Finding Meaning in the Eroica
The composition and first performances of the Eroica Symphony took place between 1802 and 1805, just a few years after the start of a new century, and a decade after the radical phase of the French Revolution. The revolution of 1789, and not the year 1800, came to be regarded by posterity as the true start of modern history and the nineteenth century. The Eroica was linked, by chronology, to a new era, and spiritually to the ideals and history of the Revolution and Napoleon. This influenced how the symphony was heard and understood throughout the nineteenth century. The Eroica, by bridging art, history and politics, became a musical mirror of the ‘long’ century whose end was marked by World War I. But it was a magic mirror, reflecting back to its public not merely echoes of the past but also the political and cultural aspirations of successive generations.
Two lines of arguments prevailed. The Eroica was viewed, on the one hand, as an inheritance: the utopian expression in music of the philosophical and spiritual conceits of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the Revolution. On the other hand, it was admired as a radical, revolutionary departure from tradition that ushered in a break with the past and suggested a pathway into a new modernity and the triumph of Romanticism. By the end of the century, the Eroica’s status as a contested and unique representation of the promise of the new century included a recognition that it was also a reminder of the devastating shortcomings of the nineteenth century, measured against the political and social ideals of the eighteenth. What follows is an account of the intense preoccupation with the Eroica, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, among critics, composers, performers and audiences.
Philip H. Goepp (1864–1936) was an American organist, student of John Knowles Paine (who thought Wagner a dangerous influence), and a lawyer. He served as the programme annotator for the Philadelphia Orchestra for two decades (from 1900 to 1921). In his popular guide to the symphonic repertory, Symphonies and Their Meaning, first published in 1897, Goepp tried his best to explain the elusive and contradictory character of the Eroica. The symphony had the ‘ring of universality’ yet was full of the uniquely unexpected, unprecedented sonorities and even the ‘hysterical’. The listener needed to be able to ‘distinguish profound joy … from careless irresponsible abandon’. Beethoven, ‘a thinking man’ according to Goepp, ‘dethroned Beauty and set up Feeling’.1
But in the Eroica Beethoven also demonstrated ‘strongest sympathy with the struggles in France for individual freedom and for the principles on which stand the American republic and national life … Justice, Equality, Democracy, Common Sense, and … Universal Brotherhood’. That being said, the Eroica also managed to reveal Beethoven as not ‘o’ercast with intellectual motives’ but possessed of a ‘balance of depth and of humanity’. Beethoven’s ‘elemental simplicity and childlike exuberance’ were on full display in the Eroica.2
Goepp’s uncertainty and inability to sort out ambiguities and contradictions in the Eroica, and his discomfort in reconciling formal qualities and some manner of meaning derived from the compositional genesis of the work, primarily the association with Napoleon and the idea of the hero, were extreme. These struggles may seem comical and naively American, but Goepp’s account confirms the conflicts and currents in the nineteenth-century reception of the symphony relating to its ambitions, form and meaning. Was it a work, Goepp explicitly asked, that celebrated the political ideas of America’s Declaration of Independence?3 Or was it a forceful manifesto of Romantic sentiment that elevated emotion over reason, spontaneity over logic, the subjective and individual over the universal, and the naïve over the sublime? Or perhaps it did both?
Anton von Webern and Felix Weingartner, two quite different composer-conductors in German-speaking Europe whose careers overlapped with Goepp, also sought to come to terms with the symphony. Webern, 23 years old, attended a performance in Vienna, conducted by Felix Mottl, on Sunday 6 November 1904, almost exactly 100 years after the Eroica’s composition. He wrote in his diary that the performance had brought him closer to the ‘divine’ genius of Beethoven and that
I long for an artist in music such as Segantini was in painting. His music would have to be a music that a man writes in solitude, far away from all the turmoil in the world, in contemplation of the glaciers, of eternal ice and snow, of the sombre mountain giants. It would have to be like Segantini’s pictures. The onslaught of an alpine storm, the mighty tone of the mountains, the radiance of the summer sun on flower-covered meadows – all these would have to be in the music, born immediately out of alpine solitude. That man would be the Beethoven of our day. An Eroica would inevitably appear again, one that is younger by 100 years.4
The painter whom the Eroica inspired Webern to compare Beethoven with was Giovanni Segantini, who died unexpectedly in 1899 at the age of 42.5 Segantini was widely considered one of the greatest painters of his time. Ludwig Hevesi, Vienna’s leading art critic, was among the painter’s most ardent admirers. For Hevesi, Segantini’s unique synthesis of hyper-realism, achieved by the application of small, highly textured geometric brush strokes, with a compositional strategy of visual and pictorial symbolism made him ‘a great philosopher with the brush’.6 The meticulous beauty of Segantini’s representations of life and nature high up in the alpine mountains vindicated Nietzsche’s privileging of an artist’s vantage point in the search for truth.
The rhetoric of Hevesi’s critical assessment of Segantini’s art and ambition found its way into Webern’s diary. For Hevesi, Segantini crystallised reality and turned life into an epic. Suffering and death became real without sacrifice of beauty. Hevesi compared Segantini’s disaggregated brushwork with the innovative military strategy of Helmuth von Moltke who led Prussia to victory over Austria in 1866 and France in 1871. Segantini approached the canvas piecemeal, working with seemingly disconnected detailed gestures only to succeed in depicting a coherent argument in the totality of the artwork. The soul of reality beyond the visible was revealed to the viewer through aesthetic representation.7 Hevesi, writing in 1906, described Segantini’s achievement as the ‘humanising of nature’. The ‘highest loyalty to reality’ led Segantini to the ‘secret meaning of appearance, the symbolism of the visible, and the soul of the world of people’.8 Segantini’s painterly means and unique perspective revealed a new way of knowing the world.
Hevesi’s comparison of a modern painter to a contemporary military hero suggests the prominence of the aesthetic in the fin-de-siècle discourse on modernity and politics. For Webern, the astonishing formal aspects of the Eroica, its relentless energy and the constantly surprising ingenuity in thematic development demonstrated the composer’s ambition to express something about the course of history. This justified the Eroica’s stature as a landmark of the power of artists to create meaning and value.
Listening to the Eroica, Webern was reminded of Segantini on account of the grandeur of the symphony and its arresting ingenuity in the elaboration of motivic elements. Segantini’s revelatory symbolism depicting the confrontation of the human and the natural landscape, and his penetrating gaze and original divisionist technique resembled, for Webern, Beethoven’s use of musical procedures in the service of ideas. Both artists revealed an overt and a covert reality simultaneously, and exposed human ideals through their aesthetic. And both worked in solitude: Segantini by choice and as a result of perpetual statelessness, and Beethoven because of deafness.
Webern’s awe at how Beethoven ‘humanised’ nature and articulated man’s place in the world in the Eroica was, however, compromised by a sense of loss and absence, widely shared by his generation, regarding the moment of history he found himself in. Segantini’s paintings suggested what a modern Eroica needed to achieve, and perhaps what it might sound like. But the absence of a Beethoven, someone who might be up to the task of writing another Eroica, was pronounced. The spirit of the age seemed to work against the possibility.
Hevesi had pitted Segantini’s penetrating idiosyncratic pictorial realism against the soulless power of modern technology, exemplified by the capacity of ‘Roentgen rays’ (X rays) to produce unprecedented images of reality; the facts hidden by mere appearance were astonishing. But this modern means lacked a soul. It could not discover and assert deeper meanings. Segantini, however, could do so as a result of a contemporary aesthetic vision and style. By using small, ‘atomic’ strokes, the painter revealed majesty and the play of enduring values by highlighting overlooked details, and reconciling the impressive with the ephemeral, all in contemplation of human life and time in nature.9 Hevesi and Webern both saw in Segantini an artist capable of evoking new meaning. For Webern the apparent contradictions in the Eroica that baffled Goepp could be reconciled by imagining its equivalent in modern painting.
Segantini defined for the young composer, overwhelmed by the sound of the Eroica, the proper aspiration of the composer of the day. The new Beethoven would have to experience isolation, idealised by Webern as being alone in nature. An Eroica could not come from within the transformed space of modernity – the city – but only from within a refuge from it. Although Webern construed the solitude of the high mountains of Switzerland metaphorically, the allusion to Nietzsche’s attachment to Sils Maria was unmistakable. But most important for Webern, in 1906, was the replication through music of Segantini’s harnessing of modern compositional strategies to create a coherent transformative totality, a modern Eroica, a philosophical vision in music.
Twelve years later, in 1918, at the end of the Great War, Felix Weingartner, the world-renowned 55-year-old composer-conductor, wrote a short essay ‘Where is the Modern Eroika?’10 His spelling (an evocation of Greek antiquity) highlighted the point articulated by Webern, the need for a modern work of comparable stature and power. Weingartner understood, as did Webern, that such a work needed to emulate the Eroica in spirit and ambition but not imitate it. The new ‘Eroika’, like the original, had to be evocative of and true to its own historical moment, and not deny the passage of time by conceding to a nostalgic aesthetic of restoration that was increasingly popular with concert audiences.
The catastrophic events of the Great War drove Weingartner in a political direction far from the concerns that preoccupied Webern. Weingartner acknowledged that during the war there had been no shortage of new patriotic music, some of it superficially reminiscent of the Eroica but more akin to Wellington’s Victory. But the monumentality of patriotic music (one thinks of Max Reger’s 1915 Eine vaterländische Overtüre, Op. 140, as opposed to his Requiem, Op. 144b, from the same year) emulated the Eroica only in terms of scale and the presumed subject matter of heroic deeds in war. This revealed, he thought, too narrow an understanding of Beethoven’s Eroica.11
Weingartner knew that throughout the nineteenth century the best-known aspect of the Eroica among musicians and the lay public was its link to Napoleon, rooted in the legend of its original dedication and Beethoven’s subsequent striking of it to substitute a nameless hero for commemoration. Generations of listeners understood the unprecedented heroic scale of the opening movement, and the funeral march of the second, as evoking an ideal of heroism rooted in war and politics. The apparent contrasts between the opening movements and the last two, however, remained a puzzle.
Since the Eroica was first and foremost an epic narration in music of heroism in wartime, for Weingartner the surprise was that four years of war failed to inspire a new Eroica. The turmoil, violence and leadership of the Napoleonic era had provided, after all, the context for Beethoven’s masterpiece. ‘The truly heroic’ was apparently a consequence of war, and therefore the Eroica’s guiding essence. Despite the ‘limitless’ sacrifice of millions of promising young people, the innumerable sufferings tolerated in silence, and the ‘belief in a better world’ (which applied also to the first decade of the nineteenth century), no work of music had yet appeared that met ‘the unprecedented events of contemporary life’ with comparable ‘profundity’. What the shattered world required, in Weingartner’s view, was a work that ‘releases in liberating sounds the animating movement of our soul’, just as Beethoven had done. What made the Eroica immortal was the ‘overwhelming picture of greatness’, inspired by the events of its time, communicated by music.12
For Weingartner, the events of modern history were overwhelming. Technology had so transformed the globe, closing the gaps between peoples, that it seemed inconceivable that the uniqueness of the historical moment would not be revealed in a work of music, much in the way Webern understood Segantini’s painting to operate. Weingartner was in search of a work that ‘would liberate forever the doors’ that imprisoned the highest ideals of the day. The question was whether there was an artist capable of creating a work for all times that also remained true to its historical context, one that could pass the test of time and not become just a ‘gradually fading image’.13
Despite an uncanny resemblance between the modern world and the time of Beethoven’s Eroica, there was, for Weingartner, one decisive difference. And that was the absence of a hero in contemporary public life remotely comparable to Napoleon. The cause of modernity’s failure to produce a new Eroica was not, as Webern thought, the lack of an artist of Beethoven’s stature. Rather, the cause was a vacuum in political greatness. A hero in politics was needed to inspire the present, precisely on account of the barbarism of the war; it had derailed the historical momentum of the nineteenth century towards progress. Before 1914 ‘humanity had been on the best path, guided by truthful understanding, on its way to a cosmopolitan world’, Weingartner lamented.14
No mere war hero could inspire a modern Beethoven to compose a new ‘Eroika’. The need was for charismatic political leadership. The Eroica revealed that Beethoven, before 1804, understood Napoleon to have been more than a hero in war. Weingartner observed that Napoleon’s ideals transcended violence and conquest, although he relied on and was ultimately defeated by war. Those ideals included the unification of Europe, the liberation of all people, and a belief in equality, liberty and the elimination of conflict between nations and races. There was no modern ‘Eroika’ because there was no ‘true’ hero like Napoleon who could ‘ignite’ the Beethoven of the day to write a new ‘Eroika’. Beethoven’s achievement was a work that ‘understood the language of the destiny and direction of the spirit of the world’ and ‘faithfully translated’ history and politics into music. But heroic deeds in the public realm, not only on the battlefield, remained the necessary pre-conditions for the appearance of great modern art.15
Contemplating the Hero: Berlioz and Wagner
Weingartner’s certainty about a causal link between political deeds and ideals and the art of music was a symptom of the extent to which, for the nineteenth century, such a link had been defined by Beethoven’s Eroica. The symphony stood apart on account of its synthesis of aesthetic and formal originality in music and its suggestion of a philosophical and historical argument expressible in language. That argument possessed an unambiguous, authentic, but ill-defined biographical origin. No account of the Eroica, especially in the many concert guides for the lay public, omitted this issue. In his entry on Beethoven in Gustav Schillings’s 1835 Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, Adolf Bernhard Marx pointed to the significance of the ‘images of the heroic’ and the ‘sequence of ideas’ in shaping the symphony’s musical fabric.16
Berlioz opened his 1862 account of the symphony with an admonition not to ‘tamper’ with the description of the work in the first published edition as ‘heroic’ and as the ‘celebration’ of the ‘memory of a great man’. Berlioz omits any reference to Napoleon or historical specifics. He underscores the absence of particularised imagery and a specific story line. The well-known anecdote about Beethoven striking out Napoleon’s name, which Berlioz calls the ‘mutilation’ of the title, is termed a ‘deception’, since the symphony lacks an explicit programme or narration. However, for Berlioz it possesses an aesthetic consistency, a prevailing style adequate to the hero’s funeral and remembrance. A coherent style and not a story explains the uniqueness of the work and its ability to elevate ‘grief’ through ‘such pure form and such nobleness of expression’.17
The Eroica, Berlioz concludes, ‘possesses such strength of thought and execution, that its style is so emotional and consistently elevated besides its form being so poetical’. For Berlioz, the symphony came to occupy a purgatory between explicitly programmatic instrumental music and symphonic music uncompromised by defining words or descriptive images. It was ‘entitled to a rank as equal to the highest conceptions of its composer’, despite competition from Beethoven’s subsequent six symphonies. Berlioz viewed the ‘poetic’ aspect of the Eroica as evocative of classical antiquity: Virgil in the Aeneid (for the funeral march) and Homer in the Iliad (for the link between mourning and celebration in the Scherzo).18
The most influential voice in the nineteenth century on the character and meaning of the Eroica was Wagner. A decade before Berlioz, in his 1852 programme note on the Eroica, Wagner pioneered the idea that the entire work possessed a dramatic poetic programme of articulated generic ideals. Wagner detached its presumed poetic content from any connection to the specific history of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Wagner stripped the symphony of its own history and context and elevated its poetic meaning into the realm of metaphysical idealism.19 In 1870, in the midst of playing the work with Cosima, Wagner stood up and exclaimed, ‘The only mortal who can be compared to Shakespeare!’20 The Eroica fuelled Wagner’s ambition to transform the genre of opera in a direction consistent with Beethoven’s use of symphonic form as a vehicle for a drama of ideas, whose greatest exponent was for him Shakespeare.
Wagner sought to characterise the Eroica in a way more fitting to the mid-century. He had begun to align himself with the political nationalism flourishing in Germany; he developed his image of Beethoven to fit his ambitions and prejudices regarding the intersection between music and poetry; and he took into account the anti-Enlightenment currents in German idealism and Romantic literature and sought to separate the Eroica from the political and epistemological ideologies with which Beethoven had aligned himself.
In the mid-1850s, Wagner’s inconsistent and self-serving bias against the French had not yet fully blossomed (it had done so by 1870, when he published his seminal essay Beethoven). But his affinity with a new aggressive German cultural and political chauvinism had. Wagner shared a suspicion within German intellectual circles of a renewal in France of a mythic obsession with Napoleon (as expressed in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir from 1830, and amply demonstrated by Napoleon’s re-burial in 1840 in Paris). The link between the posthumous glorification of Napoleon’s ambitions, talent and courage and the French appreciation of the Eroica rested on the idea that the symphony was a tribute to Napoleon’s originality and greatness.21
By focusing on the Eroica’s place in the evolution of music, poetry and ideas in history, a reinvention that secured Beethoven’s identity as German, Wagner sought to undermine this interpretation. Since there was reason to suspect that Beethoven, his rage at Napoleon’s naming himself Emperor notwithstanding, harboured some fascination with and admiration for Bonaparte throughout his life, the erasure of a specific history for the Eroica was essential. Wagner recognised that the enthusiasm for the music of Beethoven in France at mid-century demanded that the significance of Beethoven’s original dedication and the underlying beliefs that led the composer to the idea of the symphony in the first place, be diminished in the eyes of the German public.
Wagner’s reframing of the Eroica was not only politically well timed but also justified by the fact that the dedication was changed to ‘an heroic symphony … composed to celebrate the memory of a great man’. The challenge remained how to unify the work’s varied musical materials and reconcile, ideologically, the sharp contrasts between the movements as a single poetic drama. Wagner’s solution was brilliant. Each of the movements represented parts of a dramatic representation of life. Action was followed by tragedy, serenity and love (in Goepp’s simplification of Wagner’s argument).22 Wagner’s idea of the hero in the symphony was thereby detached from any narrow association with Napoleon. It referred rather to an idealised vision of human experience.
The word ‘hero’ in the Eroica, Wagner argued, referred to ‘the whole, the full-fledged man in whom are present all the purely human feelings – of love, of grief, of force – in their highest fill and strength’. Wagner concluded:
the artistic space in this work is filled with all the varied intercrossing feelings of a strong, a consummate Individuality, to which nothing human is strange, but which includes within itself all truly Human, and utters it in a fashion that – after frankly manifesting every noble passion – it reaches a final rounding of its nature, wherein the most feeling softness is wedded with the most energetic force. The heroic tendency of this artwork is the progress toward that rounding off.23
This decontextualising of the political origins and implications of the symphony came shortly after Wagner’s flight from Dresden and his brief career in 1848 and 1849 as a revolutionary dedicated to the older liberal traditions of the universal extension of political rights. This decontexualisation had its impact on subsequent generations. However, Wagner’s reading of the Eroica, and his recasting of Beethoven in general, inspired opposition and scepticism, as would his own music. Wagner notwithstanding, the idea of the hero as a figure in the public realm, associating the heroic with political power and military prowess as exemplified by Bonaparte, remained associated with the Eroica, as Weingartner’s conviction that for another ‘Eroika’ to be written, great leadership capable of world historical actions had to precede the work of art. This reflected a widespread presumption that art, in history, remained consistently contingent on politics.
Weingartner’s call for a new hero was a familiar refrain between 1918 and 1920, as testified to by the hero-seeking circle around Stefan George and Max Weber’s classic critique of the heroic political saviour in his 1919 Munich lectures, Wissenschaft als Beruf and Politik als Beruf. The outcome was ultimately tragic. Hitler fulfilled the wish for charismatic leadership. But Beethoven’s own inclination to hero worship in politics, which began with Joseph II, remained tied to the ideal of the enlightened despot. Beethoven’s fascination with Napoleon was hardly exceptional for the nineteenth century, as Tolstoy’s War and Peace suggests.
The desire for a strong authoritative ruler defined the second half of the century in German history. It was expressed primarily through the cult of Bismarck. It later persisted and fuelled distrust of the Weimar Republic. In 1802 and 1803 Bonaparte may have represented for Beethoven universal ideals of freedom, brotherhood and the rights of citizens. But the striking of his name from the title page of the Eroica inspired Arnold Schoenberg to explain in 1944 that when he undertook to write his Ode to Napoleon, the Eroica reminded him that it was his ‘moral duty’ as an artist ‘to take a stand against tyranny’. Politics, once again, preceded art.24
What fuelled nineteenth-century criticism of Wagner’ s reading of the Eroica was the historical record that Beethoven admired Bonaparte on account of shared ‘Enlightenment’ political sympathies. Beethoven’s outlook, typical of the quite liberal Bonn of his youth, was rooted in a faith in the power of reason, and grounded in an awe of nature. These inheritances from the late eighteenth century were never understood in the nineteenth century to be fundamentally inconsistent with a politics dominated by a single individual, and therefore with the ideal of the great man. It was not autocracy or even despotism that defined the debate in the nineteenth century over the meaning of the origins of the Eroica. Rather it was Beethoven’s allegiance to universality and reason as criteria of ethical and political principles and epistemological judgement. It was the assertion of the universal character of freedom that Wagner sought to deflect and minimise.
Reclaiming the Idealism of the Eroica
The opponents of Wagner, such as Carl Reinecke and Max Bruch, saw Beethoven as the prophet of universal virtues, including tolerance and equality, not a nascent radical post-1848 German nationalist whose ideas anticipated a racialist ideology and the substitution of national myth for history. This divide helped deepen a nineteenth-century perception among anti-Wagnerians of a close affinity between Beethoven, Goethe and Kant. The Eroica Symphony was understood as a radical departure from the Classical models of Haydn and Mozart, and a harbinger of musical Romanticism (alongside the C minor Fifth Symphony and the Ninth, whose choral movement with its reprise of earlier movements set it apart from the Eroica). But this break with past musical models actually underscored Beethoven’s commitment to contemporary sentiments regarding the political freedom of the individual. The Eroica’s ideological prestige derived from its being perceived as the purely instrumental evocation of the sentiments expressed explicitly in the last movement of the Ninth. The Eroica became the Beethoven symphony most closely associated with the Ninth.
Among sceptics of Wagner’s nationalist politics, the implied meaning of the Eroica was an argument on behalf of liberty, the idea of natural rights, individuality and therefore a ‘cosmopolitan’ world, the proper fulfilment of a universal historical destiny. The Eroica was not, in this view, an ahistorical evocation of generic human experience. Nor did it prefigure the heroic in the sense evoked by the myths to which Wagner was attached, which idealised his aggressive German chauvinism.
Nowhere is the character of the late nineteenth-century anti-Wagnerian reading of the Eroica more evident than in the writings of Paul Bekker, a highly influential critic and partisan of early twentieth-century modernism, particularly Mahler and Schreker. Bekker’s Beethoven first appeared in 1911. He argued that the Eroica was emblematic of an underlying unity within musical expression, which flourished throughout the nineteenth century. This unity, derived from Beethoven, persisted beneath the divisive distinctions between programme music and ‘absolute music’ that had emerged in the 1860s.25
Beethoven, and particularly the Eroica, represented the common ground between the opposing camps of the ‘New German’ school dominated by Liszt and Wagner, and the group around Brahms. The work was exemplary, for Bekker, owing to its classic–romantic synthesis, and the link it created between sound and ideas. However true the Eroica was to apparently purely musical values – thematic development, harmonic logic and the use of time in formal structures – it nonetheless shaped the way music could express thought in instrumental music. Beethoven’s Eroica elevated music as a complex but persuasive system of human communication that articulated ideas – not pictures, events or personalities – with musical means, even without an explicit intention to do so.
The Eroica for Bekker marked a radical departure in the use of sonority. The use of solo instruments (such as the horn), and the extremes of dynamic range and contrasts, including the amassing of sound, are audible in all four movements. This sustained novel use of the orchestra lent the work a perceived unity that permitted it to develop a complex argument. Yet the Eroica, according to Bekker, still had one foot in Classicism, as evidenced by the absence of the nascent organic form exhibited by the Ninth.26
Bekker’s most celebrated insight into the Eroica was his assertion that precisely because the symphony’s structure was not organic but sequential, the source for the motivating ideas behind the work, and therefore the key to its overall argument, lay not in the first or second movements, but in the last. Until Bekker, the nineteenth-century consensus held that the leading idea of the work, the ‘heroic’, was established in the first movement. The exposition of the hero in the initial movement was a prelude to the hero’s subsequent funeral and commemoration. Indeed, the tune of the funeral march had been set to words for Simon Bolivar’s funeral in 1830.27
Bekker, intrigued by Beethoven’s use of material from the 1801 ballet The Creatures of Prometheus in the last movement, argued that idea of Prometheus represented the culmination of Beethoven’s design and argument. The evocation of Prometheus reconciled the political origins and ideology of the first two movements with the Eroica’s larger purpose as an affirmative celebration of the human potential to command nature and make history. The originality of the music and the form in the Eroica for Bekker constituted ‘a hymn of praise of a free humanity of action’.28
In Bekker’s reading, the gift of fire and therefore foresight was the legacy of Prometheus. The symphony opens with the articulation in the first movement of human freedom as individual heroism. With the death of the hero, and the overcoming of grief (the third movement), the Kantian universalisation of practical reason constituted the culmination of freedom as freedom for all. Thus Beethoven shifted the weight in the architecture of the Eroica to the figure of Prometheus in the finale. Individual ‘great men’ – Bonaparte and General Ralph Abercromby (who was killed in the Battle of Alexandria in 1801 and whom Bekker adduced as a possible inspiration for the second movement) – were ultimately transitional factors in history and in the symphony’s structure.29
Bekker found that, by placing the emphasis in the finale on the mythic figure of Prometheus after traversing the preceding movements, Beethoven could persuasively render his ultimate philosophical objective: the affirmation of the universalising of Prometheus’s gift to humankind. The music argued a transition from the individual to the collective. The purely formal procedures of musical art in the last movement – the variation form – represented a closing reconciliation of individual and collective freedom. As to the nature of individual heroes, Bekker observed that ‘to their personalities, in the narrow sense of the term, Beethoven remained indifferent’. For Beethoven, Bekker concluded, ‘only what was typical, eternal in its appearance: the power of the will, majesty in death, creative power did he fashion together; and he created from this his poem on all that can be great and heroic, and all that human existence can make of itself’.30
By reversing the priority of the four movements of the symphony, Bekker integrated the Wagnerian view of Beethoven as musical dramatist and forerunner of the music drama. Following an emphasis on musical form associated with the anti-Wagnerian, Bekker held up the Eroica as a masterful breakthrough in musical expression, incomparably reconciling classicism with a typically Romantic freedom of musical expression. He thereby modified the Wagnerian idea of meaning in music by viewing the Eroica as a generalised philosophical assertion of human potential in a condition of freedom. This fitted Webern’s association of the work with Segantini’s capacity to unlock, by aesthetic means, underlying universal truths by penetrating the details and structures in nature.
Bekker’s removal of the symphony’s meaning from the age of Napoleon was less radical than Webern’s, since the ideas Bekker found expressed by the Eroica remained true to their historical origins in 1789. The analogy Webern drew between Beethoven and Segantini focused on what would be required of a modern equivalent to the Eroica. This question assumed the distancing of the symphony from its context of origin, a strategy implicit in the assessments of Wagner and Berlioz.
Weingartner was sceptical of both Bekker’s analysis and Wagner’s highly romantic approach. He remained wedded to the idea that the key to the meaning of the Eroica lay in the first two movements. He rejected the composer’s metronome markings for the first two movements, added by Beethoven in 1817. They ran contrary to what he believed to be the ideational content of the work. The sixty per dotted minim for the first movement invited, he thought, a trivialisation of the movement and the grandeur of the heroic. Likewise, the eighty to the crotchet indication for the second movement was ‘alarmingly quick’ and ‘could not possibly be the right one’, for it violated the funereal idea.31 Erwin Stein reported on two performances he heard in 1930, one by Toscanini and one by Webern. Toscanini, Stein reported, adhered to an ‘old style’ that relied on tempo modifications to underscore ‘pathos and expression’. By pursuing flexibility in the pacing of the work, Toscanini followed the path of emancipating the Eroica from its narrow historical context implied by Wagner and Berlioz but returned the priority of the heroic as definitive of the first movement and the symphony.
Webern’s performance seemed to Stein ‘more directly impressive’. Webern held to a swift tempo in the first movement without sacrificing expressive contrasts. The ‘vehemence’ and ‘lyrical elements’ occurred naturally without losing their unique character. The second movement was ‘more flowing’ and ‘less pathetic’ in character. But most remarkable was the last movement. It was ‘wonderful’, particularly the variations. The impetus with which the symphony closed was ‘telling’. Webern sought to highlight the inner structural coherence of the four-movement work, and, as Bekker, underscored the defining presence of the last movement.32 As Donald Francis Tovey observed in 1935, the finale ‘is in a form which was unique when it appeared, and has remained unique ever since’.33
The Eroica and the Logic of History
The status accorded the Eroica during the second half of the nineteenth century by Wagnerians and their detractors derived in both instances from the undeniable suggestion from the composer himself that there was some sort of argument rooted in politics and history that hovered over a work. Unlike the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, the Eroica has neither a preface nor explicit allusions to nature and visual scenes in the countryside illustrated by tone painting. But unlike the Fifth or the Seventh, the Eroica does not allow one to dismiss assertions of allusions (to ‘fate’ and the ‘apotheosis of the dance’ in those cases respectively) as illegitimate. Yet the Eroica, despite the resemblances to the Ninth, lacked an explicit setting of text.
The nineteenth-century reception of the Eroica reveals that Wagner and his acolytes understood themselves as participants in the march of historical progress and actors in the dawn of a new age. On the other hand, Brahms and his followers remained sceptical of the inevitability of progress in history. The fin-de-siècle modernists in the early twentieth century, including Mahler and Schoenberg, absorbed the Wagnerian conceit of progress. But as Webern’s 1906 musings and Hevesi’s advocacy of contemporary art suggest, the belief in the inevitability of a progressive logic in history had a sharp edge of criticism. The growing dominance of industry, the mechanisation of daily life, the destruction of the natural landscape and the ravages of capitalism were dangers to spiritual and aesthetic progress. By the end of the century, the human soul seemed at risk, as was the purity of nature. But the imperative to create a new art to fit a new age remained.
Running parallel to the Wagnerian enthusiasm for a new art adequate to contemporary life was a pessimistic vision of cultural decline. Progress in material terms, including advances in technology (of which Brahms, ironically, was particularly fond), was accompanied by a sense of foreboding linked to political nationalism, and to a perceived threat to aesthetic and cultural standards posed by democracy and mass culture. Among the consequences of the French Revolution was the destruction not only of the aristocracy of birth and political privileges, but also of an aristocracy of learning and aesthetic patronage and discernment. Nostalgia for pre-modern eras flourished, including the Medieval (visible in the Gothic Revival in architecture) and the Renaissance (the cult of Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo). The late nineteenth century witnessed a reassertion of artisan crafts as a counterweight to industrial manufacture (the Arts and Crafts Movement) and a call to rediscover Classicism, particularly Mozart.
Bekker’s Beethoven represented a non-Wagnerian liberal defence of the idea of progress. Beethoven pointed to a future marked by the universal encouragement of individuality, an ethics of equality and freedom on behalf of human potential and justice. Weingartner, once an adherent of this view, became more doubtful. In 1912, in a collection of essays that included a plea for a return to Mozart, he confessed that he thought Beethoven marked the high point of music history. The book opened with an affectionate reminiscence of Weingartner’s 1898 encounter with an elderly surviving contemporary of Beethoven’s. ‘Beethoven was everything’, she said, and modern music left her cold.34
Cultural criticism that excoriated the nineteenth century and raised the alarm at a descent into mediocrity gained in prominence after 1860. Matthew Arnold published Culture and Anarchy in 1869. Between 1883 and 1892 Max Nordau wrote three popular books, The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization (1883), The Sickness of the Century (1887) and, most famously, Degeneration (1892). Among the intellectuals whom Brahms admired most was Jacob Burckhardt, a devoted music lover and author of Der Cicerone, a guide to the art of Italy, first published in the mid-1850s and revised in 1873, which Brahms cherished. Burckhardt was pessimistic about modernity, both its politics and its culture. His doubts, thinly veiled in his 1860 masterpiece The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, became explicit in his lectures from the 1880s, published in English after his death as Force and Freedom.
The resemblances between Brahms’s Second Symphony from 1877 and the Eroica suggest that Brahms shared Burckhardt’s pessimism about the direction of history (as the late Reinhold Brinkmann brilliantly argued).35 Brahms does not merely evoke the Eroica in the material in his symphony’s first movement, but also recalls its rhythmic elaborations and orchestration. The similarities are intentional reference points for listeners, alerting them to differences between the era of the Eroica and the late nineteenth century. Brahms understood that Beethoven articulated a sense of newness and optimism characteristic of the historical moment, particularly through a dynamic use of musical time. Brahms sought to highlight, through allusions to the Eroica, a ‘change in the historical situation’. In a manner resembling Webern’s reading of Segantini’s landscapes, Brahms explicitly introduces calm and repose in musical space and time, qualities evident in Segantini’s vision of nature. The explicit references to the Eroica expressed ‘a skeptical reaction against the optimistic and utopian promise of that forward-looking, perspectivist idea of history which Beethoven’s formal process implies’; Brahms would repeat this use of the Eroica in the opening chords of his Third Symphony from 1883 and in the variation from the finale of the Fourth from 1885.36
The utopian impulse that inspired Beethoven to break with past models of symphonic form (including his own first two forays into the genre) led to his deployment of novel compositional procedures in the Eroica, suggestive of vectors of progress. Among these novel features, of which Brahms was keenly aware, was rhythmic unpredictability. Beethoven’s breaking of regularity and his relentless use of syncopation defied established expectations of continuity. The predictable and the asymmetrical are juxtaposed in the third movement of the Eroica from the very start, giving the contrasting and varied uses of rhythmic elements a leading role in establishing the dynamism of the musical structure.37
Wagner emulated this path towards an extended musical drama and monumentality, not with rhythm but with the extension of harmony, augmenting the possibilities of repetition and avoiding closure. Brahms, with a melancholy sensibility, countered this approach. Although he made use of complex rhythmic asymmetry and syncopation, the dominant character of the music of the Second Symphony suggests isolation and solitude. Brahms took refuge in nature, highlighting beauty of a static kind. Brahms’s allusions to Beethoven’s driving energy in the Eroica functioned as signals of twilight and not a new dawn in history.
In Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen can be found the most arresting use of a musical reference to the Eroica to mark the decline and end of a great era of art and culture. Strauss achieved a brilliant synthesis of the opposing trends in nineteenth-century music. He started out in the orbit of Brahms under the patronage of Hans von Bülow in Meiningen. He then embarked on a spectacular career using the tone poem format developed by Liszt. Strauss utilised explicit programmes but retained an idiosyncratic allegiance to classical models of thematic development, variation and form. He admired and emulated Wagner, but in the end, his ideal remained Mozart, as it would for Brahms. Nevertheless, between the late 1880s and the outbreak of World War I, Strauss earned a reputation as a modernist in the Wagnerian mould.
After 1918 Strauss struggled to retain his place in music as more than a holdover from the past. He collaborated with the Nazi regime after more than a decade of fierce opposition to post-1918 modernism. In 1944, faced with the impending defeat of Nazi Germany and the ongoing physical destruction of the major German cities, Strauss composed his Metamorphosen for twenty-three string instruments, which premiered in March 1945. A quote from the second movement of the Eroica appears at the opening. At the end of this extended essay, which is marked by an uncanny virtuosity in thematic elaboration, extended tonality and counterpoint, Strauss inserts a quote from the funeral march of the Eroica. Under this quotation, Strauss wrote in the manuscript, ‘In Memoriam!’
The Eroica became an epitaph for the art and culture of modern European history. Metamorphosen foregrounds lyric intensity but eschews the dynamic energy of the Eroica. In this respect Strauss emulated Brahms, and assumed the image of the artist in solitude, as expressed by Webern via Segantini. He articulated the endpoint of Brahms’s scepticism and pessimism regarding modernity and progress. Yet he did not evoke what Brinkmann termed a ‘sentimental’ idyll. Brahms’s symphonic commentary on the Eroica was a musical representation of loss in history, of having come late in history, after a golden age. But beauty and joy manage to break through the melancholy. The perspective of the painter, in Segantini, was one of intense interior reflection as a consequence of the embrace of nature. In Strauss, however, hope is extinguished and the illusion of refuge or rebirth shattered. No scherzo follows.
Performing and Listening to the Eroica in the Twentieth Century
In the twentieth century, the late nineteenth-century tradition of seeing the Eroica as a harbinger of the future, emancipated from its specific history, waned. Theodor W. Adorno’s account of the history of music, which revolved around Beethoven, is a case in point. For Adorno, music of historical and aesthetic greatness had to reveal the ‘structure of society’ through the composer, either consciously or sub-consciously, with a ‘substantial, objective like-mindedness’. The Eroica showed that ‘Beethoven did not accommodate himself to the ideology of the oft-cited rising bourgeoisie of the era of 1789 or 1800; he partook of its spirit.’ Hence his ‘unsurpassed achievement’ revealed ‘an inner coincidence with society’.38 The Eroica was rooted, for Adorno, in its time and place. The evidence for this belief was that the work was not built up from themes and motives, although ‘it seems as though everything develops out of the motive power of the individual elements’. On the contrary, Beethoven’s music was ‘in fact identical with the structure of Hegelian logic’. The ‘conception of a whole dynamically conceived, in itself defines its elements’; the elements, already conceived (as within a prepared piano, Adorno argued) ‘adapt themselves to become part of the pervading idea of the whole’.39 The overarching structure of the Eroica (in Bekker’s sense) determined the constituent musical materials.
The conception of the Eroica as defining a historical context has dominated twentieth-century reception and performance. Webern’s 1930 performance mirrored a belief in an overarching compositional logic governing the entire work. This rendered illegitimate the Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian approach to performance that invited adaptations to the expressive rhetoric of later nineteenth-century Romanticism. The stress on the structural totality of the symphony’s design rendered the implications of Beethoven’s narrative intentions and even the changed title page irrelevant. The historical content in the work derived from its totalising musical logic. A translation seeking to articulate musical meaning as history in ordinary language could not rely on biographical claims regarding intentions but on the work’s distinctive musical structure and procedures.
Furthermore, during the twentieth century, research in historical performance practices and instruments was inspired by this approach. The Eroica was reconnected to its historical context by replicating the expressive devices and performance habits of Beethoven’s lifetime. The fast tempo indications were honoured. The sound lost its lush and rich post-Wagnerian quality. Doublings of wind instruments were discontinued. The balances among wind, brass and strings shifted away from the strings, and timpani sonorities assumed a hard-edged prominence that rendered the antique novel.
Nonetheless the alliance between formal analysis, historical scholarship and period performance practice grew out of late nineteenth-century patterns of reception among musicians and critics, including efforts to emancipate the Eroica from the limitations implied by the biographical circumstances of its composition. But the broader public has remained fascinated by inherited and long-unanswered questions. Was the ‘heroic’ aspect generic or tied to Bonaparte? Was the argument of the Eroica located in the ideals of the French Revolution? Did Beethoven prefigure the end of absolutism, and democracy? Does the Eroica point to a cosmopolitan utopia in which the end of history, as the last movement, culminates in a joyous and universal affirmation? Was the interpretive shift away from history by Wagner and Berlioz justified? Do the symphony’s revolutionary elements – from the extended form of the first movement, including the unprecedented Coda, to the transfer of emphasis to the last movement and its variation form – sound significant to the modern audience in terms of politics and society?
By presuming to return the Eroica back to history in analysis and performance, has the twentieth century not only modernised the work but also unintentionally rendered it irrelevant and without the power to inspire the awe and ambition it retained throughout the nineteenth century? Not entirely. It was given a riveting performance by Adam Fischer (a vocal opponent of Viktor Orban’s government and the assault on liberal democracy in Hungary) in Düsseldorf in 2018, at a ceremony where a prize was given to George Soros for the Open Society Foundation’s advocacy for the rights of the Roma. This performance, of astonishing speed and intensity, sought to command the attention of the audience and vindicate the popular image of Beethoven as rebel, critic of convention, and advocate of political freedom and the moral obligation to act against injustice.
The Düsseldorf audience’s reaction confirmed the resilience of the nineteenth-century discourse about the Eroica as expressed in innumerable books on music history and guides to the repertoire. A representative sample will be discussed below. The writers of concert guides treated listeners as if they were tourists embarked on a journey to foreign lands, dependent on Baedeckers. The claims, conclusions and clichés circulated by the authors of these musical tour guides continue to dwarf serious attempts at theoretical or historical revisionism. The habits of reading about music before and after playing or listening that flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still persist among the audience.
The prevailing view of the Eroica as formulated and disseminated in one of the first popular guides from the 1850s reveals the centrality of Wagner’s reading of the work. Ernst von Elterlein (actually Ernst Gottschald), a state functionary and musical amateur born in 1826, wrote two famous guides, one to the Beethoven piano sonatas, and the other, published in 1858, to the Beethoven symphonies. For Elterlein, the Eroica marked the beginning of Beethoven’s ‘emancipation’ from the past. He came into his own with one ‘gigantic onward stride’. The Eroica ushered in a new era of musical aesthetics. Its ‘poetic idea’ and formal ‘embodiment’ represented an indivisible unity.40
Elterlein credited Wagner with discovering this unity and resolving the seeming disconnect between the first two movements and the last two. The Eroica was revealed as representing the full range of human emotions, reconciling disparate human attributes by distilling the ‘inmost nature’ of human individuality. The reconciliation of contradictions in human nature – therefore the journey and its triumphant conclusion – defines Beethoven’s realisation of the ‘heroic’ in music.41
A starker contrast to Elterlein than Hermann Kretzschmar would be hard to imagine. Kretzschmar was among the most admired and influential historians of music in German-speaking Europe. In 1887, the 40-year-old Kretzschmar published his Führer durch den Konzertsaal. It became the most widely distributed and respected German guide to the concert repertoire. Kretzschmar flattered his reader by foregrounding the incomprehension with which the Eroica had been initially greeted. Its ‘exotic’ grandeur both delighted and offended its contemporaries, in part because what sounded new had appeared ‘overnight’ without warning. The Eroica defined Beethoven’s genius and secured his reputation as an innovator. It was therefore no surprise that the composer considered it his finest symphony (before the publication of the Ninth).42
Kretzschmar pioneered in asserting the authority of historical scholarship and the objective validity of descriptive analysis couched in the technical language of music theory. He provided a detailed sequential account of the events of the symphony, including themes, key changes and instrumentation. His descriptive analysis of events is limited to events the audience can easily identify. He alerts them as to what to listen for. Kretzschmar’s ambition was to guide the audience through the unfolding musical fabric. The ‘plot’ of the music, in his summary, in turn becomes the basis for an eloquent appraisal of the greatness and novelty of the Eroica.
Kretzschmar is therefore dismissive of efforts to read into the music the story of the work’s dedication to Napoleon and its withdrawal. Likewise, he discourages speculation on the meaning of the heroic. He rejects Wagner’s attempt to assign a unifying meaning to each movement. Imputing a coherent programme to the outer movements seems ‘petty’. Kretzschmar assimilated from Wagner and Berlioz the idea that the symphony is distinguished by contradictory qualities, each potentially suggestive of the heroic. Power and action are implied by the music, as are pathos and the elegiac. Kretzschmar seeks to guide the reader to appreciate Beethoven’s ingenuity. He explains in detail why the horn entrance before the recapitulation in the opening movement was not a mistake even though it unsettled expert listeners. For Kretzschmar, by focusing on Beethoven’s originality as a composer, one can sense how idiosyncratic and personal the composer’s understanding of the heroic was.
Kretzschmar’s concert guide went through many editions. The Eroica entry in the 1919 edition is essentially unchanged, augmented only by references to new historical scholarship.43 What was added included Bekker’s insight into the last movement, the link to the figure of Prometheus, the thematic resemblance to Mozart’s overture to Bastien und Bastienne, and an echo from a work by Beethoven’s teacher in Bonn, Neefe. Kretzschmar’s guide was expanded and revised posthumously; he died in 1924. Friedrich Noack, who took over, chose not to tamper with the original text.44 Kretzschmar’s overriding goal was to counter the Wagnerian disposition to infer implicit or explicit philosophical, historical or political meanings in the Eroica, despite his evident sympathy for Wagner’s brilliant appropriation of Beethoven in his music.
In the year Kretzschmar’s guide appeared, Wilhelm Langhans (an orchestral musician before turning to music history in the 1870s) undertook a two-volume expansion of August Wilhelm Ambros’s classic history of music. In contrast to Kretzschmar, Langhans accepted Wagner’s reading of the Eroica. Langhans interpreted the poor reception of the symphony in its time as proof that it was a harbinger of the triumph of the Wagnerian aesthetic.45 This allegiance to the Wagnerian account dominated the Eroica entry in Max Chop’s popular book on the Beethoven symphonies, published in the first decade of the twentieth century. Reclam, a pioneer in the production and distribution of inexpensive pocket-size books, was its publisher, insuring success for Chop, a music journalist, composer and ardent advocate of Wagner. Chop quoted extensively from Wagner.
What distinguished Chop’s account of the Eroica was his expansive biographical account of Beethoven’s rejection of the dedication to Napoleon. Chop took pains to describe Beethoven’s distaste for Bonaparte after 1804, his awareness of the hypocrisy and superficiality of Napoleon’s character, and the bankruptcy of any claim that Napoleon merited the status of a hero. Although Chop’s book resembled Kretzschmar’s guide in its presentation of musical examples, it deviated by engaging explicitly in politics. Chop sought to reinterpret Beethoven as a modern German patriot. He exploited the context of Wilhelmine nationalism, which had been profoundly influenced by Wagner. An anti-French bias flourished in Imperial Germany, particularly in the two decades before World War I. Chop appropriated Beethoven to the Wagnerian and nationalist cause. The volume remained in print after Chop’s death in 1929.46
Perhaps the most popular German-language guide to the concert repertoire after Kretzschmar was a multi-volume series issued in 1912 by the Viennese publisher Schlesinger. The first volume was on the Beethoven symphonies, edited by Adolf Pochhammer (born in 1864, and the head of the Musikhochschule in Aaachen), with the Eroica entry written by Ernst Radecke (1866–1920) who came from a long line of musicians and trained as a music historian. Radecke, obviously influenced by Bekker, emphasised the significance of the final movement. Beethoven transcended the limits of variation form and achieved a seemingly effortless triumph of inspiration and spirit over convention.47
Radecke compared Beethoven’s genius to that of a painter, rather than a poet. He was clearly no Wagnerian and identified Schumann as the heir to Beethoven’s innovative use of rhythm in the third movement of the Eroica. Radecke assured his readers that they need not worry if the final two movements did not fit easily into a construct of the heroic or a narrative. The music in those movements managed to reverse the mourning and gravity of the first two. The Eroica ended, in Radecke’s account, with music suggestive of a visual image of an idealised reality characterised by ‘the Good, the True and the Beautiful’.48
Radecke’s remarkable reliance on the visual dimension led him to stress the second movement’s imagery as a public event. The coffin, surrounded by ‘the entire community’, inspires mourning for their ‘leader, their supporter, their defender and friend’. The heroic is crystallised as political within a quotidian setting. The mythic, poetic and philosophical construct of the heroic articulated by Wagner is circumvented. For Radecke the first movement is cinematic, a sequence of images created by sound. The listener becomes a witness to the hero’s development, growth, ambition, striving and victory. At the movement’s end, the hero is seen standing before his people, in illuminated splendour, as the supporter and benefactor of humanity.
Radecke sought to persuade the listener to set aside exaggerated programmatic speculation. If, however, one wished to ruminate on the nature of the hero Beethoven might have had in mind, then the music held the key. The hero of the Eroica emerges as a ‘great man’ worthy of praise, whether in ‘politics, war, science or art’ on account of the ‘breakthrough’ of his original formal achievements. The heroic in the Eroica breaks free, in Radecke’s reading, from the realm of power and violence, and is redefined as creativity in science and art.49
Radecke’s account pointed to the possibility of locating a new utopian vision in the Eroica: a new age defined not by war and politics but by the life of the mind and the imagination. Nietzsche, not Wagner, set the terms of Radecke’s hero as artist and thinker. Radecke’s version of the Eroica’s utopian vision mirrored values from the work’s historical context. Beethoven, like Goethe and Kant, linked the heroic to the triumph in history of reason, truth, the good and the beautiful. Perhaps Radecke’s vision will have the last word.