Locating the Second Subject

There is nothing particularly unusual in the overall tonal plan of the first section – the exposition – of the Allegro con brio. It begins with a series of statements of the main theme in the home key of E♭, in bars 3, 15 and 37. This is followed by a transitional passage, bars 37–57, in which Beethoven moves towards B♭, the dominant, and cadences in that key. The music remains in B♭ for 90 bars, until a short phrase (bars 148–53) returns the music to the home key for a repeat of the exposition.

In Beethoven’s earlier works in sonata style, and in much of the music of his eighteenth-century predecessors, it is usually not difficult to find a theme that is not only set in the contrasting key but is sufficiently distinct in character from the main theme to be identified as the primary theme of that 90-bar section: its ‘second subject’, as it has usually been called since the earliest theoretical descriptions of sonata form.³ But where does that theme begin? What is the ‘second subject’ of the Eroica? (What, indeed, is a second subject?)

These questions can be fraught with difficulties. Donald Tovey included a diatribe against the term ‘second subject’ in nearly every one of his writings on classical form. In the introduction to his book on the Beethoven piano sonatas, he complained that:

The problem, as Tovey and others understood it, is not that second subjects do not exist, but rather that pieces of music show a wide range of ways of modulating to a contrasting key and articulating the new key. Sometimes the arrival is signalled by a revised repeat of the main theme (Haydn), sometimes by a rhetorical figure that could hardly be called a theme: Tovey cites the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 111. And there may possibly be a series of discrete ideas in the new key (or at least no longer in the home key). This is what we find in the Eroica: a series of themes which collectively introduce, embellish and confirm the key of B♭ (see Table 5.1).

It might be enough to say that all these ideas, being unambiguously in the key of B♭, are part of a group of subjects and leave things at that. But the ear differentiates between things that sound preparatory and those that sound confirming, between lyrical and vigorous, between irregular and regular in design. And in spite of Tovey’s admonition about looking ‘to see where the Second Subject comes’, listeners who take stock of what they have heard may naturally want to prioritise some ideas over others. Virtually all performances nowadays respect Beethoven’s instruction to give listeners the opportunity to hear the entire exposition for a second time. And since the same five elements listed above appear in their original form and their original order in the recapitulation – though transposed to the home key – one has three opportunities to consider how the themes stand in relation to each other – more, of course, on repeated hearings.

When it comes to the winner of the second-subject-of-the-Eroica competition, opinion is divided. Tovey, in his all-too-concise ‘essay in musical analysis’, speaks of a ‘vast “second subject”’, ‘which ‘display[s] its procession of themes’, of which the one beginning at bar 44 is ‘of cardinal importance’ though it has ‘escaped the notice of analysts’.⁵ He then quotes bars 44–51 but does not illustrate or speak about any of the other themes in B♭. This is consistent with Tovey’s accounts of and remarks on the Eroica elsewhere: in a highly informative single-line reduction of the Allegro con brio in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article on sonata form, he marks this theme as the beginning of the ‘second group’, which he notes in passing that ‘nine conductors out of ten overlook’.⁶ The heading ‘New Theme’ above bar 84 and bar 109 reinforces Tovey’s notion of a group as a succession of themes.

Walter Riezler was more prescriptive. Though he by no means ignored the theme at bar 57, he understood it to be part of the transition, on account of the unstable harmony and the agitation introduced by the semiquavers in the ninth bar of the passage. He began his account of bars 83ff. with a question: ‘Is what now comes a true “second subject”, such as we are acquainted with in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, and in those of Beethoven’s first period?’ And he answers it in the affirmative, partly because of the ‘spiritual contrast’ with what has gone before whereby ‘the music seems for a time to be reposing’.⁷ One wonders how well Riezler knew Haydn’s later symphonies, many of which use a revised version of the main theme rather than a new idea with a clear ‘spiritual contrast’. But what he says about Mozart and the early Beethoven is accurate, and it is this repertory that most influenced theories of sonata form as developed in the nineteenth century.

In their magisterial Elements of Sonata Theory, James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy are in no doubt about where the second subject is to be found. They describe bars 45ff. as ‘a new, questioning theme’ that comes to a ‘decisive tonic resolution’ at bar 57, which ‘launches a new theme … S proper’.⁸ They thus go further than Tovey, and in the opposite direction to Riezler, not only identifying bar 57 as the start of the second group but also assigning it as a point of focus: ‘S proper’, rather than simply ‘S’.

Hepokoski and Darcy argue, further, that bar 109 is the main theme of a closing area, that section which rounds off the action by confirming the contrasting key as the goal of the exposition. This theme, they argue, is not preceded by a strong cadence in the dominant but behaves more like a continuation of the preceding theme and its elaboration; that earlier idea, beginning in bar 83, can thus only be understood as an ‘introductory or preparatory module’ to the closing theme, not a second theme in its own right. They are sensitive to what they call the ‘reception history’ of the Eroica, and they readily admit that the earlier theme ‘has often been mistaken for a “second theme”’.⁹ But they insist that the crucial confirmation of the contrasting key, the point which marks the movement’s ‘essential expositional closure’ – the final phase of the exposition – begins not in bar 109 but as early as the downbeat of bar 83. In other words, the ‘spiritual contrast’ for which Riezler pleaded so earnestly is of little interest for sonata theory and, in the Eroica, leads (according to Hepokoski and Darcy) to a poor understanding of how the second-group themes work together.

Is there an answer to the question, a resolution of the problem, a way of reconciling more than one of these points of view? Heinrich Schenker, who published the most extensive analysis of the symphony (1930), with a thirty-five-page, two-stave reduction and a further forty-nine graphic examples, takes a surprisingly metaphorical angle on the problem. Dismissive though he claimed to be about the textbook account of sonata form, because of its tendency to carve up pieces of music into sections, he nonetheless observed that the underlying course of the melody ‘expressed an initially careless impulse, a youthful insouciance and lack of inhibition’ according to which one must assign bars 57–82 to the modulatory section and regard bars 83ff. as ‘the so-called second subject’.¹⁰

There is certainly a cadence in B♭ in bar 57, but it seems rather abruptly appended to the interplay between the oboe, clarinet, flute and violin, slamming the door on this wonderful interplay of the melodic instruments – as if to say ‘not yet’; perhaps this is what Schenker meant by ‘lack of inhibition’. By contrast, the theme emerging in bar 57 expands to provide a far more substantial cadential preparation, with fully two bars of predominant (ii⁶) harmony, followed by a cadential $\begin{array}{c}6\\ 4\end{array}$ that makes the ensuing V–I resolution to B♭ far more emphatic than the one 26 bars earlier. After such a build-up, it was only natural for Beethoven to introduce a theme of greatly contrasting character, slower and more measured. What is crucial, however, is the antecedent–consequent construction of the later theme: an eight-bar phrase (83–90) to which bars 91ff. form a direct, if expanded, response. To listeners familiar with Beethoven’s earlier instrumental works, and with Mozart and much of Haydn, bar 83 marks the start of something that, while not tonally new, is nonetheless thematically special.

The ‘New Theme’ in the Development Section

When Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1792, he had some lessons from Haydn, who was then the most celebrated composer in the city. He had also come to know much of Mozart’s music from his experience as a practising musician in the court orchestra of his native Bonn. His friend Count Ferdinand Waldstein’s prophesy, that by hard work Beethoven would ‘acquire Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands’, is the first written statement linking the three great Viennese ‘classic’ composers together. It is sometimes interpreted, in analytical terms, as Beethoven learning the art of motivic and thematic development from Haydn while adhering to the symmetry of Mozart’s large forms, in which the recapitulation runs in close parallel to the exposition. However, there is a marked disparity in the proportions of the other sections. While Mozart’s development sections are about half the length of the expositions they follow, those of Beethoven are longer; and with the younger composer, the coda sometimes expands to become a section in its own right, rather than merely giving emphasis to the final cadence. It may well be that the near-exactness of Beethoven’s recapitulations helps to restore an overall balance in his forms between the qualities of likeness and difference.

In works written at the same time as and immediately after the Eroica – the composer’s so-called ‘heroic phase’ – the development is almost as long as or even longer than the exposition. In the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata Op. 53, also composed in 1803–4, an 85-bar exposition is followed by a 70-bar development; in the next large-scale sonata, Op. 57 in F minor (the ‘Appassionata’, 1805) the development (70 bars) is longer than the exposition (65); and it may seem proportionally longer still, since the exposition is not marked to be repeated. A year later, in the first of the quartets Op. 59 dedicated to Count Razumovsky, the 102-bar exposition is again played only once; the development is 140 bars long.

In each of these three works, the development may be divided into two parts, or phases; doing so enables the listener to refocus attention on the ways in which Beethoven transforms his thematic materials. In the ‘Waldstein’, bars 90–111, he reduces the main theme to its end-motives, while in bars 112–41 he develops the arpeggios that emerge from the second-subject chorale. In the ‘Appassionata’ an elaboration of ideas from the main theme and transition (bars 68–108) leads to a literal quotation of the start of the second subject, which initiates the second phase of the development (bars 109–33). And in the first ‘Razumovsky’ quartet Beethoven makes a feature of the divided development by introducing a standing on the dominant after 49 bars, only to back away from an early return to the home key; the second part comprises a diversion to D♭ major, a lengthy fugato and a second, definitive (but relatively short) standing on the dominant.¹¹

As extensive as they are, these development sections are dwarfed by that of the Eroica which, lasting 244 bars, contains many of the elements described above. After a lengthy introductory passage based on the transitional theme at bar 45, a substantial, far-reaching elaboration of the principal motive leads to a further airing of the transitional theme in the A♭ major before a fugato emerges in its relative key, F minor. However, throughout this passage Beethoven avoids anything that could be construed as an area of repose: the first true point of arrival in the development, a perfect cadence in the remote key of E minor, does not occur until after 130 bars: this cadence is heralded by off-beat $\begin{array}{c}6♮\\ 5\end{array}$ pre-dominant chords far more menacing than anything heard previously, so that the arrival in E minor, however remote from the home key, comes as something of a relief.

This arrival is marked by what is commonly denoted as a ‘new theme’, and in this respect the Eroica differs from the development sections of the symphonies, sonatas and quartets that were composed in its wake. But is that theme entirely new, or is it somehow related to one – or more – themes heard previously? This is a question that has exercised writers for a long time; and it may imply that the status of the Eroica as a quintessentially middle-period work invited writers on music to look beyond the newness of the theme, to search for a way of integrating it into the whole.

The Austrian composer and theorist August Halm was the first to publish an essay specifically about this theme, in the year of his death (1929).¹² Halm may have also been the first to note that the tenor part (taken by the cellos, with reinforcement from the second violins) of what he called this ‘foreign body’ (Fremdkörper) outlines a broken chord in E minor, filled in with passing notes, and does so in a way that corresponds to the shape of the principal motive (Example 5.1).

Example 5.1 Beethoven, Eroica Symphony, Op. 55, outline of main motive in the cello part of the ‘new theme’

(after Halm, ‘Der Fremdkörper’, p. 481)

In making this observation, Halm nonetheless questioned its value for our understanding, our appreciation, of the movement as a whole. If, after all, the Allegro con brio comprises 700 bars, the development section alone nearly 250, was it absolutely necessary to explain everything in the development as somehow thematically related to what had been set out in the exposition?

A year later, Heinrich Schenker completed the mammoth task of making a full voice-leading analysis of all four movements of the symphony. He included a graph that shows the shape of the main theme embedded in the bass of the ‘new theme’ (Schenker’s Fig. 24), but he refrained from remarking on the relationship between the two themes in his accompanying text – until the final section, where he eulogises Halm for his insights into the problems of music analysis and his devotion to the study of the German masterworks. (Considering that Schenker found Halm’s short essay and Nottebohm’s monograph on Landsberg 6 the only pieces of secondary literature on the Eroica worth consulting, this was high praise indeed.)

Walter Riezler took issue with Halm and Schenker, insisting that ‘the structure of the episode’ is governed not by the cello line but by the first oboe’s melody, and that it is a mistake to explain away the former as the main motive elaborated by passing-note motion.¹³ Riezler had an altogether different idea: he regarded the theme as based upon one of those ‘turning figures’, as he called them, which pervade the symphony from beginning to end: the oboe e–d♯–e–f♯–g–f♯ in the ‘new theme’ is a variant of the violins’ opening figure, g–a♭–g–f–g–a♭, and for that reason the theme need not be regarded as new.

In the absence of consensus about a work by Beethoven, twentieth-century scholars sometimes appealed to the composer’s sketchbooks for clues to his intentions. It is worth having a look at the manuscript in which he worked out the plan of the symphony. The earliest sketch transcriptions, made by Nottebohm in 1880 when the manuscript was still in the possession of the Landsberg family, present a number of continuous drafts of the movement; these show not the oboe melody, which Riezler and others have taken to be the ‘new theme’, but the cello line below it, which essentially mirrors its contour. That is, in Nottebohm’s transcriptions it is always the lower line of the theme that Beethoven has written down, not the top line by which we normally identify melodic movement. (Nottebohm did not refer to this feature anywhere in his commentary.) This raises the question: Did Beethoven have the oboe melody in his head when he got to this point in the sketchbook, or did he conceive the cello part as the tune? In preparing their recent edition of the whole of the sketchbook, Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman came across further sketches in which the ‘new theme’ makes an appearance, and some of these do indeed show the incipit of the oboe melody.¹⁴ But it is always the cello part that Beethoven continues in the sketch, as if it were the governing line. (Like Nottebohm, the editors did not discuss this theme in their commentary.)

Could it be argued, then, that the cello line is the underlying melody of the ‘new theme’, and that the first oboe sings above it to disguise the intention of what lies beneath? That would still leave open the question as to whether the cello line is really a version of the opening theme stretched from two bars to four and filled in by passing notes. I myself doubt that the new theme, played an octave above its original pitch and as the lower voice of a delicate contrapuntal setting, will be heard as a version of the main theme of the symphony. In any event, the introduction of new themes in development sections is by no means unprecedented – there are examples in Mozart’s instrumental music, and occasionally in Haydn’s – and the oboe is, after all, the highest and most prominent part. The real question that Halm may be asking is this: can listeners perceive a connection between the two themes once it has been pointed out to them in writing? Is that, ultimately, ‘the value of music analysis’?

The Recapitulation: Just Before and Just After

As the point of recapitulation (bar 398) approaches, the second horn gives what sounds like a premature entry of the principal motive. And when the main theme does actually return at the appropriate time, its first six bars appear exactly as they had at the beginning of the movement; but the continuation is recomposed so that, instead of cadencing in the home key, it makes a surprise modulation to F major. How is each of these events to be understood? And, since they occur in such close proximity, are they related to one another?

It is worth recalling a famous anecdote transmitted by Ferdinand Ries, in which he recorded his outrage when, on hearing the first rehearsal of the symphony, he was sure that the horn player had miscounted the bars of rest in his part and came in too early.¹⁵ But the premature horn entry is not only intentional but, as the sketches show, was also planned from the outset.¹⁶ And while it is meant to sound striking, it is not something that could be omitted without creating further problems. For if the second horn player, knowing that the recapitulation was to begin four bars later, had not entered where instructed the harmonic rhythm would be unbalanced, with two bars of pre-dominant harmony (represented by the violins’ minor third a♭/c♭) followed by six bars of dominant seventh (represented by the major second a♭/b♭; Example 5.2). In other words, something is needed after four bars, even if the horn entry does not sound quite right, and even if it sounds wrong enough to be attributable to a counting mistake.

Example 5.2 Beethoven, Eroica Symphony, Op. 55, bars 390–8, without second horn part

One possible explanation is that the notes played by the horn pull one of the violin lines down, and so they continue the trend initiated by the stepwise descent from c♭ to b♭, with a♭–g in an inner part, at the same time reinstating the dominant pedal that had dropped out a few bars before (Example 5.3).

Example 5.3 Beethoven, Eroica Symphony, Op. 55, bars 390–8, with implied dominant pedal and violin II conforming with horn II

Seen in this light, it is not the second horn player who enters four bars early but the second violins who linger too long on a♭¹, when they should have moved to g¹, and so fail to contribute to the – perfectly normal – $\begin{array}{c}6\\ 4\end{array}$ chord preceding the final dominant seventh.

If the horn entry is locally upsetting, what follows after the return of the opening, without in any way sounding like a performance mistake, introduces a more serious perceptual problem. For what should have been a repeat of the opening bars of the music (minus the two introductory chords) veers in a new direction: the tonality is no longer the home key of E♭ major but one that had been previously avoided: the only earlier use of F major harmony had been in bar 45, as the dominant of the contrasting key of B♭. In the recapitulation the cellos, having duly reproduced the start of the main theme, continue as before with a chromatic line; but instead of the c♯ being pulled back to d as a lower neighbour, Beethoven treats it as if it were a d♭ which must resolve downwards, to c♮ supporting the dominant of F, and in so doing force the violins to move down to f² instead of reaching for the expected upper neighbour, a♭². What is more, the instrument that Beethoven uses to confirm and celebrate this unexpected twist is one that has not yet been used, and indeed that one would least expect to find in a symphony in the key of E♭ major: the horn in F. For listeners who think of the Classical style as human comedy in musical terms, the passage comprising bars 390–416 could be titled ‘The Misbehaving Horn Players’: one brings in the main theme too early, another plays it in the wrong key.

The absence of a♭ in the violins eight bars into the recapitulation can, moreover, be related to its presence four bars before it: the second violin a♭¹, which had sounded against the g in the second horn part. In other words, not only the main theme but also the neighbour note that is meant to follow it are sounded together four bars before the expected point of recapitulation: the primary note and its upper neighbour are heard simultaneously, rather than consecutively.¹⁷

Some restoration of A♭ is offered when the first flute, in taking up the main theme in the key of D♭, copies the horn player’s insistence upon the fifth scale degree as the goal. That is, since the horn, when it reaches c², stays on that note for a full five bars (411–15) before lipping the pitch up to d♭², the flute also remains on the fifth of D♭ for the same amount of time. But this note is the very a♭² which had been missed out some fifteen bars earlier when the violins were forced downwards. The flute’s a♭² eventually resolves to g²: implicitly in bar 430, when the main motive returns, and explicitly when it is repeated fortissimo ten bars later, now with g³ as the highest note in both the wind and the strings. Beethoven, then, does not deny us the neighbour-note figure g²–a♭²–g² in the recapitulation, he actually gives it to us twice: it just does not take the form in which we had been expecting to hear it in this part of the composition.¹⁸

Thematic Development, Thematic Relationships

The discussion of the recapitulation, in which harmonic and thematic matters may be said to intersect, is a fitting introduction to a larger field of enquiry into the Eroica: the nature of its themes, and the interrelationships between them. True, not all music theorists set much store by motivic relationships in music, or ‘thematic unity’ as it is sometimes called. Schenker, whose interest lay in voice-leading connections between the surface of a work and its deeper underlying structure, often poked fun at those he dubbed Reminiszenzenjäger (‘hunters of [thematic] reminiscences’), while Tovey, in his essay on Beethoven’s art forms, pronounced that ‘themes have no closer connexion with larger musical proportions than the colours of animals have with their skeletons’, and that ‘the notion that music can be logically connected by mere thematic links has done almost as much harm to composers as to theorists and teachers’.¹⁹

As sensible as these pronouncements may be, they do not help us to explain why a certain theme in a certain place in the music may be compelling. If the laws of musical structure suggest that a modulation from one key to another early in a composition (in the exposition) is strategically important, we are still keen to know why one theme, rather than some other, has been used to articulate the arrival in that key, and also which theme – or version of some earlier theme – is employed to get from the home key to the new key. (If this were not the case, we would then be able to invent any number of new Classical works merely by using the main theme of one sonata with the secondary themes of another, suitably transposed to a contrasting key.) Such questions have attracted writers for a long time, and the Eroica is certainly a work that has generated interest along these lines, partly because of its sheer length, and partly because of its position in Beethoven’s oeuvre as a work that purportedly ushered in a new creative period.

Some thematic relationships can almost be forecast by the position they occupy in the design of a movement. In particular, the very end of a broadly conceived sonata exposition often includes an echo of the main theme: this technique helps to bridge the point at which the exposition is repeated. The closing subject, if such a theme precedes this bridging idea, often makes a reference to the main theme; and in the Eroica Beethoven does both these things, and even adds further references to the main theme as the closing theme is expanded (Example 5.4).

Example 5.4 Beethoven, Eroica Symphony, Op. 55, second-group themes related to principal motive

But while thematic relatedness across a work, or a movement of a work, can help us to hear it as hanging together (the German word Zusammenhang is often translated as ‘coherence’), it can also run the risk of damping the listening experience as a result of lack of variety, lack of contrast. This is a problem that different composers have addressed in different ways, and sometimes in different compositions. One often associates Haydn with a technique that in the twentieth century became known as ‘monothematicism’, because the most prominent theme in the second group of his sonata forms is sometimes a version of his opening theme. By contrast, Mozart’s deployment of thematic material seems more diffuse, more varied on the surface, though there are exceptions in his mature works (especially those in minor keys). Beethoven’s thematicism may be regarded as a synthesis of the two, though there is also an element of thematic transformation that looks ahead to techniques more commonly associated with the middle of the nineteenth century (Schumann, Liszt and Wagner); here the relationships between themes do not require special pleading on the part of analysts, and yet the contrast of character and mood are indisputable.²⁰

For this reason, some writers of the past hundred years have rejected Tovey’s dictum on theme and design and are instead keen to find thematic interrelationships commensurate with Beethoven’s grand structural plans, and in particular to understand the entire first movement of the Eroica as growing out of its opening theme. This may not be as difficult as it sounds, since the theme is made up of two contrasting components from which all manner of material may be derived: (a) arpeggiation (broken chords); and (b) stepwise movement upwards and downwards, that is, passing and neighbour notes.

Riezler, whose Beethoven life-and-works study includes a thirty-five-page appendix devoted to ‘an attempt at an analysis of the organic structure’ of the first movement of the Eroica, described (b), as we have seen, as turning motion; he noted the importance of turning figures in both the bass line in bars 6–9 and the melody emerging from the violins’ syncopated g². He also perceived the new theme in the development as based on a turning figure and thus could relate it to the violin line at the start of the movement.

Writing a decade earlier than Riezler, the German conductor Fritz Cassirer saw everything in Beethoven’s work in terms of intimate thematic relatedness. His Beethoven und die Gestalt²¹ packs close to a hundred unnumbered music examples from the first movement of the Eroica alone into the space of about twenty-five pages, and his account of the symphony – and of thirteen further works – reads like a chain of interrelated music examples accompanied by a brief, highly florid text. To give but one extreme example of thematic connection in the first movement, at the bottom of page 21 Cassirer juxtaposed the theme at bar 83 and the lead-in to the ‘new theme’ in the development (see Example 5.5), and some even more tenuous threads are drawn between first-movement material and themes from later movements in the symphony.

Example 5.5 Beethoven, Eroica Symphony, Op. 55, comparison of bars 280–3 with bars 83–6

(after Cassirer, Beethoven und die Gestalt, p. 21)

Of course, it is dangerous to criticise an isolated claim without considering the whole of the author’s argument; and Cassirer does make some trenchant observations about thematic relationships, especially between the first and third movements (both in E♭, and both in 3/4 time), which many will probably find convincing. But the arguments that fail to persuade weaken the stronger ones, and this causes the foundations of his analysis to subside.

A more promising search for thematic connections in the first movement of the Eroica was made by the American composer, conductor and neuroscientist David Epstein. His wide-ranging Beyond Orpheus includes a substantial chapter on the Eroica in which he sought to find thematic interrelationships not only on but also somewhere below the surface of the music, in things that Schenker would have called ‘middleground motives’ and Carl Dahlhaus ‘subthematicism’.²² Like Cassirer and Riezler before him, Epstein was concerned with unity in music, and the first of his analytical chapters is entitled ‘Unity in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony (First Movement)’; compared with the earlier authors, he showed a more secure sense of the harmonic underpinning of thematic material.

Epstein made much of a bass progression which, while not meriting the status of theme in the conventional sense of the term, is nonetheless an important feature of the Eroica’s harmonic landscape and a major unifying feature: the stepwise progression from ♭VII to ♭VI to V, leading eventually to the local tonic. (Riezler had noted this, too, but did not deal with it systematically.) It makes its first appearance, as A♭–G♭–F → B♭, in the modulation to the dominant, enabling Beethoven to reach the contrasting key in the shortest possible time: A♭ major in bar 43 is the subdominant of the old key, F major in bar 45 the dominant of the new.

Elsewhere, Beethoven uses this progression more broadly and emphasises different features. At the beginning of the development, where it takes the form B♭–A♭–G → C, he broods at length – for twelve bars in all – on the semitone A♭–G. (Schenker heard this as a transformation of the neighbour-note figure g–a♭–g of the main theme.²³) At the start of the recapitulation, the tonic itself (E♭) is reinterpreted as ♭VII and so leads to the unexpected entry of the horn in F. And in the first part of the coda the same progression is expanded to such an extent that it is easy to lose sight of the intended harmonic goal (see below).

The (Not Slow) Introduction

The two introductory chords (often called ‘hammer blows’), whose initial functions are to state the key of the symphony and establish the tempo of the first movement, are sometimes thought of as acquiring a certain thematic status as the first movement unfolds. Insofar as they precede the exposition – that is, they are not repeated when the exposition is played for the second time, nor do they return in the recapitulation – they are not part of the sonata plan itself. The use of strong tonic chords, or a strong chord progression, as a call to attention was not a new idea, nor was it restricted to the symphonic genre: one finds it in several of Haydn’s later string quartets. But while a single chord has no element of the time dimension – and one cannot easily regard two of them as a ‘motive’ in the conventional sense, since they lack harmonic contour – the idea of repeated chords gains in meaning as the first movement progresses, as the distance between similar hammer blows is shortened from three beats to two, and the space between them is filled in with broken chords that recall the opening motive. And when an entirely different, highly dissonant chord emerges in the development section – separated once more by three beats, but no longer played on the downbeat – it, too, can remind us of the opening in spite of a new texture, an altered metric position, a lengthening from crotchet to minim, and a function that is more climactic than introductory (Example 5.6).

Example 5.6 Beethoven, Eroica Symphony, Op. 55, some passages built on vigorously repeated chords

The Extended Coda

From about 1803 onwards, the codas to the outer movements of Beethoven’s instrumental works generally get longer. The first-movement codas of the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata and, to a greater extent, the Eroica do more than emphasise the ending: both contain harmonic progressions that could find a place in a sonata-form development section. This gives rise to the possibility of regarding some Beethovenian codas as ‘secondary developments’ or ‘terminal developments’, terms that may have been first used by the French composer Vincent d’Indy.²⁴

In the Eroica, the music that follows the end of the recapitulation is 140 bars long, which is nearly as long as the exposition (or recapitulation) itself. Like these sections, the coda unfolds in several phases. The first begins with the above-mentioned ♭VII–♭VI–V progression, which had initially been presented in the space of just three bars (43–5) but is now stretched over fourteen (551–64). Because of its sheer length, and the increase in dynamic level (from piano to forte to fortissimo), the C major at bar 561 will be difficult to hear, initially, as the dominant of F, by contrast with F major in bar 45 (and especially G major at the start of the development). On the contrary: Beethoven’s continuation in the coda marks C major as a tonic in its own right, crucially by framing its own dominant seventh, the $\begin{array}{c}6\\ 5\end{array}$ chord above B.

The return of the ‘new theme’ in bar 581 is another marker of the world of the development, in spite of the greater proximity of F minor to the home key, the E minor of bar 284. The theme is repeated in the tonic minor but with new orchestration. And the ensuing 36 bars of dominant preparation (bars 595–630) recapture the mood of the last 60 bars of the development, this time without the horn’s early entry.

When the tonic returns, Beethoven is not simply content to allow the main theme to play itself out, reaching the high B♭ no fewer than eight times for ‘heroic’ effect, as Kerman would have it.²⁵ He also corrects the harmonic ‘fault’ in the second-group theme at bar 57, replacing its diminished seventh (bar 65) with a dominant seventh (Example 5.7). Once the damage has been repaired, the movement can be brought to a swift conclusion, with just three tonic chords. We may thus view this coda as part exploratory, part celebratory; but in the context of the coda as a whole, the celebration is somewhat underplayed.

Example 5.7 Beethoven, Eroica Symphony, Op. 55, the different continuations, in the recapitulation and coda, of the theme from bars 57ff.

The Overall Structure of the First Movement

The search for thematic unity, or coherence, is a feature of twentieth-century analytical writing. But the mere relatedness of lines, harmonic progressions or textures does not explain how a work unfolds in time. Sonata form is an important start in clarifying the first movement of the Eroica which, though unprecedentedly long, behaves in most respects according to the form most frequently used for first movements in the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Even if a textbook definition of sonata form was not published until Beethoven’s last years (in Anton Reicha’s Traité de haute composition musicale, 1824–8) and the term Sonatenform itself first appears more than a decade after his death (in Adolf Bernhard Marx’s Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, 1837–47), Beethoven was fully conscious of the basic elements of sonata form as practised by his contemporaries and immediate predecessors: his sketches are frequently annotated with markers for the start of the second subject, the development and the recapitulation.²⁶

An important account of the form of the first movement is given as a single-stave precis of the movement, in Tovey’s entry on Sonata Forms for the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The technique is not unique to the Eroica: elsewhere in this essay, and in related entries on Rondo, Scherzo and Variation, he uses single-stave sketches. But that of the Eroica is not only the longest but also the most heavily annotated, with verbal notations showing formal elements – first group, transition, dominant preparation, second group, statements and counter-statements of themes – as well as themes, modulations, rhythmic figures, rhythmic diminutions, and large-scale exact or transposed repetitions of material previously heard. Spread over eight pages in small print, Tovey’s precis is not unlike Beethoven’s own single-stave drafts in the sketchbook, except that it represents the final version, contains more analytical and descriptive commentary, and is complete.

A more ambitious overview was undertaken around the same time by Schenker. His study comprised a fifty-six-page text: four Bilder (‘pictures’, or graphs) making up a thirty-five-page booklet in landscape format, which offer a much fuller precis of the music (on two staves throughout) of each movement and include highly detailed analytical annotations; and a set of forty-nine further music illustrations printed on six large sheets of paper which, when unfolded, measure 75 x 50 centimetres (about 30 x 20 inches). The production costs were enormous. And given that much of the Western world was in recession at the time of its completion, it is hardly surprising that Schenker was unable to place the work with a major German music publishing house: both Breitkopf & Härtel and Peters of Leipzig turned it down. He resorted to issuing it, at his own cost, as the third volume of a series of yearbooks, The Masterwork in Music, of which he was the sole author and which the Munich publishers had discontinued a few years before on economic grounds. (We learn from Schenker’s diary that his wife Jeanette was willing to finance the publication from her personal savings; but his pupil Hans Weisse succeeded in persuading the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who admired Schenker’s way of contemplating music, to raise three thousand marks and thus save the couple from financial difficulties.)

By the time of the Eroica study, which was his last written-out essay in music analysis, Schenker’s concepts of musical coherence had coalesced into a theory of structural levels (or layers), the entire network of relationships within a musical work being controlled by a simple two-voice Ursatz and a series of ‘voice-leading transformations’ applied to it. From this framework he was able to trace the growth of the movement in stages, from a ‘background’ (represented by the Ursatz) through various ‘middleground’ levels to a ‘foreground’ reduction in which the essentials of the surface become clearly visible.

Of the theoretically possible forms of Ursatz, Schenker chose the simplest for the first movement of the symphony, in which the upper voice (called the Urlinie) descends by step through the interval of a third – a ‘third-progression’ (Terzzug), in Schenker’s terminology – and is supported by the cadential movement of a bass line in note-against-note counterpoint: $\hat{3}$ – $\hat{2}$ – $\hat{1}$ above I–V–I. For a piece in E♭ major, the upper voice g²–f²–e♭² is supported by E♭–B♭–E♭.

But a musical form such as sonata form divides tonally into two broad parts: a harmonically open-ended exposition (here, E♭ modulating to its dominant, B♭), and a development and recapitulation, in which that harmonic progression must be closed up – the dominant key must be returned to its natural state as a dominant chord of the home key. In Schenkerian terms, the Urlinie is ‘interrupted’ at $\hat{2}$ and begins over again: $\hat{3}$ – $\hat{2}$ || $\hat{3}$ – $\hat{2}$ – $\hat{1}$ . In addition, there is a strong pull towards a return to the opening of the piece – the recapitulation – which is represented by the seventh above the dominant, a♭ supported by the continued B♭ in the bass, the seventh, a hovers, so to speak, over the entire development section. This elaboration of the Urlinie and its supporting bass is called the erste Schicht, the ‘first layer’ of the middleground (Example 5.8).

Example 5.8 Heinrich Schenker, ‘Beethoven’s Third Symphony’, Fig. 1: first movement, first middleground layer

Since there is a temporary resting on the first of the dominant chords, that is, a strong sense of arriving at and remaining in the key of B♭ major, the f² in the upper voice must be shown to descend, by step, to the keynote of B♭ major, f²–e♭²–d²–c²–b♭¹. This stepwise descent of a fifth (Quintzug, or ‘fifth-progression’) represents the modulatory section and all the themes of the second group; it is first shown in Schenker’s Fig. 2, the second middleground layer. In Fig. 3, the third layer of the middleground, he shows support for this descent with a bass-line progression, B♭–D–E♭–E♮–F–B♭, which outlines a I–V–I progression.

Schenker described the fourth and last of his middleground layers (his Fig. 6) as an ‘illustration of the octave registers of the exposition’, now showing the outlines of the first 152 bars in the actual registers in which they unfold. What had been given in his Fig. 3 as a single ‘fifth-progression’, the linear descent from f² to b♭¹, is now shown as a series of four Quintzüge, of which the first, second and fourth are set in a higher octave. These progressions correspond to the elements that make up the modulation to and subsequent music in the key of B♭: the modulation (bars 45–57), the theme at bar 57, the ‘so-called second subject’ at bar 83 and the entire passage from bar 109 to the end of the exposition. This last descent is the ‘fourth, thoroughly elaborated fifth-progression’ which, being set in the upper register, leads to the higher b♭² at bar 144, which can then descend by step (to a♭²) at bar 152; the a♭² now either leads directly to g² for a repeat of the exposition or it is stretched out over the course of the development and will resolve 246 bars later at the start of the recapitulation (Example 5.9). (This is marked in Schenker’s Fig. 6 by the words zur Wiederholung oder Durchführung.)

Example 5.9 Schenker, ‘Beethoven’s Third Symphony’, Fig. 6: first movement, fourth middleground layer

The explanation of the first three middleground layers takes up less than a page of text; the next twenty-five pages clarify the details of Bild 1, the foreground graph, in considerable detail. This text is set out section by section – bars 1–15, 15–37, 37–45, 45–57, 57–83 and so on – with great emphasis laid upon the underlying counterpoint.

Where an even closer examination is required, Schenker divides these sections into smaller units: thus, the antecedent of the second subject, bars 83–91, is explained separately, with further music examples used for clarification. His Fig. 10b shows the underlying sequence of five to six exchanges in the first part of the antecedent; Fig. 13b shows that this pattern is broken in the consequent phrase, and also that the ♭6–g♭ resulting from the change from major to minor is eventually converted into a g♮ when the consequent phrase is extended and eventually resolves to B♭ major (Example 5.10).

Example 5.10 Schenker ‘Beethoven’s Third Symphony’, Fig. 10b and Fig. 13b: voice-leading details in the antecedent and consequent phrases of the theme at bars 83ff.

The foregoing commentary has been intended as an introduction to some of the issues faced by musicians who cared deeply about the materials, fabric and structure of the Eroica in the twentieth century and who committed their thoughts to pen and paper. It is unlikely that agreement will ever be reached on many of the issues these contemplations have addressed. Schenker’s claim to have presented the Eroica ‘in its true content for the first time’, as he subtitled his 1930 study, is little more than wishful thinking if taken at face value. To opponents of his view of musical coherence, or ‘synthesis’ (as he commonly called it), these words may be more self-aggrandisement, an expression of the author’s conviction of having discovered the true path to understanding the great German tradition over the course of four decades.

If Riezler’s 12,000 words on the analysis of the first movement alone, and Schenker’s 30,000 on all four, leave much to be explained and so many viewpoints to be assessed objectively, it is hard to imagine that contemporary writers will rush to improve on these scholarly monuments, let alone write something that can be regarded as definitive, a ‘standard work’ in publishing parlance. What seems certain, however, is that Beethoven’s Eroica will continue to exert its fascination upon those who wish to learn how music goes: to have a better understanding of what it means to be a second subject or a new theme, how the entry of an instrument or theme can both confound musical expectations and promote coherence at a higher level, and how one musical idea may be said to be in a relationship with another. If these goals are worth pursuing, then the symphony is more than an outstanding example of classical music: it represents a major contribution to Western civilisation itself.