The beginning of the movement he shapes as an archetypal funeral march from the Revolution, from all wars: a mournful dirge in the darkest register of the violins, the basses evoking muffled drums. In the mind’s eye, troops slowly march behind the catafalque, the masses gathered to watch the procession and to grieve. The dirge rises to a piercing dissonance on A-flat, falling to G, which captures the pathos of the scene (as falling half steps did in the Pathétique). Those two pitches, singled out on the first page of the symphony, will play a steady role in the movement. The opening dead march is answered by a consoling E-flat-major theme in richly scored strings, echoing (whether or not he realized it) the well-known Marche lugubre of François-Joseph Gossec, who had been in the vanguard of French revolutionary composers.38
Once again Beethoven has to be a psychologist in tones. He wants this music to enfold the whole process of mourning, which is not one event and one emotion but a mingling of events and emotions: formal public mourning and inchoate private sorrow, and the exaltation of the dead as martyrs patriotic and transcendent. Meanwhile the end of burial and elegy is to honor the dead and also to give completion. In those terms humanity endures tragedy and lays it to rest. The hope of mourning is to reclaim joy. All those things he enfolds in this music that is based on French models but still sounds sui generis.
From beginning to end there is a missing element in this funeral service: there is no hymn to God. It is a secular humanist ceremony, as it would have been in revolutionary France.39
To encompass the stages of burial and mourning, Beethoven again has to bend formal traditions, this time nearly beyond recognition. The basic form is on the order of a march with trio, ABA. But he needs more perspectives than ABA can give him. To that pattern he adds interludes, constant variations of the material, internal repeats that evolve into a complex and unprecedented form dominated by the rondo-like return of the dirge—six returns, four of them varied, moving between C minor and F minor.
After the flowing beginning of the middle section in C major (with perhaps representations of cannon shots) and the return of the dirge in C minor, he takes up a solemn and majestic double fugue. It rises to a transcendent climax in the high-humanistic key of E-flat: horns soar upward accompanied by strings striding up and down. It is a moment of heart-filling grandeur that Beethoven will never surpass and hardly equal. It is not a paean to God but a hymn to humanity.40 Then the music falls back to earth, to the burial of the dead: a crashing low A-flat chord, drums and cannons, lacerating bugle calls. It dies away to a return of the dirge over an ominously surging bass; that resolves to the consolation of the B theme, but the bass and dirge return, and the drums and bugles.41
He begins the coda in D-flat, as he did the coda of the first movement, here with a fragile but hopeful new theme like the sun breaking out over a scene of mourning. It does not last. The anguish returns, cadencing back to C minor with the snarl of a low stopped horn and wind figures like distant wails. Composing the end takes him hours, perhaps days of improvising at the keyboard and singing and walking, some eight drafts on the page to discover what he wants.42 The result is extraordinary, unprecedented. The music is no longer the picture of a march or a funeral cortege. It is inside now, in the heart, and there the dirge falls into sighs and fragments. The movement ends with a distant cry, sinks again to deathly silence.
In summer 1803, Beethoven begins work on the third movement with an idea for its ending. At the head of the sketch is “M.,” meaning “minuetto.” The summer before, he had made an initial sketch for the movement labeled Minuetto serioso. But in these years he is apt to be vague in what he calls a “minuet” and a “scherzo.” It is not clear when he begins seeing these ideas in fast scherzo tempo rather than slower minuet. He continues with a peculiar note: “M[inuetto] at the end of the Coda a strange vo[ice]”—eine fremde St[imme].43 The “strange” (meaning foreign-to-the-movement) voice in question involves a rising three-note chromatic line, the chromatic slide that he established in the first movement as a central motif. That fremde Stimme will indeed end up in the coda of the movement.
Soon, he finds the dashing, folklike melody of the scherzo, whether he sees it yet as scherzo or minuet. A long continuity sketch adds an introduction to the E-flat theme and makes some stabs at the trio. Then something takes hold. He sketches a rushing figure leading up to the folk theme and notes the tempo as presto. Whether or not he had been before, now he is composing not a minuet but a scherzo. Now he has the ideas that will dominate the movement: a rushing figure of indecipherable meter sounding like a teeming host (the hemiolas of the first movement becoming manic) and his bit of piping folk tune:
From there the scherzo takes shape quickly.44 The two basic ideas of rushing figure and folk tune (most essentially in the oboe), steadily varied, modulating, sometimes taking the form of intricate chromatic windings, will be material for the movement proper. The movement is dashing, impetuous, quicksilver, the form taking shape with reference to traditional minuet-scherzo form, adapted and expanded. One singular feature is that after an opening indistinct murmur in E-flat, the music moves to B-flat and first presents its little oboe tune in that key, then in F, then in B-flat again. Only then, tutti fortissimo, horns leaping upward, basses following the theme in canon, does the tune arrive in the home key of E-flat with a joyous sense of Aha! The model for this procedure is the first movement, where the Hero theme is heard quietly twice before its tutti fortissimo eruption.45 In some ways, the 3/4 scherzo is an echo of the 3/4 first movement lightened, accelerated, electrified.
In the trio section of the scherzo, he revels in his trio of horns in their primeval role as hunting horns. The classically virile, crowing theme is based on a triad, making it another avatar of the first movement’s Hero theme:
The coda begins with a pianissimo whisper, and there he places (from measure 425) the “strange voice” he had noted in the first sketch:
The keening chromatic slide D-flat–D–E-flat does sound like a voice from somewhere outside the scherzo (though its notes are already there in the violins a few measures earlier). And indeed, the figure is from outside: the “strange voice” answers the downward chromatic slide E-flat–D–C-sharp on the first page of the symphony that created a harmonic kink, the C-sharp a sore note that has resonated ever since. Here, at the end of the scherzo, after its adventures as both C-sharp and D-flat, the sore note resolves up to the tonic note. From there, the music gathers strength and intensity, just as did the coda of the first movement, up to a tutti fortissimo finish in three curt staccato chords. (All the movements end with staccato chords.)
From the sketches, then, it appears that he started the third movement at first with little clear sense of it, either its material or perhaps even its genre—not sure whether it was minuet or scherzo. But when the ideas appear and become presto, the movement takes shape as a stretch of effervescent exhilaration. As the Marcia funèbre followed the battle, the scherzo follows as the end of burial and mourning: the return to life and to joy. That journey, from suffering to joy, is a story Beethoven enacted over and over in his music, and in the whole of his life.
For Beethoven to begin work on the finale is to arrive in familiar territory: the basso and englische themes he has handled three times before and decreed from the beginning will be the goal of Bonaparte. He knew from the beginning that his approach here would echo the treatment in the Prometheus Variations for piano: after a new introduction in the context of the symphony, he will start with the Basso del Tema and add voices until the englische tune arrives. He will quote none of the variations from the piano version, only the basso and tune. The variations have to be redone for orchestra and for a new purpose—at once an arrival, a fulfillment, and an apotheosis.46
The qualities musical and humanistic that Beethoven found in the englische are manifest in its being the foundation of two major sets of variations, one for piano and now this one for orchestra. After the rise and victory of the Hero, the burial of the de
ad, and the scherzo’s return to life and joy, the music arrives at the gift the Hero has given to the world. Recall Schiller’s words on the englische:
I can think of no more fitting image for the ideal of social conduct than an English dance, composed of many complicated figures and perfectly executed. A spectator . . . sees innumerable movements intersecting in the most chaotic fashion . . . yet never colliding . . . It is all so skillfully, and yet so artlessly, integrated into a form, that each seems only to be following his own inclination, yet without ever getting in the way of anybody else. It is the most perfectly appropriate symbol of the assertion of one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.47
Here is the meaning of the simple contredanse that underlies a heroic symphony: the englische as image of the ideal society, the conquering Hero’s gift to humanity. As in the other movements, it is a dramatic and symbolic image adumbrated in musical form.48
Like the scherzo, the finale falls quickly into place for him. The first sketch is the first four notes of the basso, the head motif that in much of the movement will stand for the whole of the theme, as the first four notes of the Hero theme often served in the first movement. Next he writes down a rushing passage in sixteenths, in G minor. It evolves into the G-minor eruption that will begin the finale.49
In the end that manifestly militant introduction storms only briefly. By the end of the first phrase, the music has turned into the familiar mode of an introduction to a dance, and the variation-finale proper is under way. The music conjures the atmosphere of the Prometheus ballet, the Basso del Tema run through alone and echoed jauntily in the winds. As in the ballet version, a suddenly loud three-eighth tattoo serves as a kind of refrain to the basso.50 Its ending starts with the A-flat–G figure and brings the music back to the tonic, the home key. Like most sets of variations, and also like the music for an englische at a dance, the finale will have a series of contrasting sections with changes of mood and tempo.
He gathers the variations over the basso as he did in the piano version: the music first in two parts, then three, then four. In the third variation he arrives at what the music was searching for, the sprightly little englische tune, first in the light mode of a dance, then suddenly loud, assertive, undergirded with rocketing bass lines. From its beginning, the goal of the symphony is the englische. Which is to say, this dance and the ideal society for which it is a symbol are going to be exalted. The idea of an apotheosis in dance was implicit from the beginning. The Hero theme of the first movement was not a martial figure but a dance on the order of a waltz, and its half-and-quarter trochaic rhythm foreshadowed the dotted-quarter-and-eighth trochees of the englische. At the same time, the first three notes of the Hero theme are the same as the beginning of the englische: E-flat–G–E-flat.
Once more Beethoven fashions a singular, ad hoc form for the finale, less a series of variations in discrete blocks than a movement that will gather, swell, intensify toward the end. In his sets of variations since childhood, he has imposed overarching plans, and so it is here. It is the particularities of the plan, the interweaving of material, the gathering of threads from earlier movements, the multidimensional form, that make this movement unprecedented, more pointed and forceful than variations tend to be. The finale will be kaleidoscopic, like the first and second movements. Like the first movement it will be a kind of ongoing process, but with more sustained themes and a sense of stylistic evolution and transformation.
Within the overall process of intensification, he lays out the finale in four large sections, though the effect is more continuous than strongly marked. The first section reaches the englische and develops it at length. The second section (from measure 117) leaves E-flat for C minor, starting as a double fugue (constituting variation 4) on a motif from the first variation combined with the basso (this recalls fugues in the Marcia funèbre and in the first movement). The fugue dissolves into variation 5, a quiet recall of the englische in distant B minor / D major. That reversion to a dance style leads to a climactic fortissimo in triplets, reminiscent of the scherzo. Variation 6 is a real march at last, the first one in this work whose subject is a military hero: a “Turkish”-tinged march in G minor, the style familiar from the military music of the day, the effect like a passing parade of soldiers in a peaceful time.
The third section of the finale builds to an apotheosis of the Basso del Tema. It starts with variation 7, another quiet recall of the englische in C major. Variation 8 is another fugato over the basso, in E-flat major. With that Beethoven makes a peculiar decision, to return to the home key in the middle of a section, pianissimo.51 But this is a return of many things, another gathering of threads. Figures in the fugato recall the C-sharp/D-flat sore note and G–A-flat motif going back to the first page of the symphony.
During the fugato the basso theme is inverted—turned upside down. Inversion is an old contrapuntal device, but Beethoven does not make this inversion casually: the scaffolding of the Hero theme was an inversion of the basso. In the middle of the fugato, the flutes dart in with the beginning of the englische theme, E-flat–G–E-flat–D. Then the horns enter on the same, but with a new last note suiting their nature as horns: E-flat–G–E-flat–B-flat. Those four notes are, of course, the head motif of the first movement’s Hero theme. Here Beethoven “explains” where that motif came from.52 With his theme, the Hero is present, in person or in recollection. The section ascends to a climax, the basso in glory pealing out in the horns.53
He has shaped the finale as a steady intensification from the light style of a dance to a heroic voice, and has placed the exaltation of the Basso del Tema at the end of the third section. The fourth and last section of the finale is the apotheosis of the englische melody. Rather than carrying its accustomed lilt, it appears solemnly, poco andante. Here he transforms the englische into a hymn, its poignant leading voice the oboe that has been the main wind protagonist all along. At this moment near the end of the symphony, he makes his little dance tune into a song of great tenderness and compassion. As in the Funeral March, this is a hymn not to God but to Humanity. At the same time he gathers up more threads. In a web of subtle allusions in the third section, he recalls themes, colors, textures, feelings from the Marcia funèbre: the martyrs to freedom are recalled, woven into the pattern of life.54 Now the music has moved from a heroic voice to one inward, contemplative, commemorative. In that way the finale retraces the journey from first to second movement, from victory to mourning, outward to inward. Once again he builds to a fortissimo climax, the horns pealing out the englische theme.55 Slowly the music sinks from that peak to stasis and anticipation.
So ends the finale proper. Throughout the symphony, Beethoven has suppressed a sense of completion and closure. For that he has reserved the very end, an explosion of jubilation that is the climax not only of the finale but of the whole of Bonaparte. Mozart wrote that when he reached the end of a work he felt the whole of it resounding in the last chord. So it is here. The final pages are what the unfulfilled end of the first movement was waiting for, the true victory, the completion of the Hero’s task. The coda is presented like the denouement of a great ceremony vibrant with horns and trumpets—like throngs, like all humanity exulting in a revolution triumphant, with a joy that obliterates everything else. The theme the horns proclaim is Hero and englische, leader and people united; the harmony is nothing but the tonic and dominant of the basso. The end celebrates humanity’s imagined triumph, and no less Beethoven’s real one.
There are many resonances social and musical in the densely woven fabric of movements Beethoven fashioned in 1803, which was finally published in 1806 as a symphony now called Eroica. With it he reached his full maturity by joining his Aufklärung ethos with his music. In the framework of metaphors and symbols conveyed by means of a few words—Bonaparte, Marcia funèbre, Eroica—and otherwise in notes, shapes, forms, analogies, there is a final crucial point. Das Thema of the first movement was made from the finale’s Prometheus bass and the
englische melody. If the theme of the first movement is the Hero, call its source in the finale’s englische dance tune the People, who are humanity.
Whether or not Beethoven saw it consciously as such, here is an overarching metaphor. Like Napoleon, this enlightened Hero does not rise from aristocracy or from accident of birth but is self-created from his origin in the People, just as his theme is created from its origin in the englische. Thereby the self-created hero becomes a paradigm of all human potential. To exalt this kind of Hero is to exalt the People, the common clay. The Hero theme turns that idea into sound: it is based on a triad, one of the simplest and most common things in music. From that common clay, the theme is exalted.
In autumn of 1803, back in his flat in the Theater an der Wien, Beethoven wrote out the orchestral score of the Third Symphony. Its flowery title page proclaimed, Sinfonia grande / intitulata Bonaparte / del Sigr. / Louis van Beethoven. Then he turned his pen to other projects nearly as extraordinary. He knew beyond doubt that this was the best thing he had done. He hoped it would have a brilliant future. But he could hardly have imagined the implications of that future. The Eroica reframed what a symphony, and to a degree what music itself, could be and achieve. It would stand as one of the defining statements of the German Aufklärung and of the power of the heroic leader, the benevolent despot, to change himself and the world. No less is its exalting of such an individual a prophecy of the Romantic century, whose cult of genius would declare Beethoven the true hero of the Eroica.56
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 42
