Perennial Popularity

During the 2011–12 concert season, Beethoven’s Third Symphony was the work most frequently performed by American orchestras. Only twice this century was the Eroica not among the top twenty programmed works in the United States. More often, it was in the top ten, as all of the ‘tier one’ orchestras in North America have programmed the symphony at least once since 2000.¹ Europe’s leading orchestras remain equally committed to the Eroica. The Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Staatskapelle each already programmed the work several times in the twenty-first century, while the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic racked up twenty-six and fifty-one performances respectively, the latter choosing the Eroica to close the ‘Vienna Philharmonic Week in New York’ concert in March 2019. The piece is no less favoured in Asia and Australia, where the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the KBS Symphony Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (to name only five leading orchestras) continue to play Beethoven’s Third Symphony every few years both at home and on tour.

More evidence of the Eroica’s enduring popularity is its reliable top-100 spot on Classic FM’s Hall of Fame list, a survey conducted each year by the United Kingdom’s on-air home for ‘The World’s Greatest Music’. Although consistently bested by Beethoven’s Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies in this contest, the Eroica’s popularity endures. Only once this century did the symphony slip on the ‘world’s biggest poll of classical musical tastes’, plunging to number 123 in 2002 but rebounding, undaunted, to number 80 the next year. But conductors, it would seem, fly the Eroica banner highest, as Beethoven’s Third Symphony was voted the number one ‘greatest symphony of all time’ in the BBC Music Magazine’s 2016 survey of 151 of the world’s current top conductors.²

Enduring Emblem: Heroism and Revolution in Contemporary Classical Musical Culture

Like its perennial popularity, the Eroica’s ‘branding’ in twenty-first-century mainstream classical musical culture has hardly deviated from its nineteenth-century construction as the pre-eminent musical emblem of heroism and revolution, both political and aesthetic. Scott Burnham’s words provide the now classic late twentieth-century scholarly encapsulation of the symphony’s critical reception: ‘with the Eroica Symphony, Beethoven becomes the hero of Western music, “The Man Who Freed Music”. With this one work, Beethoven is said to liberate music from the stays of eighteenth-century convention, singlehandedly bringing music into a new age by giving it a transcendent voice equal to Western man’s most cherished values.’³ Classic FM’s Eroica blurb distils nearly two centuries of critics and commentators, declaring beneath images of Beethoven and Napoleon that ‘of all the works in the history of classical music, this is the one that definitively closed the door on the Classical period and ushered in fully the Romantic era’.⁴ Orchestras’ marketing materials similarly parrot permutations of this axiom of Eroica reception. For their November 2017 concerts under the baton of a new music director, for instance, the National Symphony Orchestra advertised the Eroica as ‘Beethoven’s revolutionary tribute to the heroic ideal’, the music with which Beethoven ‘swept away all previous notions of what a symphony could be or ought to be’.⁵ In a sentiment no less sweeping, to promote the opening concert of the 2018–19 season, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra billed the Eroica as ‘a work that changed the course of music history’.⁶ And in copy both tortured and trite, for three April 2019 concerts the Toronto Symphony Orchestra credited the symphony itself with the act of stylistic insurrection: ‘Beethoven’s “Eroica” broke every rule in the book of composing a symphony.’⁷

At least Beethoven the human retains his composerly agency in the 2003 television film Eroica, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s historical re-enactment of ‘the day that changed music forever’.⁸ ‘Didn’t obey the rules?’ Beethoven snaps sarcastically at his pupil Ferdinand Ries for shouting ‘Fool! Wrong!’ to stop the orchestra after the ‘early’ horn-call entrance ‘didn’t sound right’. In this entertaining if improbable dramatisation of the first reading of Beethoven’s new symphony in Vienna on 9 June 1804, musicians, servants and Austrian aristocrats mill about the music room at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace, tossing political popcorn at the viewer expecting credible conversation. Near the beginning of the film, for instance, when the horn player hastily stumbles through the door, Beethoven quips ‘You’re late for the Revolution, Otto.’ And answering an unmannerly query – ‘And what rank? Landowner?’ – from the surprisingly mature Count Dietrichstein,⁹ Beethoven replies in kind, ‘No, I’m a brain-owner’, a clever if ahistorical recontextualisation of actual Beethoven snark.¹⁰ Ries and Princess Marie Lobkowitz most clearly articulate for Beethoven his personal and revolutionary estimation of his status. In response to copyist Wenzel Sukowaty’s concern that Beethoven ‘can’t talk to the nobility of Austria and Hungary as if they were equals’, Ries defends his teacher: ‘He believes he is noble by virtue of his talent. He doesn’t accept the inequality.’ And Marie sheepishly apologises to Dietrichstein for the ‘brain-owner’ crack by explaining: ‘Our friend thinks his talent exempts him from everyday customs of deference.’ ‘It does, it does. Well, here it does, anyway’, remarks the Prince, offering Beethoven reassurance, however tempered.

But the BBC’s Eroica delivers its best brain candy in response to the revolutionary aspects of the music of the symphony rather than the political backdrop of its first read-through. When asked by his patron the Prince if those gathered will find the music original, Beethoven prophetically delivers his own critical reception: ‘It’s original from beginning to end.’ On the opening chords, he directs the orchestra: ‘This is a summons, an imperative.’ A surprisingly astute servant whispers to Ries just at the moment the first movement drops into the coda, ‘A Haydn would be over by now, sir, wouldn’t it? He’s buggered about with the whole thing, hasn’t he?’ And after the slow movement, Dietrichstein, representing an alignment of political conservatism and the critical mainstream, complains to Beethoven directly: ‘This is a formless mass. A mere arrangement of noise. A great piling up of colossal ideas. It’s very moving. In parts it has elements of the sublime. But it is also full of discord. And it lacks rounding out. It is not what we call a symphony.’¹¹ As to the music’s subject: ‘Heroism’, Beethoven states plainly to Haydn (yes, Haydn, who in the film arrives on the scene as the Scherzo comes to a close), just to clear up any confusion left by the title of either the symphony or the film. The final revolutionary proclamation, however, is reserved for the wise and aged Haydn who, presciently channelling Wagner, profoundly voices the anecdote informed viewers have been waiting to hear: ‘He’s done something no other composer has attempted. He’s placed himself at the centre of his work. He gives us a glimpse into his soul. I expect that’s why it’s so noisy. But it is quite, quite new – the artist as hero. Quite new. Everything is different from today.’ As Haydn exits the scene, the last heroic variation of the finale swells to the foreground in the soundtrack, providing the requisite musical gravitas to the film’s heavy-handed historical exegesis. All that remains is for Beethoven to violently tear the title page bearing the dedication to Bonaparte from his score, which he does, of course, cut perfectly to the last cadence in G minor just before the Presto surges to the finale’s triumphant end.¹²

Count Dietrichstein’s complaints about Beethoven’s ‘arrangement of noise’ in the BBC’s Eroica would seem more fair and fitting were he describing a more recent self-proclaimed revolutionary symphony titled Eroica: Tan Dun’s Internet Symphony No. 1, Eroica, composed in 2009 to fulfil a commission for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra’s debut concert in Carnegie Hall. According to Tan himself, the intention of his brash pastiche of quotations from Beethoven’s Third Symphony and other warhorses was to reflect this new orchestra’s ‘revolutionary idea’ to ‘bridge music’s past and the present’.¹³ Lofty though this Eroica composer’s aim was, New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini punctured the soaring ambition of the inaugural internet symphony with the first classic line of its reception: ‘This five-minute crowd-pleaser takes riffs from Beethoven’s “Eroica” and folds them into a score teeming with clanking percussion, corny brass chorales, and perky passages that sounded as if Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon had somehow encountered the Lone Ranger.’¹⁴

Smart Heroes, Sophisticated Revolutionaries and Superior Status in Popular Culture

Beethoven’s Third Symphony collides more gently with the visual media of twenty-first-century popular culture when it is deployed more conventionally: to convey long-established extra-musical meanings in film and television soundtracks. The tired use of classical music as a sign of wealth and elite status in American movies persists in the new century, as two quick examples of the Eroica’s Scherzo used diegetically will confirm. In the opening scene of the 2014 coming-of-age independent film Beach Pillows, two twenty-somethings break into what they believe is a wealthy friend’s posh apartment. The flat is beautiful, spacious and impeccably decorated in ‘MoMA-esque’ style. Large oil paintings adorn the walls, art and architecture books fill the bookshelves, and a presumably expensive bottle of scotch sits on the kitchen counter. Just after one of the intruders comments that ‘this place must have cost a fortune’, he moves the stylus to the vinyl sitting on the turntable. The Scherzo of Beethoven’s Eroica sounds while the two uninvited guests drink beer, smoke a joint and talk about the failures that are their lives. Just as the Scherzo hits the coda (the cue started at the reprise), the duo’s foolery is interrupted when the apartment’s actual inhabitants – a mum, dad, two kids and a dog – arrive home, the shock on each face cut to the beats of the movement’s final cadence. To be sure, the bounciness of the Scherzo is compatible with the playful if irreverent energy of the scene, but the primary function of Beethoven’s music in this scene in Beach Pillows is to reinforce the sophistication of the residence and convey its incongruity with the two uninvited visitors. Ironically, however, at least for the astute viewer, even this conventional cinematic meaning of classical music risks failure here: the vinyl on the platter, plainly visible, is actually Handel’s Water Music Suite from the 1959 Reader’s Digest box set Music of the World’s Greatest Composers.¹⁵

The diegetic use of Beethoven’s Eroica in the 2014 romantic comedy-drama Obvious Child depends on a related cliché of musical signification in American visual media: the association of classical music with intelligence and highbrow culture. When the scene cuts to the inside of an independent bookseller in New York City, the Scherzo is heard under the dialogue as if on the store’s sound system, immediately establishing the learned atmosphere of the shop. Although the selection of Beethoven’s music for this scene may have been largely arbitrary, one could be tempted to read a touch more sophistication in this particular use of an Eroica excerpt. ‘Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books’ is the name of the store, and Beethoven’s revolutionary symphony may be a clever, if subtle, nod to the progressive politics of the shop, its owner, employee, and customers within the story, the social commentary of the film (it’s boldly pro-choice) and even of the filmmaker Gillian Robespierre herself (the name echo also helps). Perhaps a step too far, but certainly a possible, if serendipitous, reading.

The non-diegetic use of Beethoven’s Eroica in the 2015 blockbuster film Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation, the fifth instalment of the Mission Impossible action spy series, likewise taps into the well-worn filmic association between classical music and elite culture, but the choice of soundtrack music in this instance seems to imply more than just the clichéd signification. While classical musical enthusiasts were quite delighted by the film’s smart action sequence choreographed and cut to a performance of Puccini’s Turandot at the Vienna State Opera (Alex Ross, for one, notes a possible ‘deep-inside joke’ in the resemblance between the opera’s first three notes and Lalo Schifrin’s Mission Impossible theme song),¹⁶ the placement of the excerpt from the coda of the Eroica’s first movement would likewise bring a knowing smile to the initiated viewer. Benjamin ‘Benji’ Dunn, the British technician-turned-field-agent team-member of the Impossible Mission Force, has ‘won’ tickets to see Puccini’s opera, and Beethoven’s symphony fades in as he picks up the brochure, grunts indignantly and absconds from his CIA office. The Eroica supplies a lengthy sound bridge for the scene change to Vienna: the final iteration of the first movement’s heroic first theme is heard at full volume as the viewer glides towards the Stephansdom spire in an aerial shot. The Eroica continues as Benji, now in Vienna, exits the U-Bahn, strutting victoriously in his tux en route to the opera. The winning smile is knocked off his face, however, when a stranger aggressively plants an envelope in his stomach, cutting the music off mid-passage (but on a downbeat, at least) to interrupt the final surge to a triumphant conclusion.

No less secure are the heroic associations of the Eroica’s first movement when it sounds non-diegetically in the operating theatre of the American Broadcasting Company’s primetime television medical drama Grey’s Anatomy. In ‘This Magic Moment’ (Season 8, Episode 11), which first aired on 12 January 2012, the operating room is prepared – the scene set – to the first movement ‘Alla rustica’ of Vivaldi’s Concerto for Strings in G major, RV 151, classical music once again tracking superior intelligence coupled with high occupational status. But the Eroica’s opening chords punch up the assertive command that follows: ‘Team leaders, let’s get in place.’ The heroic first theme follows as the surgical teams move into position, Dr Owen Hunt’s measured pep talk reminding his army of doctors (and informing the television viewers) of the high stakes of the epic campaign ahead – the separation of conjoined twins: ‘Be sharp, be present, be focused. Dr. Robbins has been caring for these children since the day they were born. They will each get a new life today. Our actions will determine what kind of lives they will be.’ Slick splicing provides the musical suture, and the movement’s final cadence sounds as sterile drapes are pulled back from the table to reveal two conjoined – dolls. It may be just a practice run, but Dr Hunt’s last command of the scene – ‘Let’s begin’, inserted between Beethoven’s penultimate and final chords – leaves no doubt about the heroic surgical struggle ahead.

But the very first episode of the Netflix award-winning original documentary series Chef’s Table, now in its fifth season, takes the signification cake in its tracking of the fusion of sophistication, revolution, heroism and triumph over adversity with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. The episode profiles Massimo Bottura, chef patron of Modena’s three-Michelin-star restaurant Osteria Francescana, first at the time of writing in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.¹⁷ The soundtrack is chock-full of classical music alongside original cues, all of which sound non-diegetically. The first movement of ‘Winter’ from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the reliable pick for communicating refinement in a single bar, tracks the opening credits, as the visuals alternate between time-lapse photography of the frenetic activity in the Osteria Francescana kitchen and appreciative, slow-motion close-ups of individual dishes. But composer Max Richter has altered the metre in places, rendering Vivaldi’s concerto as surprising as it is familiar, a clever nod to Chef Bottura’s reimagining of traditional Emilian cooking. Chopin’s Etude in C minor, Op. 10, No. 12 cleverly tracks the introduction of the first intentionally ‘provocative’ (Bottura’s word) plate served at Osteria Francescana, the ‘revolutionary’ (my word) dish ‘Tortellini Walking Into Broth’. The reaction to Bottura’s culinary insurrection? ‘They want me dead’, he recalls.

The next several years were difficult: Bottura’s recipes were truly threatening to the Modenese. ‘We were struggling, were really struggling’, he explains in the documentary. ‘I was ready to close the restaurant because it was totally empty.’ Lara, Bottura’s wife, elaborates, ‘It wasn’t like closing that restaurant was going to close down his desire to bring the Italian kitchen into the twenty-first century. If he left at that moment he would be surrendering, and surrendering a battle that would continue within him.’ Fast forward to 2001, when the most important food critic in Italy wrote an article for Espresso in which he lamented that the Modenese didn’t understand Bottura’s cuisine. More gastronomic reviews followed, and as Lara explains, ‘They started seeing in Massimo something that they hadn’t seen for a while in Italy, which was someone who was willing to take risks.’ Chef Bottura again: ‘In November, we got the prize [from Espresso Guide] … as Best Chef, Young Chef in Italy, and the first star Michelin.’ Cue Beethoven. As the Eroica’s opening chords sound, Bottura strides triumphantly through the front door of his restaurant, enters the kitchen and embraces his staff, the whole scene filmed in slow motion to amplify the momentousness. The Allegro con brio tracks a lengthy montage of service in a fully booked Osteria Francescana, with close-ups of the revolutionary culinary creations that secured Bottura’s victory. A slick musical elision allows the final cadence to sound just as the last plate is served up for the viewing pleasure of esurient Netflix watchers.

Alongside predictable placements in film and television soundtracks, the Eroica also makes an appearance in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, the award-winning turn-based strategy computer game released in 2005. Widely celebrated for its multiple distinct playlists in the soundtrack, most of which make heavy use of Western classical music, Civilization IV proposes music as the most important cultural ‘technology’ in the game. Once discovered, music allows cathedrals to be built in a city, the construction of which increases culture which in turn boosts happiness.¹⁸ Less inspired, however, is the particular use of the Eroica’s Marcia funebre as the diplomacy theme for Otto von Bismark.¹⁹ Without too much effort, it is of course possible to hear the Eroica excerpt as memorialising the great hero who vanquished all enemies, unified Germany, and governed the German Empire for nearly twenty years as its first Imperial Chancellor. But Napoleon Bonaparte is also a named leader in Civilization IV, and his diplomacy theme is ‘La Marseillaise’, a choice which suggests not only missed opportunity but a certain lack of music-historical knowledge among the game’s designers and composers. True, legend has it that ‘Bismark considered Beethoven’s art a source of strength for his political achievements’,²⁰ and Hans von Bülow did ‘appallingly’ rededicate the Eroica to Bismark in 1892.²¹ But when one recalls that it was during Napoleon I’s reign as Emperor of the French that ‘La Marseillaise’ was withdrawn as the French national anthem and, moreover, that Bismark requested that he be spared ‘the monkey show’ of a state funeral (a request that was honoured) while Bonaparte’s remains were exhumed and carried through Paris in a grand funeral procession nearly two decades after he died, the Eroica’s Marcia funebre would seem the obvious choice for Bonaparte’s diplomacy theme rather than Bismark’s. There is also, of course, Beethoven’s original dedication of the Eroica to Bonaparte.²² Then again, by lead designer Soren Johnson’s own admission, the Civilization IV musical selections were largely a result of his preference for the music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.²³ At the risk of undermining a central argument of this chapter, perhaps the lesson in this brief consideration of the Civilization IV soundtrack is not to read too much into such things.

Just as the hero mythology and stylistic revolutionary associations of the Eroica are reinforced in visual entertainments during the past two decades, the twenty-first-century’s first English-language biography of Beethoven also subscribes to Eroica reception orthodoxy. Written not by a music historian but by the popular biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Edmund Morris for the Eminent Lives series, Beethoven: The Universal Composer (2005) has been knocked by critics for its hyperbole, reductive triumphal narrative and uncritical assertions of Beethoven’s unparalleled greatness, even as this short book is appreciated for its readability and engaging rendering of character.²⁴ In the few pages devoted to the Eroica, Morris hears the symphony’s two opening fortissimo chords as the ‘cannon shot of a new symphonic language’²⁵ and the last movement as ‘cast in a form never before to be attempted – part Classical variation, part an imperious exercise of will on intractable materials: godly fire applied to clay, the Code Napoléon transforming old laws’.²⁶

Alternative Readings: Pastoral, Politics and Freedom in Musical Scholarship

In mainstream classical musical culture, visual media and popular biography, the homogeneity of twenty-first-century connotations of Beethoven’s Third Symphony is quite striking. Such harmony among recent uses, associations and meanings of the Eroica extends the long-established heroic-revolutionary trope further into the popular-cultural imagination while faithfully reflecting two centuries of the Eroica’s reception. Indeed, most contemporary engagements with the symphony do not challenge Burnham’s assessment of the Eroica’s power: ‘the conjunction of Beethoven’s music with the ethical and mythical implications of the hero and his journey holds the entire reception history of this symphony in its sway’.²⁷ But alternative readings of the Eroica are emerging in musical scholarship alongside this basic heroic trope, as new critical theories engage with the work’s traditional interpretations.

The pastoral is the linchpin in the first two new Eroica exegeses of the twenty-first century, both of which provide pivotal examples in the authors’ respective book-length explorations of much broader issues and repertory. As the central work in the concluding chapter of The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (2002), a groundbreaking study of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century instrumental works in which a subject is specified by a text, Richard Will’s reading of the Eroica shares much with those that situate the symphony within the art of the Napoleonic era: the first movement suggests conflict, battle, the constant threat of war and military deeds, and its heroic opening theme references the character of the grand Uomo. But when the famous chromatic C♯ of the opening phrase ascends to D, Will hears familiar pastoral references: the ‘middle-register murmuring’ of slurred figures in the second violins, the ‘smoothing out of the first-violin syncopations into long tones’, and the ‘leisurely progress’ of the violins and cellos towards tonic closure at the end of the phrase; in the restatement of the theme that immediately follows, solo woodwinds and horn ‘prolong an idyllic atmosphere’.²⁸ In short, the hero of Will’s reading is predisposed to digression from the outset. As forward motion in the exposition keeps ‘giving way to a sensuousness that wafts out of the woodwinds, out of the pulsing rhythms and the messe di voce spanning each phrase, and out of the passing chromaticisms … the grand Uomo would appear to have strayed into one of those erotic idylls where the heroes of epic are forever losing their way, the palace of Armida or the island of Calypso’.²⁹ More digressions follow in the movement, until the heroic theme finds its final form in the coda when the orchestration migrates from the pastoral to the military, culminating in a ‘full-blown trumpet fanfare’. Because the military topic grows seamlessly out of the pastoral topic in Will’s interpretation, ‘the foil to the heroic identity has become its foundation, the conscience on which its endeavors build’. The character of the heroic theme in Will’s reading is thus an amalgam, and just as the hero is transformed by the pastoral, so too are the meanings of idyllic stillness: ‘If at first pastoral topics stand for distraction, for sensual or illusory retreats from duty, by the end [of the first movement] they have become a landscape that inspires, like the Swiss mountains whose embedded history of freedom and justice motivate Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell to his struggle against tyranny.’³⁰

In Beethoven after Napoleon (2004), an exploration of political romanticism in Beethoven’s late works, Stephen Rumph’s reading of the pastoral element in the Eroica’s opening phrase is the converse of Will’s. Where Will hears the pastoral topic surfacing at bar 9, when C♯ ascends to D, Rumph is ‘drowsing in the idyllic countryside of the Pastoral’ until the chromatic slip to C♯ in bar 7. With the addition of the jarring syncopations, off-beat violin ‘shrieks’, and diminished seventh harmony, the opening bars of the Eroica become ‘a perfect musical symbol of an alienated nature’. This reading of the Eroica, in Rumph’s own estimation, ‘flies in the face of a long tradition … of describing the symphony as a heroic military epic’, as Rumph jettisons reception history to hear the work as drawing its ‘chief sustenance from the naive realm of nature’.³¹ Support for his argument comes from Beethoven’s choice of key, the permeation of lower dance topics, the ‘haunting’ of Beethoven’s work on Prometheus by Haydn’s Creation, and even the pastoral literary references in the Heiligenstadt Testament.³²

While the primary aim of Rumph’s book may be to challenge traditional political interpretations of Beethoven’s late works, he employs the same hermeneutic strategy when engaging the heroic style: hearing resonance of contemporary philosophical, aesthetic and political constructs in Beethoven’s music. For the Eroica, the illuminating concept is the Enlightenment’s narrative paradigm of the Universalgeschichte, which, in Rumph’s elucidation, ‘traces the education of humanity from an instinctual harmony with nature to a state of rational freedom’.³³ The Universalgeschichte allows Rumph to link Beethoven’s ballet Prometheus to the Third Symphony philosophically and politically as well as musically and compositionally, a discursive connection that propels several sweeping interpretations: that the natural state, from which humanity was alienated in the seventh bar of the Eroica’s first movement, is finally regained in the periodicity of the finale’s contredanse; that the individual is welcomed into the collective ‘as the fragments of natural harmony reunite in the mirror patterns of choreography’; and that the dialectic of nature and culture is ultimately synthesised in the contredanse variations. Rumph’s hermeneutics even link his Eroica to Beethoven’s own heroic but alienated self: ‘Out of the lonely depths of the Heiligenstadt Testament springs this festive, communal vision – the Geschöpfe des Beethovens become human simply by dancing together.’³⁴

The repertory focus of Nicholas Mathew’s book Political Beethoven (2013) may be Beethoven’s much maligned occasional and overtly political works, especially Wellingtons Sieg, Der glorreiche Augenblick, the Ninth Symphony and the Missa solemnis, but his task is much broader: ‘to explore the ideological, musical and psycho-social mechanisms that have allowed Beethoven’s music to collaborate with a succession of new historical actors’.³⁵ Mathew’s ‘network of collaborators’ ultimately includes us, but he begins with Beethoven’s ‘collaborative politics’ in Napoleonic Vienna and the critical history of the heroic style. No new exegesis of the Eroica per se is offered here, but Mathew’s exploration of the critical reception that sets the intrinsic musical narrative of the Eroica in opposition to the extrinsic historical narrative of Wellingtons Sieg leads to a dialectical conception of the autonomy aesthetic, the philosophical construct at the heart of Eroica reception history. After tracing the history and historiography of the heroic style, especially criticism in which the ideal of the Eroica is placed in direct opposition to the real of Wellingtons Sieg, Mathew concludes that ‘the autonomy of a work such as the Eroica can consequently only be measured by a disavowal of anything that it might be said to represent’. Or, put more generally, compositions that are granted ‘independence from worldly matters’ seem to ‘have something to say about the world’.³⁶

Daniel Chua’s Adornian reading of the Eroica in his book Beethoven & Freedom (2017), however, rests on the notion that music’s aesthetic autonomy is actually displaced political autonomy, as ‘the eradication of reality on the surface allows music to retreat into an independent realm where it can reformulate the possibility of a freedom that has yet to be realised’.³⁷ Chua’s rehearsals of German Idealist assertions of aesthetic autonomy and Adolf Bernhard Marx’s claims for the self-determination of musical form certify the Eroica’s analogy with freedom as defined by Kant, leading to an essential point in his Eroica argument: in representing the unrepresentable, ‘the Eroica is the embodiment of freedom, not just as a hero, but as a noumenal concept’.³⁸ This reading depends on the Third Symphony’s articulations of Adorno’s five states of nothingness, which, taken together, form the Augenblick – the aesthetic premise or, in Adorno’s own words the ‘very core’, of his theory of the symphony: ‘every artwork is an instant, a momentary suspension of its process’.³⁹ For example, Chua explains how, for Adorno, the opening of the Eroica is ‘redeemed by nothing’:

In positing the Eroica as an ‘eternal moment of freedom’, Chua takes Adorno’s Augenblick quite literally. To gauge the first movement as a blink in time, Chua measures

1. 1. Time over distance to determine how fast the Eroica goes, and

2. 2. Volume over distance to gauge how far sound travels in the Eroica.⁴¹

If this sounds gimmicky, well, it is. But overwrought metric cleverness notwithstanding, Chua links the Eroica to the Zeitgeist of the Napoleonic wars, the industrial revolution and notions of modern progress to argue that the first movement presents a ‘radical reconception of speed’. As an act of will, speed in the Eroica is a ‘potential energy’.⁴² To demonstrate this reconception, Chua reads the first fourteen bars of the symphony as a thematic complex whose substance ‘disperses and regroups at different points’, yielding ‘not a thematic timeline but a complex of multiple times that can rotate at different speeds and can be deployed at any given moment’. The hermeneutic upshot is that the heroic Augenblick ‘proposes a different space-time dimension where speed is not a tempo but a decision that turns time into a subjective force’.⁴³ Because Beethoven’s music can therefore cover vast distances in no time, Chua concludes that ‘freedom, in the Eroica, is a moment’.⁴⁴

Chua’s final move is to analyse the ‘early’ horn-call and its superimposition of a tonic triad over the dominant harmony as time out of joint:

Rather than some supernatural voice, as others have heard Beethoven’s famous anticipation, the Adornian reading, transmitted through Chua, hears a collapse of distance: ‘In effect, within the space of four bars, the speed of sound has become the speed of light.’⁴⁶

Heroic Narrative and Disability: Overcoming

Turning now to a welcome grounding in the physical, the first movement of the Eroica is a central example in Joseph Straus’s seminal article on disability in music and music theory. By linking the primary tropes in the critical reception of the Eroica to the construction of disability, Straus shows how in most narrative readings Beethoven’s music is ‘metaphorically conflated with the body of a fleshly human being’.⁴⁷ Whether interpreted as a threat to mobility in the hero’s journey or symbolic of Beethoven’s deafness, the C♯ in bar 7 is the disabling obstacle to be heroically overcome in the drama of the movement. While such associations are deeply rooted in Eroica reception history, the relationship Straus reveals between these familiar readings and the history of disability is truly momentous. By pointing out that in 1802 it was a new idea that disability could be overcome and noting the founding of institutions for educating blind and deaf people in European capitals, particularly Vienna’s Taubstummeninstitut for ‘deaf-mutes’, Straus establishes Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony as an emblem in this new conception of disability: ‘The narrative in the “Eroica” of disability overcome thus forms part of the history of disability, and that history in turn provides an essential context for the interpretation of Beethoven’s life and work.’⁴⁸

Human Narratives and Disability: Adaptation

Disability not overcome, however, may emerge as another new narrative thread in Eroica reception as disability studies are increasingly embraced in music scholarship. Robin Wallace’s deeply personal book Hearing Beethoven does much to challenge the enduring ‘triumph over adversity’ mythology launched by the Heiligenstadt Testament and subsequently cemented in Eroica reception by the psychological approaches of Romain Rolland, Philip Downs and Maynard Solomon.⁴⁹ Part love letter to his late wife Barbara, who lost her hearing at the age of forty-seven, part examination of Beethoven’s adaptations to his deafness, and part exploration of how Beethoven’s diminishing hearing may have shaped his compositions, Wallace’s book reveals Beethoven as human, not hero – a man who did not overcome his deafness but rather one who adapted. As Beethoven’s hearing loss progressed, his compositional processes became more visual and physical, Wallace argues, and Landsberg 6, the Eroica sketchbook that immediately followed the Heiligenstadt crisis, provides key evidence. The opening melodic motive of the Eroica, which fills two bars in 3/4 time, Beethoven wrote with three quick penstrokes, and as Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman have noted, these three penstrokes are used over and over in the drafts for the first movement, sometimes even standing in for thematic material not yet written. Wallace sees Beethoven using a simple visual cue in the Eroica sketches, one that was ‘grounded in his physical sense of time’, to stand for an important musical event. Beethoven ‘let his eyes take the lead … The movement’s audible complexity was based on something he could see: something that is still visible to anyone who cares to follow his path through the pages of Landsberg 6’.⁵⁰ The truths Beethoven reveals through his adaptations Wallace reminds us were true already: ‘that music engages sight and touch as well as hearing; that it originates in the body; that it is definitively shaped by the physical materials of its creation’.⁵¹

The Eroica is likewise denied the triumph of its heroic mythology in Joe Wright’s 2009 film The Soloist. The trope of Beethoven overcoming disability, not just his deafness but also his ostensible mental illness, haunts the plot of the film for any viewer familiar with Beethoven’s biography and music. The presumed hero of The Soloist, Nathaniel Ayers, is homeless and mentally ill, but he was once a promising young cellist studying at Juilliard. Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez tries to help Nathaniel get treatment for schizophrenia and regain something of his previous life as a musician. Lopez fails, but he does at least secure a place for Nathaniel to sleep indoors.

Beethoven’s heroic narrative, though unacknowledged in any of the film’s dialogue, literally sounds through The Soloist. In the first flashback to Cleveland in the 1970s, the young Nathaniel hums the Eroica’s opening heroic theme while walking to meet a potential music teacher; once in the studio, Nathaniel plays the Eroica’s cello part from the beginning. When the scene cuts back to present-day Los Angeles, young Nathaniel’s cello line continues, supplying a sound bridge from past to present. On the phone with Lopez, Harry Barnoff, the music teacher, speaks over the now non-diegetic Eroica melody, proclaiming Nathaniel as ‘the most gifted kid I ever met. I said that if he made a full commitment to music, if he really, really gave it all he had, the whole world would open up to him’. Synced perfectly with the dialogue, the cello part reaches the return to the heroic theme just before Barnoff finishes his recollection: ‘And he did, he really did.’ The disabling obstacle enters Nathaniel’s narrative when the Eroica hits the jarring syncopations of the development.⁵² Nathaniel tunes out the world around him while playing the cello part in his bedroom, the orchestra fading higher in the soundtrack to accompany him. At bar 279 in the development, just four bars before the new theme, Nathaniel abruptly stops playing and starts sobbing, the first hint of his impending psychological breakdown. When his mother comforts him later that night, assuring him that ‘you got something special here, baby … a way out’, the Eroica’s heroic trajectory is clearly launched: Nathaniel is not fully formed but full of potential; he will venture out into complexity and encounter adversity. But, as we already know, he will not return renewed and completed. Nathaniel will not triumph.⁵³

Nathaniel reaches his particular ne plus ultra in the Eroica’s Marcia funebre. During an orchestra rehearsal at Juilliard, Nathaniel, distracted by voices inside his head, plays out of time and flees from the rehearsal and ultimately his life as a student at the conservatory. The scene immediately cuts back to Nathaniel in the present, making music outside a shelter for homeless people with mental illness. He’s playing the cello part of the Marcia funebre.

Especially significant in the soundtrack of The Soloist is the absence of the final form of the Eroica’s opening heroic theme, the trumpet fanfare that emerges in the theme only in the movement’s coda. This crucial transformation is heard neither diegetically nor non-diegetically in the film. The moment of opportunity does present itself, however, when Lopez takes Nathaniel to the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s rehearsal of the Eroica. As the opening chords strike, Nathaniel blinks;⁵⁴ when the heroic theme commences, with Nathaniel’s heartbeat superimposed over the music, Nathaniel closes his eyes. The camera, up extremely close on his eyes, begins to zoom out and the scene eventually fades to black so as to allow the viewer to experience what Nathaniel sees (presumably) while listening: synesthetic flares of colour, like a psychedelic light show, cut to the music. Seamless audio editing jumps to the recapitulation, and the music abruptly stops at the end of the climactic passage of syncopated diminished seventh chords (bar 534), leaving the listener hanging with Nathaniel’s words, uttered sotto voce, to fill the void: ‘He’s in the room.’ ‘Who is?’ Lopez asks. Nathaniel: ‘Beethoven.’

Nathaniel’s Eroica never reaches the coda; its heroic theme never finds its triumphant blaze. In this way both the story and the soundtrack of The Soloist stay faithful to Steve Lopez’s original narrative (at least on the course of Nathaniel’s life), published in his 2008 book of the same title: Nathaniel is not cured of his mental illness, cannot recover his musical talents in full and does not emerge triumphant in the end. As Hollywood is denied its tired cliché of victory through art,⁵⁵ so too is the Eroica denied its customary heroic trajectory.

It remains to be seen how readings of the Eroica that have emerged in the first two decades of the twenty-first century might filter into broader cultural understandings or symbolic uses of the symphony, particularly in mainstream classical musical culture or visual entertainments. But at present, the Eroica remains the pre-eminent musical emblem of heroism in both critical reception and popular imagination, even when the heroic victory, however constructed, may elude.