Not Just for Pleasure

In 1809 Carl Maria von Weber began his ultimately incomplete novel Tonkünstlers Leben (The life of a Composer), which occupied him on and off until 1820/1. Among the fragments of this novel is the description of a dream. In this dream, the assembled instruments of an orchestra are getting excited about a symphony by a contemporary composer, and are discussing his music. The composer is not named, but Beethoven is certainly meant. At the end of this scene, the director appears and the instruments have to perform Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. This text was first printed in a German journal, Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, on 27 December 1809. An English translation was published in The Harmonicon in 1829. The dialogue between the director and the instruments begins as follows:

This text has elements typical of the early criticism of Beethoven’s works: the execution is considered very difficult, so the performers have to be skilled (see also Chapter 11). This is certainly not the kind of music one could play just for pleasure and without rehearsal. It is the music of a giant, worth the effort: one should accept the challenge to discover and understand the work. On the other hand, this means that ‘true’ performers of and listeners to Beethoven’s music – a small elite of connoisseurs – can make fun of those who are too lazy or too stupid to understand the Eroica Symphony. Thus Beethoven’s Third Symphony polarised the public at an early stage. One example of this polarisation, from a time when the public already knew eight of Beethoven’s symphonies, can be found in the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1824:

Again, a certain exclusiveness is apparent in this review. The critic underscores this aspect of Beethoven’s music, and the high degree of musicianship and sensitivity of the relatively small number of listeners who can appreciate that it is a privilege to attend the performance of such a masterpiece. Beethoven’s music becomes a gift, and the public is grateful.

Whenever there was a crowd, rather than a small audience, and the musicians seemed not only challenged but also happy to perform the Eroica Symphony, these aspects were typically mentioned specifically by the critic. A review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, published in January 1811, draws attention to just such an exceptional occasion, which took place in Berlin:

The Eroica as Political Statement

In addition to purely musical understandings of Beethoven’s music, there were various other critical approaches, which included viewing the Eroica Symphony as a political statement. Apart from the length and new style of the work, other things also aroused the curiosity of the public: the title raised the question of who might be the hero behind the mask of a Sinfonia eroica. The second movement, Marcia funebre, in particular, raised the question: what was the loss that occasioned this mourning?

The title of the symphony, published during Beethoven’s lifetime, gave rise to various interpretations. The original edition, published in parts in Vienna in October 1806 by Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoir, clearly states the intention of celebrating the memory of a great man: ‘Sinfonia Eroica … composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo.’ This is also the title on the score published in Bonn and Cologne in 1822 by Simrock. But another score, published in London in March/April 1809 by Cianchettini & Sperati, is titled Sinfonia Eroica composta per celebrare la morte d’un Eroe, the death of a hero. While ‘grand homme’ (a great man) might refer to greatness of mind, ‘la morte d’un Eroe’ implies a military hero, killed in battle. As we shall see, certain writers proposed a specific background to this difficult new symphony by trying to identify an actual hero, or an instance of heroism, that Beethoven perhaps had in mind. In this way, Beethoven’s Third Symphony became a piece of programme music, although it was to prove almost impossible to find an interpretation that would include all four movements.

In England, a connection between the work and Napoleon seems to have been accepted as a fact, and the Marcia funebre was a focal point. A review published in 1836 in The Musical World, for example, underscored the idea that Beethoven’s music required an educated public and that listeners might be overwhelmed by its effects; then the critic focuses on the Marcia funebre:

In the same year, 1836, The Musical World published an anecdote about Beethoven dedicating his Third Symphony to Napoleon:

Beethoven’s supposed reaction to Napoleon was disseminated by Franz Gerhard Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries in their Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven, published in 1838, after which the anecdote was quoted many times and in several languages. Ries, a former student of Beethoven, had lived in London between 1813 and 1824, and he may have already told this story in England. There is also a letter written by Ries in Vienna in October 1803 to the publisher Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn, in which he reports, concerning the Third Symphony: ‘He [Beethoven] is very much inclined to dedicate it to Bonaparte; if he does not do so, because Lobkowitz wants to have it for half a year and to give 400 gulden, then he will entitle it Bonaparte.’¹² This account fits closely with Beethoven’s first intentions as reported in The Musical World. As we shall see, though, it is unlikely that the scene happened exactly as recounted by Ries:

Anton Schindler also underscored the composer’s political ideas and his relationship with Napoleon. Schindler had much influence on Beethoven’s reception, since he claimed to have been very close to Beethoven in Vienna; he claimed that many details that subsequently appear in his Beethoven biography were communicated to him by Beethoven himself. In the first edition of his biography of Beethoven, published in 1840, Schindler wrote of Beethoven’s politics: ‘In his political sentiments Beethoven was a republican; the spirit of independence natural to a genuine artist gave him a decided bias that way.’¹⁴ Schindler goes on to argue that Beethoven believed that Napoleon was the man to republicanise France, and therefore in autumn 1802 he planned to pay homage to Napoleon in a grand instrumental work. Regarding the Eroica Symphony, Schindler brings into play the French General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who had been in Vienna: ‘The original idea of that Symphony is said to have been suggested by General Bernadotte, who was then French ambassador at Vienna and had a high esteem for our Beethoven.’¹⁵ Then Schindler reports that, having finished his Third Symphony, Beethoven had intended to send a handwritten copy of it to Paris. His version of the story continues:

Schindler’s story was reprinted in later editions of his biography, and it was translated into many other languages. For a long time the public did not question its truth, possibly because certain details of this story seem to be close to those that Wegeler and Ries had already published in 1838. In fact Schindler did not have any contact with Beethoven until 1822. So he may have been a witness during Beethoven’s last five years, but certainly not in the period of Bernadotte’s visit to Vienna and the Eroica Symphony.

A crucial detail cannot be confirmed by the the material evidence: Ries’s anecdote that Beethoven tore off the entire sheet of the title page of the score is not supported by the title page of the existing copy of the symphony. On this title page, the title originally read ‘Sinfonia grande / intitolata Bonaparte / del Sigr / Louis van Beethoven’. Beethoven removed the second line (‘intitolata Bonaparte’) by heavy erasure, but later he added in pencil the words: ‘geschrieben auf Bonaparte’ (written on/about Bonaparte).¹⁷ In a letter written in Vienna on 26 August 1804 to the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig, Beethoven wrote: ‘die Simphonie ist eigentlich betitelt Ponaparte’ (the true title of the symphony is Ponaparte).¹⁸

Regarding the reviews connecting Napoleon and the Eroica Symphony, one point was never really discussed: there is a distinction to be made between choosing Napoleon as the title or subject of the work (which has to do with the inspiration, content and interpretation of the work) and choosing Napoleon as the intended dedicatee. The two matters became blurred in the reception history. But Beethoven always dedicated his large-scale works to a person who could be useful for his career and/or pay for the dedication. What is clear is that ultimately, in the case of the Eroica Symphony, this person was Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz.

The French Tradition

The way the public and critics understand a new work of music is always influenced by their own cultural heritage and the context in which the music is performed. In this respect, the French reception of Beethoven’s symphonies was different from that in other European cities, and the Eroica Symphony is a prime example. In France there was a strong tradition of funeral marches, especially after the French Revolution. They were played in public, and it is clear that the political aim was not only to mourn the death of a person but also to salute the victims of the Revolution and to underline the hope of a glorious future. Pathos combined with a vibrant character, expressed in a relatively fast tempo suggesting a people on the move, typifies this French tradition. Examples are the famous Marche lugubre by François-Joseph Gossec (1790) or Luigi Cherubini’s Hymne funèbre sur la mort du General Hoche (1797).¹⁹ Beethoven knew about this tradition. The third movement of his Sonata Op. 26 in A♭ major (1801/2), for instance, is entitled Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe. Later, an arrangement of this movement was played in Paris during the transfer of the mortal remains of Marshal Jean Lannes to the Panthéon. Lannes, a personal friend of Napoleon, had been fatally wounded in the battle of Aspern-Essling near Vienna in 1809.

François-Antoine Habeneck’s performances of Beethoven’s music in Paris at the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire after 1828 were particularly important in early Beethoven reception. This excellent orchestra performed all the symphonies of Beethoven regularly and at a high level, and the Eroica Symphony was the first piece played in the opening concert of the series on Sunday 9 March 1828. One can fairly say that this orchestra was founded upon the Eroica Symphony. On Saint Cecilia’s day in 1826 Habeneck had invited some musicians to come to his home for lunch and to bring their instruments. The music he had prepared for informal rehearsal was Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and the musicians were so fascinated that they nearly forgot their meal.²⁰

The Marcia funebre was always in the foreground and served as a key for understanding the work. Often the Marcia funebre was performed separately, in concert and on special occasions; this led Hector Berlioz to demand in 1838 that the symphony always be played in its entirety.²¹ Other reviewers confirmed that the public admired only this movement. For example, Joseph d’Ortigue wrote in 1844 that the symphony ‘seems too long and, except the Marche funèbre, it makes little effect’ on the listening public.²² This third movement was admired as a ‘hymn of sorrow and pain … a funeral song’.²³ And François-Joseph Fétis noted: ‘A delightful melancholia reigns in the first motive of the funeral march.’²⁴ Thus the question arose of the subject, and the trigger event, behind the work.

Berlioz insisted that the title of the work was ‘Symphonie héroïque pour célébrer l’anniversaire de la mort d’un grand homme’, and even called it an ‘oraison funèbre’ (funeral oration). His interpretation reads as follows:

In the following review from 1837, Berlioz evoked a concrete programme, quoting verses from Virgil’s Aeneid, and referring to the funeral procession of young Pallas:

Such references to antiquity are common in the French reception of the Eroica. In 1835 the Gazette musicale de Paris gave the following summary of a concert: ‘The Eroica symphony … reappeared greater and nobler and more admirable of ancient grief than ever.’²⁷ In French dictionaries, the terms ‘héros’ and ‘héroïque’ refer to antique heroes such as Hercules or Alexander the Great, excelling in physical strength and bold military undertakings; so this kind of interpretation is not surprising.²⁸ We can observe the same construction from commentators in other Romance languages: in Italy in 1884, the critic Ippolito Valetta interpreted the Marcia funebre of the Eroica Symphony as the funeral of an ancient Roman hero.²⁹

Berlioz, an influential writer as well as composer, was among the few who did not merely concentrate on the interpretation of the funeral march. He analysed all the symphonies of Beethoven in long articles, mostly published in the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris. He began his description of the beginning of the Eroica Symphony as follows:

Berlioz’s style of writing about the music is meant to arouse interest. He understood that listeners might be surprised by certain aspects of Beethoven’s music, and so he explained points where Beethoven did not meet the audience’s expectations. In this way, Berlioz was not only one of the most important critics in the early reception of Beethoven but also an influential teacher. An example of his explanatory stance is found in his comments on the meaning of the Scherzo:

True to French interpretations of the Eroica Symphony, Berlioz invokes ancient culture with his reference to the Iliad. Treating the work as comparable to outstanding examples of past cultures gives a sense not only of its greatness but also its authenticity. In his conclusion Berlioz emphasises that Beethoven’s Third Symphony, with its poetic form, is in his eyes one of the composer’s very greatest works. As it is typical of Berlioz, he reaches for depth of sentiment as a measure of greatness, and his own personal impressions are linked to thoughts of the ancient world when he says: ‘Un sentiment de tristesse grave et pour ainsi dire antique me domine toujours pendant l’exécution de cette symphonie’ (‘Whenever this symphony is performed I am overcome with feelings of deep and as it were ancient sadness’).³² One could conclude that he was trying to establish the canonic status of the work, by appealing to the longevity of the feelings it inspires, even if the work itself was relatively new and not yet really understood by the public.

For a long time, the possible connection between the Eroica Symphony and Napoleon Bonaparte was completely ignored in French reception. The first French review of a concert in which the name of Bonaparte was quoted appeared in 1841 in Le Monde musical. The author mentions Napoleon’s burial in Les Invalides in Paris in December 1840, and suggests what Beethoven’s attitude to the occasion might have been:

The author recalls Ries’s anecdote, but does not discuss whether the Eroica Symphony had been written for or about Napoleon. Rather, the critic seems to construct a posthumous reconciliation between Beethoven and Napoleon, writing that the Eroica Symphony would have been a wonderfully appropriate piece of music, in the tradition of the French Marche lugubre, for a ceremony like that of the funeral of a former statesman or emperor.

Napoleon and Other Heroes

In 1841 Richard Wagner published his interpretation of the Eroica Symphony in France, as ‘Une Soirée Heureuse, Fantaisie sur la musique pittoresque’ in the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (this French text was the first version to be printed).³⁴ The fact that young Beethoven was once fascinated by the young and victorious Napoleon, and thus inspired to write this work, was a new idea for the French public. Wagner underlined that there was no reason to understand the music as a ‘symphonie biographique de Bonaparte’ (‘biographical symphony of Bonaparte’).³⁵ This work itself was a feat, according to Wagner, and thus Beethoven was himself the hero of this heroic deed.

In Austria, another hero joined the reception story: Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia (1772–1806). In 1843 The Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung published a contribution to the mythology around Beethoven’s heroic symphony (‘Zur Schicksalsgeschichte der heroischen Symphonie von Beethoven’). The article is about a cavalier who, after having seen that the public did not understand Beethoven’s new symphony, had already left Vienna for one of his country houses when Prince Louis Ferdinand announced his visit. In order to surprise the Prince, another performance of the symphony was organised, and Louis Ferdinand, very moved and fascinated by this new music, asked to listen to the work a second time. After this encore, Louis Ferdinand, even more impressed, asked if, after a break for the musicians, he could hear the symphony again, and thus it was performed for the third time. The article concludes by reporting that the day after this success Beethoven received a gift from the cavalier, but that the Prince would never hear this music again, because a short time later he died a heroic death.³⁶

The unnamed cavalier in this article was Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz, who was at Raudnitz castle (Roudnice) in Bohemia when Louis Ferdinand of Prussia joined him and attended a performance of the yet unpublished Eroica Symphony. Louis Ferdinand, a brilliant pianist and talented composer, had met Beethoven several times since 1796; and he visited Prince Lobkowitz at the end of September 1806 before he re-joined the army. He was killed by a French marshal on 10 October 1806 during a battle near Saalfeld. Even though the Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung writer did not conclude that Prince Louis Ferdinand was the intended dedicatee when the Eroica Symphony was published later in the same month, the Prince’s name still appears in the lengthy journal article. Later authors, among them Walther Brauneis, believed that the Eroica Symphony, while officially dedicated by Beethoven to Prince Lobkowitz, was somehow anonymously dedicated to Prince Louis Ferdinand.³⁷ Surely Beethoven could not have had in mind Prince Louis Ferdinand’s death in 1806 when he composed his Third Symphony, since it had long since been publicly premiered in Vienna.

Apart from published interpretations of the work, other attempts have been made to construct a political context for the Eroica Symphony. Otto Jahn, in his handwritten records, refers to Dr Joseph Bertolini (1774–1857), one of Beethoven’s doctors in Vienna. Bertolini had been the student and assistant of Beethoven’s doctor and friend Johann Baptist Malfatti and so came into contact with Beethoven. According to Jahn’s notice from 1852, Bertolini recorded that Beethoven first had the idea of composing the Eroica Symphony when he heard about Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt; he also observed that the rumour of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s death in the battle of Abukir was the origin of the funeral march.³⁸ In fact, Nelson (1758–1805) was only wounded on 1 August 1798; it seems very unlikely that this event influenced the composition of a work that Beethoven began to sketch no earlier than 1802/3.

In the notes of Carl Czerny (1791–1857), who knew Beethoven personally, Dr Bertolini is again invoked. Czerny wrote: ‘After the indication of his close friend for many years, Dr Bertolini, the first idea for the Sinfonia eroica was given by the death of the English General Abercrombie.’³⁹ Ralph Abercromby had defeated the French in the battle of Alexandria on 21 March 1801, where he was wounded, and died on 28 March 1801. Despite the fact that this was not when Beethoven started composing his Third Symphony, and that Bertolini attended Beethoven only from 1806, there was a second effort to understand the Eroica as tribute in honour of Napoleon’s English war opponents when he was still first consul. However, it seems that this idea did not really convince the critics and the public, even though the possible connection to Napoleon was often discussed. Czerny wrote that perhaps Beethoven, known for his changeable mood, may have had in mind a connection between the Eroica Symphony and Napoleon.⁴⁰ Since Abercromby and Nelson are both key figures in British history, one might assume that English authors would be interested in making any possible connection between them and Beethoven’s music. Yet British music critics did not make any connections at all between Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and British history.

The first half of the nineteenth century produced not only many performances of the Eroica Symphony, but also manifold documents of its reception. On the one hand, there were authors specifically interested in music, who studied the score and tried to help others to understand Beethoven’s art of composing. On the other hand, there were writers – among them composers such as Weber, Berlioz and Wagner – who gave literary interpretations, and did not write as music experts in the narrow sense. In doing so, they communicated to their readers their own understandings of what constitutes a musical masterpiece, and their own reception of Beethoven’s work in particular.

There has always been a strong desire to understand music by relating it to biography – and this tendency increased as the nineteenth century wore on. In the case of the Eroica Symphony the result was a focus on the title, and on the unnamed great man or hero (which is perhaps also the case with the Piano Sonata, Op. 26). Today, the public is still interested in such stories, factual or fictional, which reappear in CD booklets, films and concert programmes and in biographical literature. They have made Beethoven’s Third Symphony one of the best-known works of classical music. This thirst to link works and biography means that even today the Marcia funebre remains a focus of interest, like the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the first movement of the Sonata quasi una fantasia, Op. 27, No. 2.

The early reception of Beethoven’s Eroica proves to be a complex phenomenon, in which several strands intertwine: especially influential in this reception history was the emergence of new forms of organisation in musical life, with new orchestral cultures and new audiences interested in understanding music through listening and reading. The question of performance practice is linked to these changing circumstances. The changing image of Beethoven, and the status of his works, played and play an important role in determining performance practices. It makes quite a difference, especially to the Marcia funebre, if it is played in the manner of French revolutionary music, or in a sad and slow tempo, close to the funeral procession after Siegfried’s death in Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung). It makes a difference for the performance practice, and for the listeners, if the symphony is understood as part of a political statement in the time of Napoleonic wars, or if it is associated with the idea of the sublime and of timeless grandeur. As the reception of the Eroica Symphony changes, so too does performance practice, and vice versa.

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

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:

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.

The Premiere and Early Performances

The earliest rehearsals and performances of the Third Symphony were semi-private, taking place in the palace of Prince Lobkowitz, one of Beethoven’s Viennese patrons. An account record dated 9 June 1804, submitted by Anton Wranitzky, Kapellmeister to the prince, shows that Lobkowitz hired twenty-two extra musicians (including the third horn required for the Eroica) for two rehearsals of the work, which might seem very few by today’s standards but was then rather generous. A typical orchestra at this time had around forty musicians. The fee paid to Beethoven by Prince Lobkowitz would also have secured further private performances of the symphony that summer on his Bohemian estates, Eisenberg (Jezeří) and Raudnitz (Roudnice). The first public performance was on 7 April 1805, at the Theater an der Wien. In these senses – few rehearsals, small scale, and private performance before the debut – the performance history of this work began in a fashion fairly typical for a symphonic work for the time. In fact, Beethoven was comparatively lucky, especially with the extra musicians: high inflation and political unrest took a toll on court orchestras, and the Viennese, in particular, struggled to perform symphonic works at this time. Lobkowitz’s unusual and extravagant expenditure on music led to financial strain in the early 1800s.⁴

New with the Eroica was the degree to which performers and listeners struggled with the work – in terms of both its length and its complexity. Early reviewers were often ambivalent, and the ambivalence often turned on difficulties of performance (see also Chapter 9). To be sure, early reviewers did not immediately consider Beethoven’s earlier symphonies much easier to listen to or play. But especially with and after the Eroica, the earlier works came to be considered less demanding by comparison. Writers looked back longingly to the First and Second Symphonies, wishing Beethoven would stay within the more traditional (known, comprehensible) models of symphonic writing. In the following review, for example, from the Viennese correspondent for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, from 1805, the Eroica is compared unfavourably to the First Symphony with regard to difficulty of performance:

Such opinions of the work were partly a function of the standards of those who were now attempting to perform it: ad hoc amateur groups were starting to take the place of court orchestras, and many of the amateur groups were probably not up to the difficulties imposed by the Eroica.⁶ The semi-public concerts that took place in the residence of the Viennese banker Joseph Würth are a case in point.

The reviews suggest that the difficulties of understanding that began with the Eroica were largely related to its being addressed to the connoisseur. Comparing the work unfavourably to the Second Symphony, an early reviewer observed:

Citing Schiller’s trilogy of dramas, Wallenstein, the writer went on to argue that a concession to the limits of the comprehension of ‘everyman’ is all the more important with instrumental music, where there is no text to aid understanding.

Many other early reviewers suggest difficulties for the early performers. In 1805, the above-cited writer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung used the idea of the ‘wild fantasia’ to hammer home his complaint, the fantasia being a private genre for the connoisseur, so not well suited for large-scale concerted music:

The Mannheim correspondent for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung remarked of a performance of the Eroica Symphony in 1807: ‘Trying to perform such a colossal work was a great gamble, and only through the support of several members of the court orchestra could it be brought about.’⁹ In this context, the ‘colossal’ nature of the work can be understood in terms of its length and style, rather than the number of instruments that it required, which, as mentioned, was not particularly large.

The growing culture of rehearsal, and of treating a symphonic work as something that would need to be performed repeatedly in order to be properly understood, was emerging with particular force with this work. Another reviewer of the Eroica from 1807 could report admirable fidelity to the composer’s intentions. This was just three months after the report cited immediately above, but now in Leipzig rather than Mannheim, where a skilled orchestra was available. This successful performance depended on a degree of preparation that was exceptional for the time, as is clear from the length at which the writer describes the rehearsals:

According to this reviewer, performers must not only follow the composer’s notation to the letter, but also study the score in minute detail to try to penetrate the spirit of the work.

Performances of Beethoven’s Eroica soon became more widespread and more professional. The symphony was performed in Prague as early as 1807, for example. But English listeners were still having difficulty with Beethoven’s complex and multi-layered symphonies into the third decade of the nineteenth century. Reviewers repeatedly noted that the Eroica was considered too long and complex to sustain concentration. So, for example, one Harmonicon writer of 1829 observed: ‘The Heroic Symphony contains much to admire, but it is difficult to keep up admiration of this kind during three long quarters of an hour. It is infinitely too lengthy.’¹¹ The Viennese correspondent for the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung had reported in 1805 that ‘it lasted an entire hour’. The writer was probably talking about psychological time, rather than actual elapsed performance time. Even with exposition repeats, the Eroica symphony is only approximately 50 minutes long.¹² But at the time of the symphony’s premiere it was the longest symphony that had ever been written.

Beethoven went some way towards ameliorating the listeners’ discomfort with the symphony’s length, without actually abridging the work. He appended a note to the original edition of the performing parts to suggest that, on account of its length and difficulty, the symphony ought to be programmed first. But this advice was not necessarily followed. As Weber notes, the order in which genres followed each other on concert programmes was a matter of custom at this time, and depended on how works were perceived and valued. Overtures and symphonies usually served to open or close a concert – thus functioning as lesser-valued bookends that either settled the audience or accompanied their often early departure. But in the 1807 Gewandhaus Orchestra concert, for example, the Eroica was programmed just after intermission, a break with tradition that helped to elevate the work to canonic status.¹³

Nineteenth-Century Arrangements

Arrangements, for domestic settings and for various chamber ensembles, helped listeners and performers to come to terms with the new level of complexity presented by Beethoven’s symphonies. Indeed they provided opportunities for repeated and hands-on experiences of large-scale works in general in an era before professional orchestras became common. So, for example, an early reviewer of an arrangement for piano trio of Beethoven’s Second Symphony complained about the Eroica’s difficulty, but saw arrangements as a possible compensating aid, commenting that ‘one receives a not unworthy picture of the entire piece that is as complete as possible’.¹⁴ Arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies allowed repeated performance and close study of the music in a convenient ‘take home’ form, which might still retain some of the benefits of the original version. A reviewer of August Eberhard Müller’s four-hand version of the Eroica in 1807 first praised the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra for programming the symphony twice in its entirety, then moved on to compliment Müller’s arrangement for in effect allowing listeners more of the same:

The emphasis on ‘completeness’ in this review can be understood simply in terms of the two orchestral performances, which apparently included all the movements, and a full and able orchestra. But it also relates to the listening experience. The phrase used to describe the experience of the listener is striking: ‘the listener’s imagination’ (die Phantasie des Zuhörers) is set in ‘sublime flight’ (erhabene Schwung). The idea of the sublime was drawn upon at this time to help reviewers to describe music that yields an experience that is overpowering, incomprehensible and awe-inspiring, but it also indicated an experience of the work in which the (connoisseur) listener plays a major role: here, feelings of the sublime arise within the listener and by means of the listener’s imagination. The reviewer implies that with this composition, and a few other symphonies, the listener in an important sense ‘completes’ the work.

A review of an 1828 reprint of an anonymous 1807 piano quartet arrangement of the Eroica suggests how arrangements could work to inspire orchestral effects in the absence of an orchestra. This reviewer piles up visual metaphors that suggest that the onus lay on the listener in ‘performing’ the work, where performance is a matter of imaginative reconstruction:

In each case, the visual metaphors suggest a massive original reduced down greatly in one or more dimensions. The pantograph, for example, is a jointed-frame instrument that allows an image to be traced and simultaneously scaled down. In the case of the marble bust cast in plaster, the original is scaled down in terms of both weight and size. And with the silhouette, only the essential outline is retained. For each visual metaphor, the effect described is essentially the same: a play of imagination and recollection ensues as the viewer carries out the requisite completion to re-imagine the original work. Ultimately, the listener ‘performs’ the Eroica.

Even if the listener were prepared to make an imaginative ‘completion’ of the Eroica symphony, it was still the role of the arranger to make the arrangement suggestive, and in the right kinds of ways, so that the listener is inspired to take on the role of co-creator or performer. Reviews from Beethoven’s time indicate that the best arrangements bore in mind the instrumentation of their originals, and attempted to capture something of its character in translation. This feat was attempted in the earliest (anonymous) arrangement of the Eroica, for piano quartet, which was published in Vienna in 1807 and reviewed in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1808. Arrangements were not necessarily simplifications of the originals to cater to amateur performers. In the case of the 1807 Eroica arrangement for piano quartet, the reviewer praised the extent to which the arranger captured the original contrast between wind and string instruments, and noted that the arrangement required experienced performers to render this contrast effective:

Thus the best arrangements were seen to be able to capture something of the original works’ texture and timbre, even when no wind instruments were involved.¹⁸

Hummel’s arrangement of the Eroica symphony, published by Schott around 1830, but completed in the 1820s, can be compared with two other early nineteenth-century versions with respect to the treatment of texture. Ries’s piano quartet arrangement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony (published posthumously by Simrock in 1857 but completed in the early nineteenth century), makes a useful point of comparison, as does the earliest arrangement (anonymous) for the same forces, which was published by Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie in 1807 and reviewed in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1808), cited above. Ries’s arrangement of the Eroica clearly aims to translate the timbral contrasts for the new performing forces, giving all the parts important material and testing amateur performers’ skills.

One can consider the third movement, Marcia funebre, for example. As in the 1807 piano quartet arrangement, the piano presents the strings’ opening theme, leaving the violin to present the oboe version of the theme in bar 8 (Example 11.1a). The comparative difficulty of Ries’s version is apparent in the thick texture of the piano part (four-note chords in the right hand, and octaves in the left, for example), which must still be performed sotto voce (Example 11.1b). There is also more attention to Beethoven’s dynamic markings than in the 1807 arrangement. In both versions, the piano takes over with the strings’ theme in bar 16, and in bar 36 the violin presents the oboe’s theme. Here, and more generally in Ries’s arrangement, he achieves more idiomatic string writing than the 1807 arranger by avoiding double stops in melodic passages. Meanwhile, cello and viola are hardly just accompanying in their respective roles: the viola’s material derives from lower winds and brass, and Ries transposes down the material from bar 41 so that the viola does not have to reach high into the upper register in order to represent the clarinet and oboe; the viola also takes the oboe solo at the lower octave at the beginning of the Maggiore. The cello part is both higher and more active than that in the 1807 version, and has a larger role in presenting thematic material – chiefly the wind and brass lines. Also of note in Ries’s version is the greater use of register to represent the original score. In this opening, for example, Ries represents the double bass’s register; the 1807 version does not.

Example 11.1 a) Anonymous arrangement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony for piano quartet (Vienna: Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie, 1807), movement two, bars 1–5; b) Ferdinand Ries’s piano quartet arrangement (Bonn: Simrock, 1857), movement two, bars 1–5; c) Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s flute quartet arrangement (Mainz: Schott, c.1830), movement two, bars 1–5

Hummel is less literal with his transcription than either of the above-mentioned arrangers, but uses the means at his disposal to suggest to the listener certain details of the instrumentation of the original that the other versions do not capture. His is a more imaginative recreation, which prompts listeners to do more work. The difficulty for the performers is correspondingly greater. Consider the piano part at the opening of the Marcia funebre. One sees details such as the metronome marking (quaver = 80), which accurately represents Beethoven’s metronome marking of 1817; the original dynamic marking (pp sotto voce, whereas Ries has p sotto voce); and even an attempt to capture the original cello part in the left hand in bars 3–4, giving a sense of space and depth that is not found in either of the other two versions (Example 11.1c). Hummel’s use of thicker chords in both hands helps to preserve the original harmonies and give a sense of textural massivity despite the low dynamic range, as in the original orchestral opening.

However, Hummel’s respect for the original does not necessarily mean that his version literally includes more material from the original than the other two versions. He clearly prioritises melodic over rhythmic content, for instance, apparently considering some quite prominent rhythmic material to be secondary or dispensable. One gets a sense of his priorities from the fact that the piano part has been designed to be played alone, and the other instruments function as an optional accompaniment. In bars 6–11 of the Marcia funebre, Hummel reverses what Ries does, giving the strings the repeated triplet motif (which is also found in the strings in the original), while piano and flute play the legato wind lines. Thus in Hummel’s version for piano solo this otherwise pervasive rhythmic triplet figure will actually be omitted.

Negative reactions to the Eroica are scarce after 1805. This probably correlates with the numerous nineteenth-century arrangements of the work, which can be considered an index of a work’s popularity as well as a means of helping with its perceived difficulties. It was one of the most popular of Beethoven’s symphonies for arrangement. During Beethoven’s lifetime, large-scale chamber arrangements of large-scale works were in favour. Before 1817, the First, Second, Third, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies of Beethoven had appeared in early arrangements for nonet. Of Beethoven’s symphonies, only the first three were published in arrangements for string quartet in his lifetime: these are Carl Zulehner’s arrangements of the First and Second Symphonies (1828); and an anonymous arrangement of the Eroica Symphony, which was issued by Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie (1807). Some of the more popular arrangements were for other kinds of quartet groupings: the Hummel arrangement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for a piano quartet comprising flute, violin, cello and piano (or piano alone), is part of an extensive collection of arrangements he made for that grouping. The Hummel flute quartet arrangement of the Eroica Symphony is another example of the popularity of ‘mixed’ chamber groupings in general, and quartets involving strings and wind instruments in particular.

There were several grounds for preferring larger chamber ensembles for arrangements, especially for arrangements of orchestral works: to give a fairer representation of Beethoven’s symphonic texture, and to help represent the different orchestral timbres. It was for these compositionally based reasons – the ability to represent texture and timbre – that a reviewer of an 1806 arrangement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony for piano trio found the medium almost unfit for the task:

Transcriptions and Reinterpretations

As the century wore on, the work became widely performed in symphonic form – which is not necessarily to say in its original guise. When the work was performed at the Philharmonic concert in 1827, it was thought fitting that it should end with the funeral march. When it was performed later that year in one of the Royal Academic Concerts, it was listed ‘To end with the Marcia Funebre’, as a tribute to Beethoven and omitting the other parts which are thought to be inconsistent with it. As will be seen, this emphasis on the Marcia funebre as the expressive ‘heart’ of the work persisted into the twentieth century. Indeed this movement would later sometimes be taken to stand for the entire work.

As orchestral concerts were becoming increasingly common, and were increasingly professionalised, emphasising fidelity to the score, so too arrangements were becoming more score-like and helping to instil a certain kind of concert-hall listening and performance. A prime example is the work of Liszt, who transcribed the entire cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies for solo piano in the period 1837–65. He carefully marked in instrumentation, and wrote passages that were almost impossible to play (for anyone except himself) in an effort to preserve a sense of the original.²⁰ Arrangements were now more clearly becoming derivatives of ‘complete’ (original) works, intended to act as an aide-mémoire, or as stand-alone concert repertoire for public display. In the hands of Liszt especially, such arrangements aspired to the condition of scores, which now took over for the study of music. These arrangements, like the original Beethoven-Gesamtausgabe (Complete Critical Edition) deified Beethoven and made his symphonies seem untouchable.

On the other hand, some four-hand piano transcriptions gave rise to new embodied and social meanings for the symphonies. An example from Czerny’s four-hand transcription of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony demonstrates the intertwinement of the performers’ hands and arms, which is typical of these more complex transcriptions, although the sharing of registral space is uncommon in Czerny’s transcriptions. In bars 186–91 of the second movement, the Primo player’s left hand must move to play notes that are lower than those played by the Secondo player’s right hand. Achieving this requires the two pianists to adjust their hand positions simultaneously, to allow the other musician to occupy keyboard space that was his or hers only seconds before. This juggling act will inevitably result in physical contact between the two players. Such an arrangement moves far beyond mere presentation or replication of the original in miniature; rather, the arrangement gives rise to a challenging, entertaining and physically involved experience.

Liszt, who had the full (88-key) piano of more than seven octaves for at least the last twenty years of his life, spoke of the capability of the piano to replicate an orchestra in terms of use of register, and its ability to reproduce dense harmonies:

But the idea of the symphony as numerically massive was more germane to Liszt’s generation than it was to Beethoven’s. In fact, the power and vastness produced by a hundred or so instruments playing together was only reached by Beethoven in the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in 1824. For the Eroica Symphony’s first performances, the ensemble was very likely less than half the size Liszt had in mind.

With each new generation, and each new personality, new readings of the work arose, which are reflected in the performances. So, for example, Wagner connected the music abstractly with ‘a Titan wrestling with the Gods’. Wagner’s interpretations were written as a playbill for a performance of the Eroica in Zurich, which he himself conducted. They differed markedly from mainstream interpretations up to that point in that they connected the symphony to his own life and works, especially Die Walküre and Siegfried, rather than to Napoleon. There followed a shift towards psychological interpretations: the idea that Beethoven expressed his ‘inner being’ in the work took firm hold in the later nineteenth century. What remains common to many of the various interpretations of Eroica is a sense of heightened theatricality and penetrating dramatic power, prompting analogies with the work of Shakespeare, and with Greek drama – and the desire to see Beethoven himself as the hero depicted in the work.

Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Performance

Aspects of nineteenth-century Eroica interpretations persist. In a trend lasting from the mid-nineteenth century, the second movement, Adagio assai, has become a recurrent and at times almost automatic choice for music to be played at high-profile funerals, memorial services and commemorations. In 1847, the symphony’s second movement was played at the funeral of the German composer Felix Mendelssohn. The choice was hardly surprising given Mendelssohn’s connections to both Beethoven and the genre of the Funeral March. In our own time, the musical genre connections are no longer needed: the slow movement, in particular, has become linked with the act of public mourning. The deaths of two US presidents have been commemorated with this movement: Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 and John F. Kennedy in 1963; the latter occasion was an impromptu concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And in 1957, the entire symphony was performed under Bruno Walter as a memorial concert for the conductor Arturo Toscanini. The movement was played in another high-profile, public memorial in 1972: the Munich Philharmonic under Rudolf Kempe played it at the funeral of the eleven Israeli athletes killed in a terrorist attack at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.

One can regard these public performances as a new interpretational trend: the work, or rather the slow movement, which is now more frequently taken to represent the whole than it was in the nineteenth century, helps to create a sense of community understanding and empathy at a time of loss of national heroes. The Eroica is performed as a means of working through or coming to terms with the loss, in a public setting. This performance tradition arguably started with the early nineteenth-century ‘abridged’ Eroica performances in which the work ended with the funeral march, first in commemoration of Beethoven’s death. The use of the Eroica slow movement to help mediate, understand and direct public grief is especially clear in the case of Kennedy, where the performance of the work is included as part of biographer Susan Bennett’s moment-by-moment account of ‘the four days that changed America’.²² Performing the ‘watershed’ work became a way of thinking through this event as a turning point in US history.

In these contexts, the work is reinterpreted and used to new social and political ends. Accordingly, the work is performed in a manner that suits these particular ends. The large-scale commemorative performances of the twentieth and twenty-first century are prime examples of mainstream Beethoven symphony performance, differing from nineteenth-century performance practice in several principal ways. One of the most noticeable is tempo. Compared to the earliest performances – or at least those that followed Beethoven’s metronome markings – most mainstream orchestras take the Eroica at much faster tempi. Beethoven’s tempo indications are as follows: movement 1, dotted crotchet = 60; movement 2, minim = 80; movement 3, dotted crotchet = 116; movement 4, minim = 76. In the case of Beethoven’s Fifth, Peter Johnson finds that performances have generally slowed down over the twentieth century, at least among mainstream conductors and recordings. Johnson correlates this with a trend towards interpretations that emphasise pomp and solemnity.²³ In the case of the Eroica, the reverse is true. One of the slowest recordings is that of Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in 1948, although there are also some fairly slow recordings from the 1970s, notably Karl Böhm with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1972, and Leonard Bernstein with the same orchestra in 1978.

On the other hand, from the later twentieth century onwards, historically informed performance ensembles have tried to follow Beethoven’s expectations to the letter. One of the fastest performances on record is David Zinman, with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich (1998), who take the third movement and the Presto of the finale even faster than Beethoven’s notated tempi. Roger Norrington and the RSO Stuttgart likewise follow Beethoven’s notated tempi in a 2002 recording, but only in slow movements and slow sections of the Eroica. These groups have experimented with considerably reduced performance forces, some even mirroring those that Beethoven would have had available to him at Lobkowitz’s. An example is the ‘Resonance’ initiative of the Akademie Orchester in Vienna, led by Martin Haselböck, which includes a performance of the Eroica on original instruments in the Eroica-Saal of the Palais Lobkowitz, where the symphony was first rehearsed in 1804.²⁴ Such performances are contentious: this is hardly surprising given what has come to be invested in large-scale performances of this work in particular (national understanding, shared grief for national heroes, turning points in world political history). For example, one modern-day reviewer questions whether the work would really have been performed with such small forces, although this is a historically undeniable fact:

The case seems not dissimilar to the extensive arguments over ‘Bach’s chorus’. The B minor Mass has come to be one of the pillars of the High Baroque. It is perceived as a pre-eminent representative of the massive corpus of Bach’s vocal music and of Bach as the cultural figurehead of the North German Baroque. The so-called ‘B minor madrigal’ with one player per part does not do justice to this image any more than the ‘Chamber Eroica’ would seem to do justice to the ‘watershed’ symphony.²⁶ But the fact remains that Beethoven was prepared to live with an ensemble of just twelve strings as a minimum.

Modest performance forces (by modern standards) and faster tempi are just two aspects of historically informed performance today – and they are not necessarily the primary determinants of how we hear and interpret the music. The above-cited reviewer suggests that the slightly more sprightly performance of Le concert des nations under Jordi Savall is more in keeping with the work. Savall’s Eroica is more ‘incisive, dynamic’, with ‘more vital momentum and continuity of argument’; whereas Haselböck’s is ‘more smoothly melodious’ and has a ‘pleasing fluency’. Could it be that this reviewer mistakes hallmarks of modern-day historically informed performance in general – incision and dynamism – for imperatives of the Eroica’s performance in particular? Other defining features of historically informed performances of Beethoven’s music include the ornamental use of vibrato and portamenti, and the more articulate manner of bowing and blowing. Each generation, including the HIP (historically informed performance) generation, arguably turns the work into something that accords with its own sensibilities. Today we can hear not only ‘massive’ Eroica performances that fit with the image of Eroica as watershed work, perhaps expressive of publicly experienced grief, but we also now have the smaller performances that fit with a new taste for things historically informed. As Taruskin would say, both instantiations represent a Beethoven wholly ours.²⁷

The latest instance of an ‘Eroica wholly ours’ is the BBC’s 2003 period drama Eroica, directed by Simon Cellan Jones, which dramatises the first performance of the Third Symphony after the fashion of today’s popular ‘upstairs-downstairs’ historical dramas. The music is played by Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique, conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, so by a reasonably small orchestra compared with the mainstream, and in the original location, using original instruments. This film is on the one hand myth-debunking – in its choice of soundtrack – although Gardiner’s forces are larger than Haselböck’s and the orchestral sound is more lush. But in this film the first performance of the work is dramatised in a way that perpetuates and uses Eroica mythology on various levels.

The film is unique in taking a first performance of a musical work as its main subject. But on closer inspection, the performance is less the main subject than the occasion for rehearsing the main points of Beethoven biography in connection with this work. Naturally the film does more than simply document an event: it interprets it thoroughly and interleaves the first performance with a completely new narrative of the film producers’ own making (if partly based on historical record). The music itself, which one would think would be a main part of the diegesis, not infrequently becomes background music: lengthy shots of the first performance are intercut with other biographical anecdotes, while the symphony plays on. Ultimately, the Third Symphony provides a dramatic sonic backdrop against which the producers rehearse well-worn narratives about Beethoven’s fiery temperament, his difficult love relationships, his creative process and his genius in general. To be sure, the producers go well beyond the ‘performative’ mode typical of documentaries of musical performance, showing close-up views of performers that might allow us to experience what it would be like to perform the music; in this way they try to ‘take us there’, to the time of the premiere. But more often than not in this film, the performance becomes an essentially non-diegetic soundtrack against which the producers’ plot (a romance/clash of the classes) unfolds.

In the film, the performance difficulties of the work are thematised, and the overcoming of them is a part of the plot. Beethoven is portrayed as a firebrand, erecting difficult hurdles for the players. Prince Lobkowitz offers flattering praise to Haydn, while admonishing Beethoven who is within earshot: ‘Unlike your own words [Beethoven’s Third Symphony] does not strive for perfection of form … it’s all roaring and grunting.’ But the performers prevail: the film falls back on the teleological narratives of triumph and overcoming, which are recurrent in Beethoven biography and particularly in connection with this work. Asked how the work’s performance is coming along, Ries reports glowingly that ‘They’ve taken the symphony to new heights.’ Most prominently, the film dramatises the traditional idea of Eroica as a watershed. Indeed, it carries the tagline ‘The day that changed music forever.’ Towards the end of the film, Haydn offers that the work is ‘Quite new … everything is different from today.’ Thus the film helps to further the conflation of history and work (here a work that ‘does’ weighty historical work) that has been typical in narratives of the Eroica since the nineteenth century.

Performances of the Eroica Symphony chart an important line of evidence in the work’s reception history. First versions of the work, in the form of varied arrangements, were aids to understanding in a time in which orchestral performance was rare and Beethoven’s symphonies represented a considerable cognitive challenge for listeners – not to mention an unprecedented challenge for orchestral performers, who were largely amateurs. But the numerous arrangements of the Eroica from the nineteenth century are also a testament to the work’s almost immediate and then continued popularity. Early nineteenth-century arrangements were unique in the performance history of the work in that they allowed hands-on experience of the work, by amateur performers in the home. From then on, the work would take on increasingly ‘public’ meanings, and move firmly into the domain of professional performance: the work’s reception mirrors the increasing distance between listeners/audiences and performers in the realm of orchestral music, which emerged during the nineteenth century. Later nineteenth-century arrangements can be understood less as a substitute for the work and more as parallel means of performing, which would also help with the reception of the work in the concert hall setting.

The increasingly professional and large-scale performance of the Eroica went hand-in-hand with interpretations of Beethoven’s career that would place a great emphasis on the turn to the middle (‘heroic’) period, and see this work as a watershed. Eroica has become not just a turning point for Beethoven, in the wake of his ‘Heiligenstadt testament’ and ‘der neue Weg’ (the much-touted ‘new path), but a massive turning point in the history of the symphony. In terms of performance, the understanding of Eroica as weighty, monumental and thus musically untouchable as is evident today in HIP performances, which, even in some radical instances, seem to remain within the fairly tight parameters associated with such performances. The ‘weighty and monumental’ reading of the work that still holds sway is perhaps most evident in Eroica the film, in which every turn in the work ‘plays out’ fresh suspense and revelation on ‘the day that changed music forever’.

Perennial Popularity

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

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

Enduring Emblem: Heroism and Revolution in Contemporary Classical Musical Culture

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

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

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

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

Smart Heroes, Sophisticated Revolutionaries and Superior Status in Popular Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alternative Readings: Pastoral, Politics and Freedom in Musical Scholarship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heroic Narrative and Disability: Overcoming

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

Human Narratives and Disability: Adaptation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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