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.

This chapter examines queer digital culture, a term that refers to the ways in which LGBTQ+ identities, practices, and theories have been mixed up in the emergence, design, and constitution of digital technology. It highlights significant shifts at the intersections of queer identity and politics and digital communication technologies from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century, including transitions from textual to audiovisual media; from subcultural to mainstream politics; from utopian political aspirations (Afrofuturism; cyberfeminism; cyberqueer) to commercialization; and from identity play and performance to consumer authentication. It concludes by drawing out the contradictory dimensions of queer digital culture which both exacerbate forms of oppression and offer liberatory trajectories. Alongside the rise of new forms of heteroactivism, commodified identities, and ubiquitous but unequal digital access, LGBTQ+ digital media continues to offer the promise of solidarity and intervention in relation to social justice.

This synesthetic chapter enacts listens for queer poetics in theory, queer theory in poetics. Divers semantic, physical, and spatial positions swerve on formal constraint, and in the swerves, skrrts, and twerks that streak verses, piss, ideas, and tire tracks across this chapter, a sense of the range of queer desire emerges. Written with a viscerally formal, Caribbean, Latinx, Diasporic Black Poetics imaginary, this chapter waters the unruly growths of (indigenous, black, and insurgent) geographic and grammatical grounds.

The Under the Radar festival is the result of the politics of a time and place that were reset by 9/11. That is when the USA finally learned that it is not invulnerable at home and that its alliances in art, culture, science, and industry are fundamental to its well-being. Situated at Astor Place, a neighbourhood at the crossroad between New York’s East and West Village, Under the Radar is part of a long history of a place that maps part of the story of American immigration, architecture, urban decay and renewal, the economy, and theatre. The festival pivoted away from American exceptionalism towards the interdependence of the neo-liberal economy by accentuating transnationalism in the context of globalization. Greenwich Village’s intellectual and artistic vibrancy has a history of being in conversation with ideas and experimentation originating in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Under the Radar draws upon and adds to this legacy of place through its presentation of work from all over the world. Diversity at Under the Radar signifies ‘this is us’, not in the sense of either multiculturalism or sameness, but of an inquiry of ideas that shapes our shared human destiny.

This chapter uses Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2009 performance piece “The River” to provide an overview of queer disability studies in the United States. As with many cultural workers writing about disability from queer perspectives, Piepzna-Samarasinha complicates concepts of pride and identity; explores the effects of diagnostic categories; and yearns for queer crip futures. Sexuality plays a significant role in her piece, but Piepzna-Samarasinha avoids a straightforward narrative of liberation; pain, precarity, and debility co-exist here with pleasure. In order to situate Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work within a larger context of disability justice and queer disability studies, the chapter supplements her narratives with those of other contemporary theorists, artists, and activists. With an emphasis on the questions that queer disability studies poses for the study of literature and other cultural forms, the chapter attends to both the resonances and the friction between queer studies and disability studies.

International theatre festivals are now a dominant phenomenon and have significantly influenced global theatre production since the 1980s. Against the backdrop of post-colonial criticism over the last three decades, the initial post-Second World War function of festivals to represent various national, mostly European cultures has gradually shifted towards festivals as co-producers of international work. Therefore, festivals appear as influential players in professional networks to establish and circulate aesthetic approaches in contemporary theatre practice. Due to the lack of sources on international festivals in archives and theatre collections, the chapter examines the possibilities and challenges of documenting these new modes of production and mobility in theatre archives. Focusing on to the complex professional network around the Philippines-based choreographer and performance artists Eisa Jocson and the role of Zürcher Theater Spektakel within this network, the chapter argues that digital media and data online for international co-production reveals the complex structures of professional networks and should be considered in research on international theatre festivals in a digital age.