In his own opinion it is the greatest work that he has yet written. Beethoven played it for me recently, and I believe heaven and earth will tremble at its performance. He is very anxious to dedicate it to Bonaparte. — Ferdinand Ries on Beethoven’s new symphony, 22 October 1803
The unfinished symphony that Ries heard in 1803 was titled “Bonaparte.” At the time, Austria and France were in a peace agreement (albeit a precarious one) and Bonaparte was expected to bring to Europe a new age of peace, unity, republicanism, and freedom from tyranny.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that Beethoven violently removed the name of “Bonaparte” from his symphony. The peace with Austria and France had collapsed, and Bonaparte had revealed his true colors when he had himself declared Emperor of France on 18 May 1804.
By the time Beethoven’s Third Symphony was published, it was titled “Sinfonia Eroica composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo” — “Heroic Symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man.” As for which (if any) particular great man, that's still an open question.
The inscription runs: “Heroic Symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man.” In this we see that there is no question of battles or triumphal marches such as many people, deceived by mutilations of the title naturally expect; but much in the way of grave and profound thought, of melancholy souvenirs and of ceremonies imposing by their grandeur and sadness — in a word, it is the hero’s funeral rites. I know few examples in music of a style in which grief has been so consistently able to retain such pure form and such nobleness of expression. — Hector Berlioz, 1837 (A Critical Study of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies, p. 41)
The designation “heroic” is to be taken in its widest sense, and in nowise to be conceived as relating merely to a military hero. If we broadly connote by “hero” 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, then we shall rightly grasp the subject which the artist lets appeal to us in the speaking accents of his tone-work. The artistic space of this work is filled with all the varied, intercrossing feelings of a strong, a consummate Individuality, to which nothing human is a stranger, but which includes within itself all truly Human, and utters it in such a fashion that — after frankly manifesting every human passion — it reaches a final rounding of its nature, wherein the most feeling softness is wedded with the most energetic force. The heroic tendency of this artwork is the progress toward that rounding off.” — Richard Wagner, c. 1860 (Prose Works, Vol. 3, pp. 221–2)
It has been well said that, though the Eroica was a portrait of Bonaparte, it is as much a portrait of Beethoven himself. But that is the case with everything that he wrote. — George Grove, 1898 (Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies, p. 56)
Beethoven might tear up the dedication, but the work itself was complete. The touches which make it so lively a picture of a great heroic figure remain. The general idea of heroism has been conceived in terms of an individual. Beethoven does not portray philosophical or religious heroism. His hero is a man of limitless energy, combative, restless, active, employing his power to the full without hesitancy or afterthought. To present this heroism of deed in the symphonic form, to derive four different statements of the heroic will in action from the single underlying concept was the task which Beethoven set himself. — Paul Bekker, 1912 (Beethoven, 1925 translation, p. 155)
The revolutionary stance of the “Eroica” has never been denied: in the inner chronology of world history, the work cries out to be backdated to 1789. What Beethoven actually thought about Napoleon — whether he believed he had advanced the revolutionary ideal or, after 1804, betrayed it — is irrelevant to the revolutionary tone of the work. — Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to his Music, p. 16
Beethoven’s Third Symphony is
one of the incomprehensible deeds in arts and letters, the greatest single step made by an individual composer in the history of the symphony and in the history of music in general. — Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization, 1941, p. 763
#Beethoven250 Day 183
Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” in E♭ Major (Opus 55), 1803–04
A rousing performance by Colombian conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.
The ostensible occasion of the symphony appears to have been the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, but no amount of brooding over Napoleon’s career could have given Beethoven his realization of what we may call the life-history of heroic achievement as exemplified in the Eroica. This is obviously a transcription of personal experience. He may have thought Napoleon a hero, but his conception of the heroic he had earned for himself. …
Beethoven was here speaking of what was perhaps the cardinal experience of his life, that when, with all his strength and courage, he had been reduced to despair, that when the conscious strong man had tasted very death, there came this turbulent, irrepressible, deathless creative energy surging up from depths he had not suspected. … Never before in music has so important, manifold, and completely coherent an experience been communicated. …
Heroism, for him, was not merely a name descriptive of a quality of certain acts, but a sort of principle manifesting itself in life. — J. W. N. Sullivan, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, 1927
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, centering on the idea of a confrontation with adversity leading ultimately to a renewal of creative possibilities. Variants of this narrative sequence surface again and again in Beethoven’s music up to his very last years. — William Kinderman, Beethoven, p 96
“The “hero” of the Eroica is not a single figure but a composite of heroes of different types and different situations. In the first movement the heroic is felt in musical images that evoke grandeur, conflict, and nobility of spirit; in the slow movement a fallen hero is mourned and brought to final rest; in the Scherzo and above all the Trio, we hear horn calls to battle, along with “a strange voice” at the end, a return to the chromatic mystery of the symphony’s opening ideas. And the finale evokes a “Promethean” hero who (in the ballet, its direct antecedent) brought wisdom and the arts and sciences to the world. — Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven, p. 213
A sense of national impotence lay just behind the façade of Viennese life after the [1790] death of Joseph II, with whom were interred the thwarted hopes for Enlightened absolutism. These feelings of futility were reinforced by the Habsburgs’ abject submission to Napoleon following the succession of crushing military defeats between 1797 and 1809.
That Beethoven was capable of producing the ultimate musical definition of heroism in this context is itself extraordinary, for he was able to evoke a dream heroism that neither he nor his native Germany nor his adopted Vienna could express in reality. Perhaps we can only measure the heroism of the Eroica by the depths of fear and uncertainty from which it emerged. — Maynard Solomon, Beethoven, pp. 183–4
For Beethoven, heroism is bound up with a commitment to humanistic causes — freedom, enlightenment, creativity — that are pursued at risk or cost of death. … We should not forget the underdog status of Beethoven’s symbolic heroes. Prometheus has his Zeus; Leonore and Florestan their Pizarro; Egmont his Alba. Confronted by brute power, each is vulnerable; death threatens or claims them all. Most important is the principle for which they stand and undergo sacrifices. From this viewpoint, an individual who succumbs to the lure of power and authority for its own sake is disqualified from heroism, as was Napoleon after he had himself crowned emperor. — William Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 104
#Beethoven250 Day 183
Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” in E♭ Major (Opus 55), 1803–04
Marin Alsop leads the Peabody Chamber Orchestra in Baltimore.
For 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. …
Beethoven’s heroic style, while musically representing something like destiny, itself became the destiny of music…. [T]he critical tradition has made of Beethoven a hero, a true emancipator of music. Music can now express the higher concerns of the human spirit and not merely its feelings or affects. Music can now speak to the common man of his tribulations and triumphs and not merely to the aristocrat of his ennui and diversions. — Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero, pp. xv–xvi, 155