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INTRODUCTION AND GLOSSARY

For all the fame of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the ‘Eroica’, each new generation of concertgoers and music-lovers can probably benefit from being reminded of quite what a ground-breaking work it was when first performed in 1805. At that time its immediate claim to notoriety was that it appeared to have rudely broken the mould of the Viennese Classical symphony at a stroke, and in some ways it had. However, it was not merely a musical form that it changed for good. The ‘Eroica’ also revealed a new and powerful expressiveness of both a personal and a societal kind. Private importuning with appeals to the emotions was to become the staple of the Romantics with whom Beethoven overlapped. But the more public kind of button-holing achieved by the ‘Eroica’ and its successors (particularly the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies) seemed to carry an earnest message that was easy to associate with numinous—not to say grandiose—concepts such as Will and Triumph and even the Brotherhood of Man. This was something quite new.

Beethoven himself made explicit the connection between the ‘Eroica’ and Napoleon Bonaparte, and the symphony does indeed have revolutionary overtones of various kinds. Yet today this seems less important than the effect it has had in the past two centuries on the whole course of Western music. ‘Just as France has its Revolution, so Germany has its Beethoven symphonies’: thus Robert Schumann declared in 1839. To Beethoven’s symphonies we can directly attribute the modern orchestra and its conductor, the modern concert hall and the modern concert programme, of which they are still a core element (one that is much resented in some quarters). How this came about is worth a closer look.

First, though, it might be useful to put Beethoven’s music and the style he inherited into historical context. No matter how original a musician he was, he still faced the same basic problem that any composer of abstract music faced and still faces: how is he or she to keep it going? This is obviously less difficult for music that is ‘narrative’ in the sense of setting a text, accompanying a film, or representing in sound scenes such as battles or pastoral landscapes. But in the absence of such external ways of driving music forward it all becomes more problematical. For instance, it is well and good to start with a great tune, but there is a limit to how often it can just be repeated. It has to go somewhere. The question remains: where next, and why there? One solution discovered centuries ago was to take the tune and write variations on it, as Beethoven did in the last movement of the ‘Eroica’.