Eroica Title Page

INTRODUCTION

After our look at the musical content of the Eroica, we can now turn to interesting comments by contemporary Beethoven experts.  As usual, we present them in the chronological order of the publication of their works from which they are being quoted. 

CONTEMPORARY MUSIC CRITICISM

Maynard Solomon first discussed the relationship between Beethoven's new style and the sonata form, however, he also provides us with other interesting insights on the Eroica: 

"With Beethoven's next work, the Eroica Symphony, op. 55, we know that we have crossed irrevocably a major boundary in Beethoven's development and in music history as well.  The startling and unprecedented characteristics of the Eroica--and of many of his subsequent major compositions--were to some degree made possible by Beethoven's perception of new potentialities inherent in the flexible framework of sonata form.  Because of its unique ability to release the most explosive musical concepts within binding aesthetic structures.  The sonata form was eminently suited to deal with dramatic and tragic subjects.  (The parallels of sonata to drama were noted even by early observers.  Lacepede in 1787 compared "the three movements of a sonata or symphony to the 'noble' first act, 'more pathetic' second act, and 'more tumultuous' third act of a drama."(3: )  However, their psychological outlook and the requirements of the forms of patronage under which they worked apparently did not predispose Haydn and Mozart (not to speak of their lesser contemporaries) to fully develop those possibilities.  IN terms of the admittedly imperfect analogy between drama and sonata, we may say, with Tovey, that the sonata cycles of Mozart and Haydn were musical analogues of the comedy of manners--rational, unsentimental, objective, witty, satirical treatments of the conventions, customs and mores of society.  In the comedy of manners, disruptions of the social fabric are momentary; the loss of love or status is provisional and temporary; undercurrents of sadness and melancholy are almost invariably dissolved in a reaffirmation of social norms and in a return to sanity and wholeness.  AS Einstein observed, the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart "always remained within the social frame"; and in their sonata-form works they "limited themselves to the attainment of noble mirth, to a purification of the feelings." (4: )  Hence, however well it mirrored the rich variety of emotional states and strivings of its composers, its patrons, its audience, and the larger collectivity of which these were parts, the high-Classic style failed to map several inescapable and fundamental features of the emotional landscape in so tumultuous an era.  In particular, it rarely plumbed either the heroic or the tragic levels of experience. 

And yet, there were currents developing in Austrian musical life which would repair these omissions.  Viennese music responded slowly but inevitably to the reverberations of the Napoleonic Wars.  In 1794, the Viennese composer Maria Theresia Paradis wrote a grand funeral cantata on the death of Louis XVI, which was performed for the widows and orphans of the Austrian soldiers; in 1796, Mozart's student Süssmayer composed a patriotic opera (Der Retter in der Noth), and other composers began to place their works--as they said--"on the altar of the Fatherland."  Even the music of Haydn began to take on a new character:  he wrote one symphony (1794) titled Military, another (1795) called Drum Roll, and in 1796 he wrote the classic national anthem, "God Save Emperor Franz," which became the rallying cry of Austrian patriotism.  Also in 1796, Haydn composed incidental music to Alfred oder der patriotische König, followed several years later by an aria, "Lines from the Battle of the Nile," inspired by Nelson's victory at Aboukir Bay.  But it was in two full-scale masses with trumpets and kettledrums, the Mass in Time of War (17960 and the Nelson Mass (1798), that Haydn approached most closely what would later become Beethoven's heroic style.  Another of Beethoven's teachers, Imperial Kapellmeister Salieri, composed a patriotic cantata in 1799 entitled Der tyroler Landsturm, which contains quotations from La Marseillaise and Haydn's "Kaiser" hymn, and in which Erich Schenk has found numerous foreshadowings of Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus and Fidelio, and even of his Seventh Symphony.(5: )

The concept of a heroic music responding to the stormy currents of contemporary history was, therefore, already beginning to take shape.  Despite these foreshadowings, however, Beethoven was the first fully to fuse the tempestuous, conflict-ridden subject matter of the emerging heroic style with the sonata principle, thus inaugurating a revolution in the history of music.  Beethoven took music beyond what we may describe as the pleasure principle of Viennese Classicism; he permitted aggressive and disintegrative forces to enter musical form:  he placed the tragic experience at the core of his heroic style.  He now introduced elements into instrumental music that had previously been neglected or unwelcome.  A unique characteristic of the Eroica Symphony--and of its heroic successors--is the incorporation into musical form of death, destructiveness, anxiety, and aggression, as terrors to be transcended within the work of art itself.  And it will be this intrusion of hostile energy, raising the possibility of loss, that will also make affirmations worthwhile.

It is for reasons such as these that Beethoven's has been called a "tragic" music.  But Beethoven's heroic music is not primarily a conventionally tragic, let alone death-haunted music, for most of his works in this vein close on a note of joy, triumph, or transcendence.  The Funeral March of the Eroica yields to an animated, explosive Scherzo and a broad, swinging finale;  . . . .  In this respect Beethoven remained true to the spirit of Classicism and to the Kantian vision of Schiller, who wrote:  "The first law of the tragic art was to represent suffering nature.  The second law is to represent the resistance of morality to suffering." (6: ) Furthermore, Beethoven's music  does not merely express man's capacity to endure or even to resist suffering--the conventional qualities of tragic art.  His sonata cycles continue to project--on a vastly magnified scale--the essential features of high comedy: happy endings, joyful reconciliations, victories won and tragedy effaced.  If, as Susanne Langer has observed, tragedy is the image of Fate and comedy the image of Fortune,(7: ) then Beethoven's music presents the collision of these images--a clash from which Fortune emerges triumphant, so that the hero may continue his quest.

Beethoven's heroism defines itself in conflict with mortality, and mortality is, in turn, superseded by renewed and transfigured life.  The components of Beethoven's concept of heroism, then, are more extensive than appear at first glance, encompassing the full range of human experience--birth, struggle, death, and resurrection; and these universals are expressed formally through a fusion of comic and tragic visions of life.

Apart from its extramusical associations, it heroic stance, and its "grand manner," the Eroica Symphony marks Beethoven's turning to compositions of unprecedented ambition.  He has now chosen to work on a vastly expanded scale, twice the size of the symphonic model that he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart.  The first movement alone spans almost 700 measures.  The 250-measure development section, which in earlier Classic sonatas had usually served as a transitional pathway from the exposition to the recapitulation, now exceeds the exposition's length by more than 100 measures; it becomes the central battleground on which the issues will be fought out.  The solution of the harmonic and thematic issues must, of curse, await the recapitulation, which is here most suspensefully delayed by a prolonged transition section, and the lengthy coda, which provides greater rhetorical weight  than ever before.  The process of formal expansion that was already manifest in the opus 1 Trios and the opus 2 Sonatas here finds fulfillment.

But enlargement of forces and extension of time span do not lead here to a loosening of design and a dilution of content.  The Eroica's temporal expansion accompanies--indeed results from--extreme thematic condensation.  Early Classic melodies, based as they were on dance rhythms and forms, and normally organized around regular eight-measure periods, were typically symmetrical and balanced, suitable for orderly elaboration, ornamentation, development and restatement.  The thematic materials of the high-Classic masters were increasingly instilled with a new turbulence and assymetry through the use of a number of contrasting motifs within a more complex periodic structure.  Intensifying this procedure in the Eroica's first movement, Beethoven works with motif cells of great compression.  Describing this process of "the manipulative extension of a basic or central musical idea," Lang observes: "These sonata subjects are...motif cells that in themselves are usually altogether insignificant, but they become cogs in the machinery of design; they are twisted and turned, fragmented and tossed about with infinite inventiveness, only to be reassembled after the battle."(8: ) Owing to this extreme thematic condensation, critics are on occasion unable to specify what Beethoven's "themes" are.  Indeed, in the first movement of the Eroica, Riezler believes that what is usually regarded as the main theme or principal motif may actually be "the melodic 'unfolding' of the notes already heard simultaneously in the form of chords.' (9: )  By extension, the "motif" or thematic "cell" may consist of the two "curtain-raising" chords in measures 1 and 2.

(Note Sample)

It is even possible that here Beethoven did consciously attempt to "write without themes," to exploit the energy locked within the basic harmonic unit--the chord.  The dissonant C sharp (or D flat) in measure 7 acts as a fulcrum compelling a departure from the common chord, thus creating a dynamic disequilibrium that provides the driving impetus of the movement, an impetus that continues almost unbroken until the restatement of the tonic chord in the final cadence.  The result is music which appears to be self-creating which must strive for its existence, which pursues a goal with unflagging energy and resoluteness--rather than music whose essence is already largely present in its opening thematic statement.(10: )

Overlapping with this process is Beethoven's innovative procedure of developing a movement, and even an entire work, out of a signle rhythmic motif.  These motifs are so powerfully treated that, as Tovey has suggested, many of Beethoven's works "can be recognized by their bare rhythm without quoting any melody at all." (11: ) . . . 

Beethoven's unprecedented harmonic procedures were also decisive in shaping his "grand manner" structures.  As Leonard Ratner has observed, Beethoven's unorthodox modulatory techniques, his shifts of cadential emphases, and his overdetermined harmonic meanings--which served to create a "more powerful harmonic leverage than was customary in the music of Beethoven's predecessors and contemporaries . . .  a leverage that creates intense harmonic thrusts and broad trajectories."(13: )

Innovative features of the Eroica (some anticipated by Haydn and Mozart) are often cited, including the use of a new theme in the development section of the first movement, the employment of the winds for expressive rather than coloristic purposes, the introduction of a set of variations in the finale and of a funeral march in the slow  movement, and the use of three French horns for the first time in symphonic orchestration.  More fundamentally, Beethoven's style is now informed with an organicity both of motion and structure which gives the symphony its sense of unfolding continuity and wholeness within a constant interplay of moods" (Solomon: 192-197).

In William Kinderman's overview, we can take yet another look at the Promethean influence on the Eroica, but also read his general comments:

"What the bundle of processional anthems and cannonades in Wellington's Victory lacks is a compelling internal artistic context.  In this work a literal, external programme assumes priority, whereas in the Eroica Symphony or the 'Lebewohl' Sonata, by contrast, symbolic elements are absorbed into new and original musical designs, creating a whole greater than the sum of the parts" (Kinderman: 2).

"The dramatic and symbolic elements incorporated from the Prometheus myth are by no means confined to the finale.  The overall narrative progression of the four movements of the symphony outlines a sequence--struggle, death, rebirth, apotheosis.  The parallel with Beethoven's own despair, thoughts of suicide, and discovery of his new artistic path is scarcely accidental.  But the heroic symbolism of the Eroica is too deeply embodied in the artwork to be adequately interpreted in terms of Beethoven's biography, or in relation to any other historical figure such as Napoleon.  What Beethoven explores in the Eroica are universal aspects of heroism, centring on the idea of a confrontation with adversity leading ultimately to a renewal of creative possibilities. . . . 

The immense scope of Beethoven's first movement is reflected in his open, continuously evolving treatment of the basic thematic material.  Elements of dramatic tension are exposed from the outset.  After the powerful opening chords and the following triadic turning figure, the melody descends to s mysterious, low C#, with syncopations heard above this pitch in the violins (Ex. 26).  The full implications of the mysterious C# are explored only at the beginning of the recapitulation, when Beethoven reinterprets this pitch as D-flat, with a new downward resolution leading to an extended solo for horn in F major.  Beethoven's most striking formal innovation in the opening Allegro con brio is his expansion of the development section and coda.  With its 245 bars the development dwarfs the exposition, whereas the coda approaches the length of the recapitulation.  The climax of the development is generated by an intense rhythmic process involving accented, syncopated dissonances; so unrelenting is this rhythmic fragmentation and compression that the thematic material is virtually dissolved into nothing at about that point when the recapitulation would normally be expected.  Here Beethoven introduces an apparently new theme in the remote key of E minor, a theme that is later resolved to the tonic key in the coda.

The formal expansion created by this infusion of new material in the development thus arises as a consequence of unprecedented dramatic tension, and particularly from Beethoven's techniques of rhythmic foreshortening.  His use of such fragmentation culminating in dramatic silence is characteristic; we have discussed one such example in the exposition of the first movement of comic wit; in the Eroica, by contrast, it yields one of the most shattering climaxes in all music.  the sense of scale is vastly expanded: a long series of registrally enhanced motivic syncopations leads into massive syncopated chords, with a dissonant collision of the A minor and F major triads marking the peak of intensification.  The strongest rhythmic impulse or structural downbeat in the entire movement falls on the empty beat in bar 280, four bars before the E minor theme (Ex. 27).  In this first movement, then, the pivotal crux of the entire dramatic structure is anchored in a temporal movement that is, paradoxically, soundless.  This enables Beethoven to discharge the almost unbearable tension of the dissonant syncopations while preparing the new formal episode that is to fill the remainder of the development.

Beethoven's pupil Ferdinand Ries related an incident at a rehearsal of the symphony in which he mistook the premature horn entry just before the recapitulation as an error in performance.  The unfortunate Ries said to Beethoven 'Can't the damned horn player count?--it sounds infamously false!', a remark that enraged the composer.  The device is not well regarded as a 'mischievous whim' or a 'primitive banana skin', as described by Ries or Martin Cooper, respectively. (6: Thayer-Forbes, p. 350; Judgements of Value, p. 150)  Beethoven's music is elsewhere rich in humour, but this passage can hardly be reckoned comic, though it severely dislocates the instrumental parts.  The effect is of a bold expansion and diffusion of the structural moment of recapitulation over a broader temporal span.  The second horn anticipates the reprise four bars before it occurs in the full orchestra, and brings about a superimposition of tonic and dominant harmonies.  The resulting dissonance is acute, despite the soft dynamic level, and this helps motivate the powerful fortissimo outburst that ushers in the 'true' recapitulation.  Nevertheless, the reprise fails to follow a familiar path: the mysterious C# is now reinterpreted as D-flat, and its resolution to C opens up the key of F major for the solo of the first horn.  The two horn passages are related; both infuse excitement and unpredictability into the music at just that moment when concerns of formal symmetry would seem to be paramount.

The coda is expanded to almost the length of the exposition and recapitulation.  Here, the 'new' theme from the development is resolved to the tonic key of E-flat major.  Thus the coda serves to recapitulate those musical passages that did not appear in the exposition or recapitulation.  But is also presents the exciting last chapter in the story of the triadic turning theme that opens the movement.  This main theme is joined with a contrasting rhythmic subject, recalling a thematic combination from the development section, and Beethoven gradually intensifies the passage by means of orchestration and dynamics.  As the music reaches its climax he reinterprets the theme to lead to a full authentic cadence in E-flat major; the resolution of this primary theme is inseparably bound up with the tonal closure of the movement as a whole.  Another reminder of the vast scale of this Allegro con brio comes in the emphatic closing chords, which correspond to the two great E-flat chords at the beginning of the work.  As Beethoven's sketches show, these initial chords were an afterthought:  they anticipate the majestic power of the movement to follow, but their echo in Beethoven's final cadence also serves to cast unifying threads over this immense symphonic structure.

Beethoven was particularly drawn to the genre of the Marcia funebre during the transitional period that gave rise to his 'new path'; other examples besides the slow movement of the Eroica include the C minor variation in op. 34 and the funeral march 'on the death of a hero' in the A-flat Piano Sonata op. 26, from 1801.  The sonata 'with the funeral march' was one of the mot popular of all Beethoven's works in the nineteenth century.  Its Marcia funebre was performed during Beethoven's own funeral procession in Vienna in 1827; it is the only movement in his sonatas that he arranged for orchestra.  It thus takes on unusual interest not just for its orchestral rhetoric but for the part it played in the evolution of Beethoven's posthumous reputation as artistic hero, a mythic role still very potent today.

In its epic grandeur and dramatic power, the Marcia funebre in C minor in the Eroica goes far beyond the more conventional march in the piano sonata.  The transparent orchestration gives special prominence to the woodwinds, particularly the oboe.  Especially impressive is Beethoven's reinterpretation and development of the opening processional theme, as well as his incorporation of contrasting episodes.  At the heart of this Adagio assai he introduces a subject of triumphant character in C major, with very full orchestration, which leads into a dramatic fugato based on the main theme in the minor.  The melodic climax of the processional march had been on A-flat, a pitch that assumes special importance throughout.  Now, immediately after the luminous C major climax with trumpets and drums, the music falls onto a mysterious unharmonized A-flat, and hence into the darkness of the minor, with the sense of a gaze into the abyss.  Later, following the fugato, Beethoven restates the head of the processional theme softly in the dominant before pausing on a high A-flat in the violins, with the effect of a question posed against an indifferent sky.  The ensuing silence is broken by an emphatic answering A-flat in the low register, and a powerful 'composing out' of this harmony leads to a varied reprise of the processional march.  Equally striking is the fragmentation of the basic thematic material into hushed, broken inflections in the final passages of the coda.  Beethoven had already effected such a disintegration of his main theme at the close of the Largo e mesto of his Piano Sonata op. 10 no. 3, and he was to use the device again in his Coriolan Overture.

The subtle opening of the scherzo--which begins pianissimo and in the dominant instead of the tonic--is presumably connected with the symbolic 'rebirth' of Prometheus, as Floros has suggested. (7: Beethovens Eroica und Prometheus-Musik, p. 98)  A more obvious heroic note is sounded in the trio, with its soloistic use of three horns--a special feature in the orchestration of the symphony.  The musical character here is animated, even joyous, making a convincing psychological transition to the comedy and high spirits that emerge in the finale.  But Beethoven also incorporates into the scherzo a specific thematic reference to the outset of the first movement which clarifies the narrative sequence of the work as a whole.  Just moments before the close, the rising motivic progression D-flat--D-sharp--E-flat is played twice in the high register in the winds (ex. 28).  In a sketch, Beethoven labelled the rising figure as 'a strange [or unfamiliar] voice' ('eine fremde Stimme').(8: Nottebohm transcribes this sketch in Ein Skizzenbuch von Beethoven aus dem Jahre 1803, p. 44)  This is, of course, an inversion, and resolution, of the mysterious downward shift E-flat-D-D-flat (C#) that was heard in bars 6-7 of the Allegro con brio (cf. Ex. 26).  That dissonant inflection in the first movement is the first hint in the work of strife and dramatic tension;  the syncopations in the first violins emerge in response to the downward chromatic figure, already foreshadowing the unprecedented rhythmic force of passages to come.  At the end of the scherzo, by contrast, this breach in the E-flat major tonality is closed; the wound is healed.  The struggle embodied in the first movement has been transcended.

In the finale the association with Prometheus becomes explicit through the re-use of the theme from the ballet.  As in the op. 35 Variations Beethoven first develops just the bass of the theme--with its grotesque humour of expressive silences--before joining it to the upper-line melody.  We thereby witness the gradual creation of a composite theme out of its component elements, a notion that took deep hold on Beethoven and which surfaces again in more radical form in the scherzando movement of the F major Quartet op. 59 no. 1, from 1806.  The variations that follow in the Eroica finale are resourcefully blended with fugato passages, an alla marcia section, and an extended andante featuring wind solos to create a unique formal design.  As Lewis Lockwood has observed, 'The Eroica finale emerges as the generating movement for the whole work and as the most fully original symphonic finale that Beethoven or anyone else had written up to its time'.(9: 'The Compositional Genesis of the Eroica Finale', p. 100.  Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process, p. 166)" (Kinderman: 89 - 95).

In three of the four paragraphs of his look at the musical content of the Eroica, Barry Cooper deals with the first movement of this symphony and summarizes the remaining three movements in one paragraph: 

"The main theme reached its final form almost at once, complete with the dissonant C# that generates so much uncertainty and has such long-range effects, although the two initial tonic chords were a later addition.  Another early idea was the theme in the remote key of E minor in the middle of the development section.  Beethoven had been trying out increasingly remote keys as the tonal goals of his developments in the preceding years, and E minor after E flat major was the furthest yet.  Much has been made of the fact that there is a new theme at this point in the development, but such a feature is not unprecedented; moreover the E minor theme is distantly related to the main theme at this point in the development, but such a feature is not unprecedented; moreover the E minor theme is distantly related to the main theme (as indeed are almost all the numerous themes in this movement0.  What is so astonishing here, however, is the complete contrast of character that Beethoven achieves through a combination of remote key, unusual instrumentation, and change of register, coupled with an extraordinarily prolonged build-up to this point.

Throughout the movement, in fact, the proportions between the sections are unusual, even though the sonata-form structure is regular in outline, and Beethoven's sketches show much effort to obtain proportions that satisfied him.  The modulation to the dominant in the exposition comes quite early (bars 42-4), and is followed by a series of themes and motifs in B flat, leading to a cadence that seems to herald the end of the exposition (bar 83).  Had it done so, the innocent ear would suspect nothing amiss (the music could have jumped from bar 82 to bar 144 without destroying the sonata form).  Yet only here does a prominent new theme begin: this point is not the end of the exposition but only halfway through.  Thus Beethoven adopts the same ploy as in his Grand Sonata in E flat, Op. 7, where an early modulation to B flat leads to a theme and a cadence, followed by the true second subject (see pp. 70-1).  In the Eroica, however, unlike the sonata, he repeats the ploy in the development, which is again twice as long as expected:  when the recapitulation is due, according to normal proportions, the E minor theme appears instead, again only halfway through.  Thus Beethoven cleverly makes the proportions of the development match those of the exposition.  To reach E minor, the development moves through various keys before settling in F minor for the start of a fugato (bar 236).  From here the music repeatedly moves sharpwards round the circle of fifths, creating a sense of heroic uphill struggle, culminating in harsh discords and a dramatic single-beat rest (bar 280; see Ex. 8.2), before the development's strongly dissonant dominant minor 9th.  This passage forms the pivotal point in the development, with maximum disruption in harmony, rhythm, melody, texture, and key--the opposite pole to the smooth, harmonious four-bar main theme.

The rest of the movement contains many more surprises, including the famous premature entry of the second horn just before the recapitulation, a sudden excursion to F major shortly afterwards (with the dissonant C# used as a pivot note in the modulation), and an extremely long coda to resolve the earlier instabilities and bring the disparate ideas into an overall unity.  The extraordinary level of originality and ingenuity in the movement has generated an enormous amount of literature, yet much still remains to be said about its composition and structure.

The second movement is a funeral march in C minor; but the rising tonic triad that played such an important part in the melodic contours of the first movement reappears in the second in a central section in C major.  It seems odd to have a funeral march so early in a heroic symphony, especially when the hero Napoleon was still alive and overrunning half of Europe.  Thus the symphony is clearly not simply a portrait of Napoleon or anyone else.  Beethoven perceived true heroes as immortal, and indeed had a strong interest in the concept of immortality, which repeatedly surfaces in his letters.(13: For example, in November 1803 he wrote to the painter Alexander Macco:  'Continue to paint--and I shall continue to write notes; and thus we shall live--for ever?--yes, perhaps, for ever.' (A-85))  To represent immortality in the symphony, he therefore placed the funeral march second, after a lifelong struggle and ultimate triumph in the first movement; this enabled the third movement apparently to symbolize resurrection (though it is simply headed 'Scherzo'), and the fourth to represent the hero taking his place among the immortals.  This scheme would account for the use of the Prometheus theme in the finale.  The theme was already very well known to his potential audiences, as was its association with Prometheus (the association would have been still stronger if Breitkopf had not neglected, despite Beethoven's request, to refer to Prometheus on the title page of the Variations, Op. 35, which appeared in August 1803).  Indeed the finale of the Eroica appears to reflect the plot of the Prometheus ballet quite closely. Like the ballet, it begins with a storm, followed by an unharmonized, statuesque version of the bass-line, which is gradually brought to life by various counterpoints and eventually the main melody, as in Op. 35 (again recalling the statues brought to life in the ballet0.  In the rest of Prometheus the statues are introduced to various arts on Parnassus; likewise in the remainder of the symphony Beethoven introduces a range of musical arts--variation, fugue, march, development--in a form so complex that it cannot be readily labelled.  The Eroica was to undergo several changes before its eventual publication in October 1806, including an important change of dedication, to be discussed later, but all its main musical features seem to have been in place by the end of summer 1803.  Although clearly in the symphonic tradition of Haydn and Mozart, it far exceeds any previous symphony in length, complexity, and grandeur of conception, while its originality and its intriguing extramusical associations provide endless scope for reflection.  The true hero of the work is Beethoven himself" (Cooper:  130-133).

After these comments by Beethoven researchers of our time, on our next page, we offer you a look at all sources we used to prepare this section of our web site.