Contracts characteristically involve agreements, and contract law is – both conventionally and properly – understood as the law of agreements.

Eroica endures. This fact, discussed at some length in the final chapter of this book, was brought home strongly to me as I edited this volume. Escaping briefly from Eroica, or so I thought, after a day of proofreading, I turned to YouTube. Using a Google search with keyword ‘Agatha Christie’, I chanced upon a 1984 TV drama, Second Sight – A Love Story, starring Elizabeth Montgomery. The similarities to Beethoven’s biography can be seen in the main character’s stubborn and somewhat difficult temperament, and the painful irony that the sense that she most prizes and needs (sight) should be taken away from her. With hindsight – and with the help of this book’s chapters on reception – it was clear that the choice of the Eroica finale for this movie’s opening credits (fading in at bar 449) is overdetermined.

Chamber arrangements of Beethoven’s large-scale works ‘especially his symphonies’ were so prevalent in the nineteenth century that to ignore them is to miss an essential part of the reception or ‘life history’ of the works in question. The depth and dissemination of the arrangements of Beethoven’s works show that these arrangements, rather than the original versions, were an essential means by which Beethoven’s music took effect. In an era when concert performances were still relatively few, an arrangement was often the first instantiation of a Beethoven orchestral work that one would hear. This chapter explores these arrangements as nineteenth-century reception documents, looking at what they tell us not only about Beethoven, but also about the arrangers themselves and the processes of canon formation at the time. The chapter then considers the apparently new ways in which meanings are constructed for the symphony, through performance, and how these relate to Eroica myths and legends born in Beethoven’s day. It discusses ways in which the work has been performed, represented visually, and marketed in the twenty and twenty-first centuries, including the 2003 BBC production, Eroica.

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.