Even while Napoleon was still waging war following his escape from Elba, the Congress of Vienna officially concluded business. On 9 June 1815 the Final Act was signed by all the major European powers including representatives from Bourbon France.
Napoleon’s final major defeat was the battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. About 25,000 men under Napoleon were killed or injured in action, and 15,000 under Wellington, leaving a battlefield strewn with carcasses of the dead and dying. Napoleon abdicated again on 24 June.
Just as Beethoven’s librettist Georg Friedrich Treitschke wrote a singspiel celebrating the first fall of Paris (Day 265), he wrote another for the second occupation in June 1815. This was called “Die Ehrenpforten” (The Gates of Honor) with a final chorus by Beethoven. Beethoven’s finale is for bass, chorus, and orchestra and largely based on the phrase “Es ist vollbracht” (It is accomplished). The phrase is repeated 28 times during the 5-minute composition with a final triumphant “Ja vollbracht!”
Beethoven’s chorus of “Es ist vollbracht” alludes to the last words of Jesus in the Martin Luther translation of the Bible (Johannes 19:30). In English translations, this passage is usually (but not exclusively) translated as “It is finished” rather than “It is accomplished.”
Beethoven’s chorus also alludes to Haydn: Because it is one of the last words of Jesus in the German New Testament, the phrase “Es it vollbracht” consequently begins Sonata VI of the choral version of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” when sung in German.
The phrase “Es ist vollbracht” is also spoken by Mephistopheles towards the end of Part II of Goethe’s Faust, but that wasn’t published until 1832, after the deaths of both Beethoven and Goethe.
Although Beethoven’s finale for “Die Ehrenpforten” for bass and chorus prominently features the phrase “Es ist vollbracht,” Treitschke’s text also includes some verses that pertain specifically to the second defeat of Napoleon:
What wantonly escaped from hell
Has been removed a second time,
Hurled into ancient night.
It is accomplished.
In the space of a few anxious days,
That deed that cannot be expressed
Has been done sooner than we thought.
It is accomplished.
Towards the end, the tempo slows down and for two measures of woodwinds followed by the bass singing “Gott sei Dank und unser’m Kaiser” (Thanks be to God and to our Emperor), Beethoven quotes the music of Haydn used at the time for the Austrian National Anthem.
#Beethoven250 Day 285
Es ist Vollbracht Chorus from “Die Ehrenpforten” (WoO 97), 1815
This piece is rarely performed in concert. This is a studio recording.
The “Es is vollbracht” chorus is the last of Beethoven’s works of patriotic sentiment composed from 1813 through 1815 in celebration of the defeats of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna.
In December 1815, Napoleon was exiled to the island of Saint Helena where he died in 1821.
The year 1815 is commonly cited as the beginning of the Biedermeier Era in Austrian cultural history. Perhaps as a reaction to revolutions, upheavals, and wars, Austrians drew inward and place a greater value on conventional middle-class domesticity.
Lewis Lockwood characterizes it as “economically comfortable, politically conservative, and interested in art primarily as cultivated entertainment.” (Beethoven 415). Jan Swafford calls it “a spirit-killing twilight age … bland, conformist, philistine.” (Beethoven 653)
In its cultivation of the self, of privacy, of praise for family life, of an unwillingness to deal with a larger world, the Biedermeier era in its reluctance to support art and music and literature all too often thwarted an active rendering of creativity. — John Clubbe
This was an intensely conservative time, coupled with political repression in the form of a police state with censorship and spies instituted under the control of Clemens von Metternich, later the Chancellor of the Austrian Emperor.
For composers, it was safest to focus on music that didn’t raise much of a fuss. One approach was to create light entertainments with a popular appeal. Keeping the music simple would allow it to be played in family homes by amateurs.
Another approach for composers was to renounce popular appeal and create more personal works, even if the results were esoteric. By keeping the music purely instrumental, it would contain nothing that could be construed as political, avoiding censorship.