Historically informed analysis reveals a very different conception of hero in the Eroica than the one sustained in the popular imagination and perpetuated by the majority of its reception history: a militaristic or Napoleonic Heldenleben. By combining analytic perspectives from schema theory and topic theory with key passages from Beethoven’s epistolary life and Tagebuch, this chapter illustrates that the Eroica’s narrative is akin to religious drama, conveying the same theme of abnegation found in the contemporary oratorio Christus am Ölberge and the Heiligenstadt Testament, the Eroica’s ‘literary prototype’. Unlike some middle-period works which communicate a ‘tragic-to-triumphant’ expressive genre, the Eroica is cast in the ‘tragic-to-transcendent’ type, which became characteristic of Beethoven’s late style. A central component of this spiritual genre is the strategic positioning of structural and semantic oppositions in an unresolved state of suspension. The Eroica manifests this most overtly through a governing opposition between death ‘ombra’ and pastoral ‘Ländler, contredanse’ music, and the association of this stylistic opposition with the tonalities of G minor and E flat major, respectively. Rather than a programmatic narrative about a hero who overcomes, the Eroica is a conceptually ‘late’ work that meditates on suffering as a spiritual necessity and its implications for transcendence.

This chapter explores register in the outer movements of the Eroica Symphony. Engaging closely with Schenker’s 1930 analysis, in which the two-line register is understood as the obligate Lage ‘obligatory register’ while the three-line octave is treated as essentially decorative or reinforcing, it argues to the contrary, asserting the structural significance of the latter. By paying particular attention to Beethoven’s scoring for the flute, it develops a narrative of registral ‘failure’ in the finale that is in stark contrast to the standard ‘heroic’ readings of this work.

For the first one hundred and fifty year of its existence, the Eroica was a mirror of shifting political aspirations and fears. It framed the hopes of the century as well as its disappointments. This chapter discusses the views of Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz, as well as the opinions of Felix Weingartner and Anton von Webern. Brahms’s connection to the symphony is examined in the context of ideologies of cultural decline at the turn of the century, and the public perception of the Eroica is looked at by examining the analyses of the symphony as presented and popularised in several guidebooks to the symphonic repertoire. Throughout the chapter the connection to Napoleon and the ideals of heroism in politics and the arts functions as a recurring theme.

This chapter provides cultural context for Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, by discussing other pertinent expressions of heroism in Western culture. While these include the deeds of real-life figures such as Napoleon, the primary focus here is on literary heroes found in the epics of Homer ‘as translated in Beethoven’s time by Heinrich Voss’ and in prominent German dramas by Goethe and Schiller that date from their Sturm und Drang and Klassik periods. The underlying nature and overt actions of literary heroes such as Hector, Götz von Berlichingen, Karl Moor, the Marquis von Posa and Egmont influenced Beethoven in the articulation of his own code of values ‘evidenced by quotations in Beethoven’s letters and diary’, while the ways that Goethe and Schiller dramatised their poetic language may well have influenced the formation of the highly dramatic musical language of Beethoven’s heroic style. Varieties of heroism discussed in the chapter include the necessity of rebellion in the face of tyranny, the overriding importance of free thought and freedom in general, the rise of the autonomous individual and the triumph of free will in overcoming adversity and even overcoming one’s own self, culminating in the moral commitment to sacrifice oneself for a higher ideal.

The Eroica finale is its most contested movement. It is at once Beethoven’s earliest unique structure, departing from any known formal precedent, and the only piece he based on his own earlier compositions. The theme comes from his ‘heroic-allegorical’ or ‘allegorical-historical’ ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43, first performed in March 1801. The following year he wrote the Variations for piano in E♭ major, Op. 35, on that theme, and sought to have the title page identify the theme’s source as his ‘allegorical ballet Prometheus’.1 And, as Lewis Lockwood has shown, immediately upon completion of the variations Beethoven sketched out a movement-plan for a symphony in E♭ major, the projected finale of which is inferably to be based on Op. 35.2 It seems to have been the theme and its variations, then, that formed part of the ‘invariant concept’ of the symphony, in Lockwood’s words.3 What was it about this theme that drew Beethoven to compose with it after its invention was complete, to start to elaborate it anew, and in such different genres?4 This chapter seeks to explore the traces of these earlier works in the Eroica and to consider which of them Beethoven found essential to his symphonic conception. In particular, it will bring together his letters concerned with the counting of variations in Op. 35 and a sketch page suggesting that the theme of the Eroica finale will be ‘varied and deduced’, which have not yet made an impression on analytical understandings of the movement. Ultimately, these material traces will be used to illuminate the intersection between variation form and symphonic discourse.

The early reception of Beethoven’s Eroica proves to be a complex phenomenon. The new audiences that emerged around 1800 were interested in understanding music both through listening and through reading about it in new journals devoted to music. Beethoven’s music was considered very difficult, but worth the challenge. The dominant image of Beethoven and the status of the symphony both played an important role in the Eroica’s early reception. From the nineteenth century onwards there has been a strong desire to understand Beethoven’s music by relating it to biography. In the case of the Eroica Symphony there has been a focus on the title, and on the unnamed great man or hero, as well as on the interpretation of the Marcia funebre. Authors such as Hector Berlioz, Ferdinand Ries, Anton Schindler and Carl Maria von Weber contributed to interpretations that ranged from relating the symphony to the ancient world to the attempt to establish a programme related to Napoleon, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Admiral Horatio Nelson or General Ralph Abercromby. So the Eroica has been understood variously as a political statement. Others commentators, such as Richard Wagner, saw Beethoven himself is the hero of this symphony.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, Beethoven’s Third Symphony is programmed regularly by the world’s leading orchestras and remains popular with audiences. In contemporary mainstream classical musical culture, the Eroica continues to be the pre-eminent musical emblem of heroism and revolution. In visual media, the Eroica retains classical music’s conventional generic meaning of wealth and superior status, but it is also deployed in film, television and video game soundtracks to track markedly intelligent heroes and culturally sophisticated revolutionaries. As new critical theories engage with the symphony’s traditional interpretations, alternative readings of the Eroica are emerging in musical scholarship alongside the heroic/revolutionary trope. The pastoral, politics and freedom figure prominently in several recent close readings, while the Eroica is fast becoming a pivotal musical work in disability studies. As a central example in both heroic narratives of overcoming and human narratives of adaptation, the Eroica endures.

Evidence of work clearly connected to the composition of the Eroica is traceable from 1802 onwards. This consist of letters, sketches and other materials in the composer’s hand but also by copyists and collaborators, who worked with him. Although some fundamental documents ‘such as the autograph score’ are now lost, these materials make it possible to reconstruct in detail many aspects of the genesis of the symphony. This chapter seeks to reconstruct the different stages in the genesis of the Eroica, on the basis of a well-established research tradition ‘represented by scholar such as Gustav Nottebohm, Alan Tyson, Otto Biba, Michael C. Tusa, Bathia Churgin and Lewis Lockwood’. It focuses on general aspects of Beethoven’s creative process and draw attention to the variety of possible methodological approaches developed by musicologists during nearly two centuries of research on the subject.

Critics have often described Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony as a ‘watershed’ work, not only within his career and oeuvre, but also within the histories of music, art and ideas. However, the concept of the ‘watershed’ work needs to be understood both as an aesthetic construct and as a literary device that helps to shape a narrative of triumph over adversity. Investigating this concept means disentangling the Eroica from the many stories that have been told about it since Beethoven’s death. While modern critics have made compelling claims about the Eroica’s departures from generic and stylistic norms, for instance, these claims are complicated by close engagement with the music of Beethoven’s predecessors. Carl Friedrich Michaelis’s 1805 interpretation of the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven as ‘heroic epics’ ‘Heldengedichte’ offers further evidence that the Eroica reaffirmed and reimagined ‘rather than overturned’ an existing aesthetic paradigm. The Beethoven myth has strongly shaped the way the Eroica has been understood, so that beginning in the 1830s, the symphony’s extraordinary reputation has been closely bound up with the periodisation of Beethoven’s life and works. Recent scholarship on Beethoven’s ‘middle’ or ‘heroic’ period opens up alternate ways of thinking about the Eroica’s ‘watershed’ status.

Throughout the twentieth century, the Eroica Symphony – especially its opening Allegro con brio – attracted considerable interest from music scholars, especially theorists and analysts. This chapter surveys attempts to understand the movement as an organic whole, but it also explores several specific issues that were regularly aired during that period: ‘1’ the location of a ‘second subject’ within the exposition; ‘2’ the so-called ‘new theme’ in the development and its possible relationship to earlier themes; ‘3’ the horn player’s purportedly mis-timed entry at the end of the development, and its consequences for the start of the recapitulation; ‘4’ the status of the unusually long final section of the movement ‘is it simply an extended coda, or does it embrace a secondary development section?’; and ‘5’ the possible thematic significance of the two introductory chords.

Viennese courtly Kapellen were in decline by the time Beethoven began his career as a symphonist, with the result that one of the most important contexts for eighteenth-century symphonies was no longer available to the young generation of composers. This decline, along with various other developments in Viennese musical life during Beethoven’s lifetime, led to a reconfiguration of the symphony’s role. Public, rather than private concerts became the main platform for symphonic performance in Vienna and abroad by 1800. The organisation of Vienna’s concert life meant that symphonies were increasingly conceived as grand, individualistic works, rather than routine household entertainment music. Furthermore, select members of the Viennese aristocracy, including some of Beethoven’s supporters, continued to cultivate symphonies, with the result that Beethoven was better placed than some of his contemporaries for securing the performance and subsequent publication of symphonies. This chapter contextualises Beethoven’s first three symphonies within the broader culture of symphonic composition and performance at the turn of the nineteenth century.