All the same, given what we already know about Beethoven’s associations of his Third Symphony with Bonaparte, Prometheus and heroism in general, certain liberties will inevitably have to be taken. Not only did the ‘Eroica’ break all previous symphonic moulds in its sheer size and complexity, it was also the nineteenth century’s first major avant-garde work: one that severely challenged both performers and its audiences. It might be useful to note some of the methods Beethoven used without ascribing too many motives, other than technical, to him.

I ALLEGRO CON BRIO

A resemblance to the theme that opens the ‘Eroica’ has long been spotted in the tune with which the twelve-year-old Mozart began the overture to his little opera Bastien et Bastienne (1768): the notes, rhythm and key are identical to Beethoven’s. Scholars have pondered whether Beethoven could have known Mozart’s boyhood work, the consensus being that it is possible but unlikely. In any case the notes in question simply make up a chord of E flat major, and firmly establishing the key at the outset was a conventional way of beginning a piece of music. A large part of Beethoven’s genius lay in his ability to take the notes of a striking phrase—even just a common chord—and somehow construct an entire movement from them. It was this trick of making distinctive fragments yield up their hidden possibilities that gave rise to the concept of the Leitmotiv, which later gained particular currency through Wagner’s use of it. As always, Beethoven was ahead of his time.

How he actually began the ‘Eroica’ immediately confirms how little this symphony was to be beholden to anything that had gone before. The single chord with which he had opened the Op. 35 piano variations has now become two brusque chords for full orchestra that stand like twin great pillars forming the work’s portal. This might seem to derive from a similar device Haydn sometimes used in his later works as a ‘call to attention’, but in Beethoven’s hands his grand portal immediately opens onto an E flat tonal landscape that the cellos promptly subvert with a rogue C sharp. It is a completely unexpected move and immediately leaves the hearer slightly off balance:

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It is a powerful device (and one that was to be exploited later by Liszt).* The exposition of this first movement continues the unsettled effect by introducing tunes that feel more unfinished than complete in themselves. By the time of the repeat at the double bar-lines (the two great introductory chords are not repeated) it becomes clear on how grand a scale the music is going to be. All these motifs and snatches of tune have to be allowed to expand, link up and make satisfying sense, and from the moment the movement is begun for the second time it is clear this will be a symphony like no other before it. In fact the first movement of the ‘Eroica’, including repeats, plays longer than many an entire little eighteenth-century symphony.

This is music that needs to be heard rather than analysed, for no matter how familiar it becomes, it miraculously retains a freshness as though one were always hearing it for the first time. This maybe has something to do with its sheer energy. It is an act of self-assertion that at times almost gives the impression that the composer is reaching out of the score to grasp the hearer’s lapels. And if this seems too fanciful, the sense of an utterly distinctive musical personality with something new and urgent to say is often overwhelming, not only in the orchestral climaxes but equally in the careful details that defy the listener to ignore them.

There is a famous instance of this at the moment of the recapitulation. After the development section has taken us on an often startling but weirdly logical tour of the landscape in which we have looked at the exposition’s fragments from a variety of different angles until they seem to construct an imposing skyline, we are about to return to the home key of E flat major and it is time for the main theme to be restated. It is a normal enough moment in the Classical form so familiar to eighteenth-century listeners, but Beethoven once again wittily destabilizes conventional expectations. The orchestration is reduced to the first and second violins holding a soft tremolo chord in the dominant against which a single horn states the opening theme in the tonic. In other words, even as the violins are playing the notes that most prepare the ear for a return to the symphony’s ‘home’ key of E flat major, the horn appears to jump the gun by being already there:

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To the ears of many of Beethoven’s listeners what sounded like an awful mistake is actually a moment of pure magic. It was this harmonic clash that led poor Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s young student and unpaid secretary, to make a gaffe at the rehearsal for the symphony’s first semi-public performance by Prince Lobkowitz’s private orchestra:

Ries was scarcely to be blamed, for Beethoven was throwing away the rule book of harmony and creating his own. It might be hard to believe today, but in the nineteenth century editors and conductors often took it upon themselves to ‘correct’ this passage in both print and performance.

The coda at the end of this monumental first movement also breaks both usage and rules. Audiences were used to the Classical composers’ little codettas at the end of a movement (such as the four bars that end the slow movement of Haydn’s B flat major String Quartet, Op. 55 No. 3, or the ten bars that round off the last movement of Mozart’s B flat major Piano Sonata, K. 333/315c). They would also have adapted to the more recent and imposing endings of certain symphonies. The 83 bars that end Haydn’s ‘London’ Symphony in D major (No. 104) of 1795 contain 8 extraordinary bars (293–300) whose widening leaps for the strings vividly show how very indebted Beethoven was to his old teacher. Not only does he write some almost identical string passages in this first movement of the ‘Eroica’, but he has learned the possibilities a coda could be made to offer. Listeners would have been stunned by Beethoven’s 140 bars of magnificent originality that end this first movement. Far from acting as a decorous and allusive full stop, his coda is practically a movement on its own, beginning with another of his coups that were to be notorious before they became famous. This was to restate the main theme in three abrupt downward steps in the successive keys of E flat, D flat and C without any modulations in between to soften the harshness. And once again, heard against the background of what has gone before and heretical as it is in terms of contemporary musical orthodoxy, the device simply sounds right.