In view of events that suggested French influence in Europe could only increase in the foreseeable future, Beethoven evidently calculated that it would make sense to take advantage of Paris as the likely future centre of European culture. After all, his music was already known to Parisian music-lovers, and printed editions were available in music shops there. His First Symphony had been performed there and probably the Second as well. Both had been found agreeable and interestingly different without being too aggressively ‘modern’. However, Beethoven was probably over-estimating French receptivity to his orchestral music, since the ‘Eroica’ was not to be performed in Paris until 1825, some twenty-two years after it was composed, when it was compared to the two earlier symphonies and not to its advantage.

For some years now Beethoven had evidently been thinking seriously about writing something inspired by—if not actually a tribute to—Napoleon. In 1802 he had begun sketches for a symphony but had laid them aside in order to finish other work. By early 1803 Beethoven had decided to take two big new works with him to France to act as calling cards: an opera and a symphony. He was already at work on the opera; the symphony would be the ‘Eroica’. By the end of that summer the ‘Eroica’ was finished and in another letter to Simrock on 22 October Ries wrote that Beethoven had recently played it through on the piano for him and very much wanted to dedicate it to Bonaparte. Since then he had turned his attention to other things, including the opera, which, Ries said, was a setting in German of the French librettist Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s Léonore, ou l’amour conjugale: a ‘rescue opera’ whose plot had already been used by other composers.

The ‘rescue opera’ was a genre pioneered by Cherubini’s Lodoïska, which had been first performed to wild acclaim in Paris back in July 1791. This type of story, full of evil tyrants holding in servitude and chains innocents who were eventually freed in a grand climax, had become very popular in revolutionary France, combining as it did patriotism, idealism and an urge to sweep away the old regime. The idea of the triumph of freedom and justice undoubtedly appealed to Beethoven, who calculated that the genre’s popularity would ensure his own opera’s success. After all, Bouilly had also written the libretto of Cherubini’s Les Deux Journées, which had taken Vienna by storm a couple of years earlier. Ries reckoned his teacher would probably need eighteen months to finish the opera and so was hopeful of being able to accompany Beethoven to Paris late the following year or in early 1805. In fact the opera (initially called Léonore but soon renamed Fidelio) was finished by early 1804, having given Beethoven a good deal of trouble, and had already been bought by the Theater an der Wien. By this time the opera’s theme was interpreted as less subversive of the Habsburg Empire than supportive of pan-Germanism faced with the Napoleonic threat.

Considering that Beethoven had thought about defecting to Paris even before composing the ‘Eroica’ in the summer of 1803 and given also his known earlier republican sympathies with revolutionary France and its figurehead, Napoleon Bonaparte, how is one to assess the French influence on the symphony? There is reason to suspect Beethoven had considerably revised the revolutionary enthusiasms he had nurtured in his twenties, and he had probably already put his plans to move to Paris on hold on account of musical commitments in Vienna and the now serious deafness that was causing him much misery. At any rate it was surely significant that a full year earlier in the spring of 1802 he had written a decisive letter to one of his publishers, the composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister, who had recently moved to Vienna and had already published the ‘Pathétique’ Piano Sonata.

Evidently Hoffmeister and others had suggested he write some kind of revolutionary or Bonapartist sonata. Only the year before, Austria’s Francis II, who was also the Holy Roman Emperor, had signed the Treaty of Lunéville with France following the defeat at Marengo, when the Austrian Empire had been obliged to make a series of humiliating territorial concessions. Hoffmeister’s suggestion was presumably meant to cash in on the Austrians’ abiding—if nervous—interest in Napoleon’s future intentions. Beethoven was having none of it.

Vienna, 8 April 1802

May the devil ride the whole lot of you, gentlemen—what, suggest I should write a sonata of that sort? At the time of the revolutionary fever—well, then it might have been worth a thought. But now that everything is trying to get back into the old rut and Bonaparte has made his concordat with the Pope—a sonata of that sort?… at the beginning of this new Christian era? Ha ha! Count me out, for nothing will come of it.

The satirical religious reference was to the Concordat Napoleon had agreed with the Pope, Pius VII, in July 1801, which undertook to reverse the French revolutionary decree that Church and State should be separate entities. Although by 1809 Beethoven had long since abandoned his plans to go abroad, Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, was to offer Beethoven the job of Kapellmeister in Westphalia. Beethoven didn’t consider this seriously for a moment, but he did use the offer craftily to strengthen his bid for an annuity when dealing with his patrons. He finally got what he wanted from Archduke Rudolph, Prince Lobkowitz and Prince Kinsky when they offered him an annuity for life provided he promised to stay in Vienna. He promised; and by then thankfully.

But back in April 1802 and in the light of his early sketches for a Bonaparte symphony only a couple of months later, it seems his intentions were musically grander as well as less focused on the immediate political situation. It is likely that the figure of ‘Bonaparte’, as processed by Beethoven’s imagination, was based on the man he had once seen as spreading the egalitarian and secular ideal of the French Revolution throughout Europe and even the world. The Corsican who now did deals with the Vatican to reinstate the Church’s stifling hegemony was no longer Beethoven’s Bonaparte. The French army had long been in possession of his beloved birthplace, Bonn, together with the previously German left bank of the Rhine, and was threatening Vienna and the Habsburg Empire. So whose side was he on now? Beethoven was by no means alone in facing this quandary: it was shared by half Europe’s intellectuals. (The subject will be explored in Chapter 7, which deals with the question of the dedication of the ‘Eroica’.) And any theory of Napoleon’s exact significance to Beethoven at the time he was writing his ground-breaking symphony is further muddied by the conflation in his mind of the French conqueror with another hero, this one mythical: Prometheus.