Which is why this vastly complex piece is also completely clear in its structure and in its extreme states of expressive character.

Think about the first movement: yes, its scale of thought and ambition are unprecedented when you consider the whole structure, but on the level of its themes and their working out, Beethoven’s music is built on simple, graspable ideas: those two E flat major thunderbolts with which the symphony opens (Beethoven’s initial thought was actually to start with a dissonance, as he had done at the start of his First Symphony), and the undulating arpeggio in the cellos that starts out so serenely but which soon introduces a foreign note, a C sharp, the grit in the oyster that signals this movement’s emotional and harmonic ambition. The most radical moments are shocking when heard in isolation, like the grinding harmonic clash at the centre of the movement which seems to bring the music to a shrieking, shuddering impasse; or the enormity of the movement’s coda, turned by Beethoven into another opportunity to develop and explore his themes rather than simply to tie the room together with a handful of clichéd closing gestures. And there’s also a moment that made Hector Berlioz – otherwise Ludwig van’s greatest admirer – splutter with indignation that “if that was really what Beethoven wanted … it must be admitted that this whim is an absurdity”; the passage when the horn seems to announce the return to the main theme a few bars early. It is what Beethoven “really wanted”, but Berlioz’s comments remind us just how weird it actually is.

Yet when you hear a performance such as Frans Brüggen’s with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, or Otto Klemperer’s with the Philharmonia (strange bedfellows, you might think – one a period instrument guru, the other a big-band maestro of the old-school - but both create a mighty, granite-hewn first movement) it’s not so much the individual moments that take your breath away, but the cumulative momentum that builds from the first bar to the last. That’s the real revolution in the first movement of the Eroica symphony, and the fact that this implacable musical force should have been inspired by the representation of a great man’s works only makes it more remarkable: this movement is the definitive symphonic alchemy of musical structure and poetic meaning.

As is the rest of the symphony. One thought to guide you through the next three movements from the funeral march to the explosion of joy in the final bars: this music is simultaneously rigorously symphonic yet novel in its cavalcade of dramatic and expressive characters. The achievement of the Eroica is not that Beethoven “unifies” all of this diversity, but rather that he creates and unleashes a symphonic energy in this piece that both frames and releases this elemental human drama. It’s that mysterious momentum that is the true “heroism” of this symphony, so that the victory at the very end of the piece doesn’t just stand for Napoleon, or Beethoven, but for the possibilities of the symphony itself, which is revealed as a carrier of new weight and meaning as never before in its history. What started out as a (pre-) memorial to a great man and his humanist ideals turns into an essential embodiment of symphonic life-force.

Five key recordings

Roger Norrington/London Classical Players: this performance still breathes the air and energy of a performance practice revolution in action.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt/Chamber Orchestra of Europe: less iconoclastic than Norrington’s period instruments, Harnoncourt’s recording still thrills with discovery, as he takes the lessons of the historically informed movement to the modern instruments of the COE players.

Otto Klemperer/Philharmonia Orchestra: an interpretation that locks you into a mighty symphonic momentum from the first chord to the final coda.

Frans Brüggen/Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century: period instruments maybe, but Brüggen’s performance has a gigantic structural and emotional power.

Arturo Toscanini/NBC Symphony Orchestra (1939): not just the uncompromising Toscanini of implacable energy, there’s a flexibility and lyricism here that makes the music flow as well as foment a symphonic revolution.

Mark Elder conducts Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony at the BBC Proms on 9 August with the Hallé Orchestra.