THE STORY BEHIND: Beethoven's Symphony No.3 ("Eroica")

Title: Symphony No.3, op.55, in E-flat major (Eroica)

Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Last time performed by the Rhode Island Philharmonic: Last performed March 24, 2012 with Larry Rachleff conducting. This piece is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.

The Story: True to its name, the “Eroica” is indeed one of the most heroic feats accomplished by any artist in the last few hundred years. “Once the ‘Eroica’ existed,” says Columbia University Composition Professor Jonathan Kramer, “no subsequent composer could ignore it. The development of 19th-century symphonic music is traceable more to the ‘Eroica’ than to any other single work, and it took composers more than a century to exhaust its implications.”

A decade after the French Revolution – an event which changed European history in a cataclysmic upheaval that was both political and philosophic – Beethoven intended to create a work that appropriately honored such a moment, as well as the man who seemed to embody its ideals, Napoleon Bonaparte. But when Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor in 1804, Beethoven flew into a rage, saying, “He is nothing but an ordinary mortal! He will trample all the rights of men under foot to indulge his ambition….” At that, Beethoven tore the title page in half, threw it to the ground, and forever deleted Napoleon’s name from the original dedication, replacing it with the words “Composed to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man.”

Musically, we see in Beethoven’s Third Symphony a composer who has experienced extreme hardship (traumatic childhood, romantic rejection, deafness, recurring gastrointestinal and liver ailments, thoughts of suicide) and emerged with a mature and recognizably more spiritual tone to his work.

The first movement of Eroica begins with two bold hammer strokes in the key of E-flat, followed by a familiar theme in the cellos, which pauses, almost before it starts, on an enigmatic C#. This note, which sounds odd to our ears at first, becomes a harbinger of marvels to come, as Beethoven deftly uses it as a pivot point on which to manipulate themes with seemingly endless creativity. Listen for the contrasts between powerful climaxes and moments of captivating lyricism, as well as for the way driving rhythms are punctuated by displaced accents. Despite being one of the longest symphonic movements written to date, its tight structure evokes a sense of inevitability, and the whole thing seems to be over in a flash.

Rather than retreating into gentle tranquility for the second movement, which is what contemporary audiences would have expected, Beethoven offers, instead, a funeral march that borders on the tragic. With the oboe leading the way, despairing moods are occasionally broken by moments of optimism and hope, and masterful fugal treatments of the theme remind us of Beethoven’s brilliance. But the despair is real, and the movement concludes with a halting, fragmentary disintegration of the theme into nothingness.

Before the Eroica, it was traditional for symphonies to call for only two French horns. But this was just not enough to do justice to his ideas, so Beethoven breaks with tradition yet again and calls for three. The added forces allow him to throw the horns into a rollicking fray of fanfares during the third movement scherzo, injecting some much-needed joviality after the darkness of the second movement.

For the finale, Beethoven, in his now comfortable role as guide through musically uncharted territory, plays a bit of bait-and-switch with the listener. He sets out with what appears to be a series of variations on a simple bass line. But somewhere in the third variation, we realize that the melody heard developing over the top of that bass line is what must actually be the “real” theme of the movement.

Then the variations keep coming, each with its own character, until, in the eighth variation, Beethoven brings back the opening bass line and, in a masterful stroke of fugal prowess, develops it essentially out of existence. Graceful winds then give us a serene reprieve until the full orchestra triumphantly unifies both the opening bass line and its derivative melody. But Beethoven (being Beethoven), of course, is not finished. A coda, full of ever more melodic surprises, drives us on to a powerful climax, marked by a series of heavy, crunching and affirming chords.

Program Notes by Jamie Allen © 2024 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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