Beethoven's Eroica

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The annotated first page of Beethoven’s manuscript fair copy of the Eroica’s second movement, the Funeral March. It is curious that he should have written the word ‘Marcia’ in large and florid penmanship with the much smaller ‘funebre’ tacked on below it—almost as an afterthought.

  CREDIT: ARCHIV, BIBLIOTHEK UND SAMMLUNGEN DER GESELLSCHAFT DER MUSIKFREUNDE IN WIEN

  II MARCIA FUNEBRE—ADAGIO ASSAI

  Any work of art, no matter how novel, has both a historical context and antecedents. As already noted, in Vienna in the 1790s Beethoven would have been familiar with the occasional music written for French revolutionary festivals, much of it marches in 4/4 time. It was self-consciously ‘new’ music to suit the new society the Revolution had supposedly declared, and it had travelled all over Europe. It would be surprising had Beethoven not picked up some musical tricks from it, whether unconsciously or deliberately, even if the overwhelming originality of the ‘Eroica’ now seems to eclipse everything that went before it, extinguishing rather than embodying whatever immediate models it might have had.

  Academics have certainly not been slow to look for traces of the music associated with the French Revolution in the ‘Eroica’, and anyone with a determined thesis of musical influence will always manage to find parallels. In receptive minds melodies recur and leave behind their echoes. There might simply be a chance similarity between two tunes, or a scholar might conduct a laborious analysis to reveal a ‘hidden text’ of the same notes that purportedly lies behind both. As a teenage viola player in the Bonn theatre orchestra at the time of the Revolution Beethoven would have played the popular operatic repertoire, which at the time included works by contemporary French composers such as Grétry, Monsigny, Dalayrac (he had the scores of two of Dalayrac’s operas in his library), Le Sueur, Méhul and above all Gossec.

  François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829) was perhaps the Revolution’s foremost composer. Among his many ‘political’ works were the Symphonie militaire and the widely known Marche lugubre (1790). This slow march was played on solemn occasions such as the funeral of a national figure. It accompanied the grand public ceremony when the remains of Voltaire and Rousseau were moved to the Panthéon. It is practically certain that Beethoven knew the piece, if not from Bonn then early on in Vienna. It was chromatic, made use of dramatic effects such as long pauses, and was scored for unusual instruments including tam-tam, serpent, muted drum and a special tuba. The late American musicologist Claude V. Palisca singled out a passage in the second movement of the ‘Eroica’, the Marcia funebre, where Beethoven appears almost to parody a passage in Gossec’s Marche lugubre.*

  Without consulting the composer it is impossible to say whether or not this was sheer coincidence. The one certain thing is that it was not plagiarism. Beethoven was far too original and jealous of his own musical fecundity to need to crib other composers’ music. Similarly, the slow march at the beginning of Cherubini’s Hymne funèbre sur la mort du Général Hoche (1797) has been proposed as another influence.

  In any case it was a great time for grand orchestral funeral marches. Yet another was the slow movement of Paul Wranitzky’s C minor Symphony, Op. 31, written in 1797 with the subtitle Grande sinfonie caractéristique pour la paix avec la République françoise. Wranitzky, who shared Mozart’s birth year of 1756, was a major figure in the musical life of Vienna as a composer, conductor and violinist. As a measure of the respect in which Wranitzky was held, Haydn insisted that he direct Viennese performances of The Creation in 1799 and 1800, while Beethoven himself chose him to conduct the premiere of the First Symphony in April 1800. However, the first performance in Vienna of Wranitzky’s own C minor Symphony had been quickly banned by imperial decree, because its French subtitle was considered inflammatory. The work was full of musical allusions to the French Revolution, including in its first movement various quotations from Cherubini’s opera Médée: an opera with a reputedly subversive message. The quotations from Haydn in Wranitzky’s symphony were also taken to represent the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s fuddy-duddy old regime confronted by the triumphant new republicanism sweeping Europe. Significantly, the symphony’s slow movement was a funeral march in C minor, exactly prefiguring the one in the ‘Eroica’, although Wranitzky’s is a lament for ‘the Fate and Death of Louis XVI’ rather than for Napoleon.

  Beethoven, too, had provided his own precedent for this most solemn of slow movements: that of his A flat major Piano Sonata, Op. 26, written some two years before the ‘Eroica’. This was titled Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un eroe and marked Maestoso andante. Set in the uncommon key of A flat minor (rather than in the relative minor, F minor) it is indebted to French antecedents in that it is a proper slow march with dotted rhythms that keep the pulse going. It has a brief central section that mimics orchestral effects, including the dramatic pauses that also characterized the French genre. In the wrong hands it can risk sounding throwaway and even faintly ludicrous. It is impossible to say how consciously Beethoven had had Bonaparte in mind as the ‘hero’ in question when writing it. However, it is probably safe to say that at that time, shortly after the Battle of Marengo when the Austrians had been so decisively driven out of Italy, any generic hero would be bound to have cast a Napoleonic shadow.

  In the context of this symphony we can assume the hero so imposingly called forth in the first movement is now dead, even if at the start the music is perhaps too stately and ‘public’ to induce personal grief. The key is C minor, which Beethoven has already established in works such as the Pathétique Sonata as having private associations of somewhat histrionic passion, if not always of actual lament. As the movement proceeds, however, there are moments that go straight to the heart, above all the episode in C major that comforts, as the musicologist George Grove wrote, like a sudden ray of sunlight in a dark sky. All too short, it gives way to the original march, which then turns into a solemn fugue for full orchestra, the stately progress of which becomes briefly impassioned before the music resumes its deep-purple march and shuffles to a close.

  If there is anything in this movement that betrays French influence it is its aura of having been conceived for a great public ceremony. It is not by accident that it has so frequently been trotted out for moments of national mourning (for John F. Kennedy, for example). Indeed, it is quite hard for us to hear it any longer as just the slow movement of a symphony. It would doubtless have delighted Beethoven that it so readily conjures images of cenotaphs, black crape, slow-marching soldiers, gun carriages, riderless horses with reversed boots in the stirrups (a particularly vulgar and sentimental piece of theatre), and all the rest of the panoply of militarized national mourning for a civilian. He was plainly aiming for a grand epitome of public grief, and an epitome is exactly what he triumphantly achieved.

  III SCHERZO: ALLEGRO VIVACE

  What are we to make of Beethoven’s following a funeral dead march with a ‘joke’ (a scherzo)? In the early Viennese Classical period this movement of a symphony was a simple and stately three-beats-to-the-bar minuet. Thereafter, Haydn and Mozart made it bear more weight, and it had tended to become quicker and more complex until most symphonic ‘minuet’ movements had long since abandoned any connection with dancing. Haydn had increasingly used ‘scherzo’ when indicating a particularly light-hearted version of this movement, especially in a string quartet.

  Beethoven had long adopted this marking with enthusiasm, as in the rollicking third movement of his First Symphony although, unlike Haydn’s, his scherzos were often less urbanely witty than downright knockabout. After the monumental first two movements of the ‘Eroica’, though, his problem was how to effect a change of mood without destroying the overall tone of seriousness. The shift in rhythm from the slow movement’s four-beats-in-a-bar march to a more lilting three undoubtedly brings relief, but Beethoven then needed to write a movement that was reinvigorating and, above all, without the least hint of anything frivolous.

  One dawn in a far-off land many years ago I was woke
n by a cock crow that instantly put the Scherzo of the ‘Eroica’ into my head for the rest of the day. The bird’s high, almost trilling clarion note followed by a downward glissando was so distinctive I have wondered ever since if Beethoven had once heard just such a cockerel (in the days when he still could), and the heraldic cry had lingered in his unconscious as an aural metaphor for the awakening and regeneration of a new day. Such speculation can be pushed too far, but it does seem appropriate that after the first seven bars in which the strings (marked sempre pianissimo e staccato) softly climb an octave like a sun rising in obvious expectation, Beethoven gives the ‘cock crow’ to the oboes—his orchestra’s most gallinaceous sound.

  Once this day has dawned, though, and the implications dissected (still pianissimo) among different instruments, the full orchestra gathers itself and explodes with the call, fortissimo. After the hero’s solemn obsequies it is impossible not to see this as signalling a triumphant rebirth. Proof of what Beethoven could do with the notes of the common chord of E flat major is once more shown when the orchestra twice plays in unison a passage in which the stress falls onto the weak beat:

  This sort of syncopation was already a favourite device of Beethoven. It might indeed pass as jocular, except that the lightness of the remainder of this first half of the movement, with strings and wind alternating, makes it more playful than humorous. There follows the trio section with the famous three horns mellifluously giving their private version of the common chord of E flat major. In those pre-valve days of the hand-stopped ‘natural’ horn such a flourish would almost inevitably have been associated with a hunting motif: the stock trope of so many works of the Classical period. Beethoven manages to sidestep this by writing reflective rather than rousing music, and when the passage recurs in the trio’s second half the unaccompanied three horns die away with long-held chords that are deeply affecting. When writing about this in 1896, George Grove wondered what it was that made these last few notes so touching. ‘There is in them a feeling of infinitude or eternity such as is conveyed by no other passage, even in Beethoven’s music’, he said and went on to quote Wordsworth:

  Our destiny, our being’s heart and home

  Is with infinitude, and only there;

  With hope it is, hope that can never die,

  Effort, and expectation, and desire,

  And something evermore about to be.4

  Such mystical overtones were undoubtedly Beethoven’s answer to anyone who might have assumed a scherzo automatically meant a jest. When the syncopated unison passage of the trio’s first half recurs in the second, he changes not the notes but the rhythm in a masterstroke of inventiveness. Both syncopation and 3/4 time are abandoned, and in their place the full orchestra suddenly has an electrifying 4 fortissimo bars in duple time:

  The movement ends with equally loud emphatic chords. Yet an impression of infinitude still lingers, or at any rate of an inward horizon expansive enough still to justify the massive portal that opened the symphony. In its way, even the Scherzo is as monumental as the rest.

  IV FINALE: ALLEGRO MOLTO

  How to end a serious composition was always a problem for composers of the Viennese Classical period. It was somehow implicit in the age of sonata form that no matter how earnest a work’s mood, it ought to have the musical equivalent of a happy ending. Obviously Church works such as Bach’s Passions could leave their hearers if not actually depressed then at least suitably meditative. But in secular instrumental music there was a widespread feeling that the ending should be distinctly lighter, and it often took the form of a rondo with a catchy recurring tune. It was not really until the Romantics that composers felt free to leave their listeners luxuriating in gloom.

  This was obviously unsatisfactory at times, the contrast with what had gone before sounding merely flippant. A classic case is Mozart’s String Quintet in G minor, K. 516, a work redolent of private sorrow all the way through to the last movement, whose short Adagio introduction in G minor is probably the most depressed passage Mozart ever wrote. Yet this breaks off into a jaunty tune in the major key in 6/8 time. According to taste, the sudden contrast is either ill judged or utterly heartbreaking.

  Probably the first great composer of the Viennese Classical period to make a serious intellectual attempt to solve the dilemma was Haydn in his set of six string quartets, Op. 20, the so-called ‘Sun’ quartets, which constitute a landmark in a genre that he himself had invented. Written in 1772, they were plainly designed to be a great advance on his previous set, Op. 17, and serious enough in tone to stand on an equal footing with any other instrumental genre. In order that their last movements could maintain this tone, Haydn chose to end three of them with fugues: a forcible injection of the old-fashioned ‘learned’ mode into the sonata form style. The irony was that sonata form had originally evolved expressly to free music from all that Bachian counterpoint. Haydn’s novel solution was reasonably successful, certainly enough for Mozart to copy the idea in the finale of his own D minor String Quartet, K. 173, of 1773. Eventually this pattern was modified by both composers, as well as by many others, into a fusion that blended fugal passages into the more ‘normal’ Viennese Classical finale. The result was something that could be both lyrical and thoughtful: a solution later to be exploited by Beethoven and Mendelssohn.

  As we already know, when Beethoven came to tackle the problem in the ‘Eroica’ of how to follow three epic movements with something that would not be an anti-climax he resorted to his ‘Prometheus’ theme for a set of variations with a fugal section. Because the movement is now imprinted at near-genetic level in generations of audiences, it is impossible to imagine it any differently. The ‘Prometheus’ theme has virtually become the symphony’s signature tune. Yet from the earliest performances there were always those who felt this last movement was by a hair’s breadth not quite up to the impact of the other three. Possibly it was because the idea of having a theme and variations as its last movement was the one thing in this symphony that struck listeners as less original than the rest. By the time Beethoven came to write the ‘Eroica’ there were some brilliant examples of variations being put to use for both light-hearted and serious finales, especially by Mozart in such examples as his C minor Wind Serenade, K. 388, of 1782 and several of his piano concertos, including the G major, K. 453, and Beethoven’s own favourite, the C minor, K. 491, of 1786.

  Like the Op. 35 piano variations, the last movement of the ‘Eroica’ begins with the identical naked bass line being gradually fleshed out until the ‘Prometheus’ theme stands proud. Thereafter the theme is varied in different ways but seamlessly and with a good deal of effortless-sounding fugato and counterpoint. It is impressive that this is not merely an orchestration of the piano work. The treatment is fresh and different, a tribute to the possibilities for a composer of Beethoven’s resourcefulness of what had once been a little dance tune. At one point the music slows for a section marked Poco andante where an oboe tune of great expressiveness is introduced:

  This gradually suffuses the whole orchestra and clearly harks back to the funeral music of the slow movement, thereby invoking a unity between the dead and the resurgent hero. Then the music regains its former pace before breaking into a hectic fast tempo that ends the symphony in triumph. The trinity of Prometheus, Bonaparte and Beethoven reigns supreme: all achieved in a few weeks by a deaf musician scratching away in 1803 with ink and quills in an upstairs room whose casements were thrown open on an Austrian landscape in high summer. The crisis of Heiligenstadt has been vanquished. The promises of Bonn have been heapingly fulfilled. A stake has finally been driven through the heart of ‘Papa’ Haydn, even though he has another six years to live. A symphony that will ring down the centuries has been written.

  * See Appendix.

  * See Appendix.

  6

  WHO WAS THE REAL HERO OF THE ‘EROICA’?

  In the first three decades of the nineteenth century there were three men who fitted the near-mythological
status of Romantic hero. They were Napoleon, Beethoven and Byron: flawed and lonely geniuses who were seen as having lived heroic lives and made heroic deaths still with their ideals intact. The little Corsican’s myth continued to dominate Europe even after he was exiled to St Helena following Waterloo in 1815. The ‘Napoleonic’ character clearly transcended the man and his career. Similarly, the ‘Byronic’ myth transcended Byron, his brilliant and prodigious output as a writer, his scandalous love affairs, and the political adventuring that in 1824 led to his death at the age of thirty-six while fighting for Greece against the Ottoman Empire.

  As for Beethoven, the academic John Clubbe notes, ‘At first glance it might appear that [he] admired the republican Napoleon, inheritor of the French Revolution, and despised the royal Napoleon, emperor and despot. But in fact B’s feelings, like Byron’s, were ambivalent and fluctuated wildly over the years.’1 Even back in Bonn it is likely that Beethoven was planning a piece of music inspired by the idea of Napoleon, although not necessarily in any obvious programmatic sense. As we know, it was Bonaparte’s embodiment as the agent of liberating change that attracted him as it attracted thousands of others: the idea of Europe’s peoples at last being freed of servitude to kings and princes, bishops and priests. This, to Beethoven, would have been the true spirit of the times, and Napoleon happened to be its incarnation. It is easy today to underestimate the effect on some of Europe’s greatest minds of what swiftly became thought of as Bonapartism: an idea that had grown out of the Enlightenment to occupy an imaginative space somewhere between ideology and hero worship. In a modern sense Napoleon had gone beyond mere celebrity to achieve stardom, and intellectuals and writers including Kant, Hegel, Schiller and Goethe were ardent fans.