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WHO WAS THE REAL HERO OF THE ‘EROICA’?
In the first three decades of the nineteenth century there were three men who fitted the near-mythological status of Romantic hero. They were Napoleon, Beethoven and Byron: flawed and lonely geniuses who were seen as having lived heroic lives and made heroic deaths still with their ideals intact. The little Corsican’s myth continued to dominate Europe even after he was exiled to St Helena following Waterloo in 1815. The ‘Napoleonic’ character clearly transcended the man and his career. Similarly, the ‘Byronic’ myth transcended Byron, his brilliant and prodigious output as a writer, his scandalous love affairs, and the political adventuring that in 1824 led to his death at the age of thirty-six while fighting for Greece against the Ottoman Empire.
As for Beethoven, the academic John Clubbe notes, ‘At first glance it might appear that [he] admired the republican Napoleon, inheritor of the French Revolution, and despised the royal Napoleon, emperor and despot. But in fact B’s feelings, like Byron’s, were ambivalent and fluctuated wildly over the years.’1 Even back in Bonn it is likely that Beethoven was planning a piece of music inspired by the idea of Napoleon, although not necessarily in any obvious programmatic sense. As we know, it was Bonaparte’s embodiment as the agent of liberating change that attracted him as it attracted thousands of others: the idea of Europe’s peoples at last being freed of servitude to kings and princes, bishops and priests. This, to Beethoven, would have been the true spirit of the times, and Napoleon happened to be its incarnation. It is easy today to underestimate the effect on some of Europe’s greatest minds of what swiftly became thought of as Bonapartism: an idea that had grown out of the Enlightenment to occupy an imaginative space somewhere between ideology and hero worship. In a modern sense Napoleon had gone beyond mere celebrity to achieve stardom, and intellectuals and writers including Kant, Hegel, Schiller and Goethe were ardent fans.
All the same, it is too simple to take at face value Beethoven’s intention to dedicate his Third Symphony to Bonaparte, as it overlooks the muddle of complex and even conflicting motives that lay behind it. A century and a half of programme notes has led audiences to search the music for expressions of various portentous abstract nouns such as Triumph, Will, Humanity, Freedom and even Revolutionary Fervour, dating back to the fateful events in Paris of 1789. Humanity in particular was a quality many intellectual children of the Enlightenment loosely associated with Bonapartism, in ironic disregard of the Terror and the subsequent battlefield slaughters that actually made Napoleon’s name. It supposedly betokened sacrifice, service and social loyalty towards a mankind whose most abject guttersnipe was theoretically of equal value to a prince. Wordsworth, who as a young man initially fell beneath the Bonapartist spell, famously wrote of the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ in his 1798 poem on Tintern Abbey. (Cynics will note how very much easier it is to shed a tear over Humanity in the abstract than it can be to sustain devotion to an individual through thick and thin.) Yet such grand nouns are often hard for a modern audience to associate with a particular work of art, whether a poem such as The Prelude or a symphony such as the ‘Eroica’, even though Beethoven himself frequently thought in such terms. It is perfectly reasonable to hear the ‘Eroica’ simply as an extraordinary aesthetic achievement whose true revolutionary nature was entirely musical. Yet understanding some of its Bonapartist antecedents adds much interest.
None knew better than the composer himself just how ground-breaking his new symphony was, and he realized it ought to be performed in Vienna before he took it with him to France as he was still planning. Given the length of its first movement, in particular, he needed to reassure himself that his intuition about matters of timing and balance was correct. A trial run was essential, and Prince Lobkowitz’s excellent private orchestra would be ideal for the purpose. On 22 October 1803 Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries wrote once more to the publisher Nikolaus Simrock saying that Beethoven very much wanted to dedicate the symphony to Bonaparte. However, Lobkowitz had already offered the composer 400 ducats for the symphony’s rights for half a year: a munificent offer that Beethoven could not afford to turn down. The snag was that the prince was a deeply patriotic Austrian and in the circumstances it would have been fatal for Beethoven to stick to his original plan of making Napoleon its dedicatee with the Corsican’s name prominent on the title page.
Beethoven was quite capable of making pragmatic business decisions, which is why he judiciously dedicated the ‘Eroica’ to Prince Lobkowitz while retaining its general title of ‘Bonaparte’. Between the work’s completion in the late summer of 1803 and the score’s publication in October 1806 Austria’s Francophobia was further intensified by external political events such as the series of crushing defeats the Austrian army suffered in 1806 that led to Napoleon himself taking up residence in Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace in November that year after Francis II and his court had fled. By then, too, Beethoven’s original Bonapartist leanings had evaporated, particularly after the news reached Vienna in May 1804 that France’s self-appointed first consul had now declared himself emperor. Ferdinand Ries recorded this celebrated incident:
In this symphony Beethoven had Bonaparte in mind, but as he was when he was First Consul. Beethoven esteemed him greatly at the time and likened him to the greatest Roman consuls. I as well as several of his more intimate friends saw a copy of the score lying upon his table with the word ‘Buonaparte’ at the extreme top of the title page, and at the extreme bottom ‘Luigi van Beethoven’, but not another word. Whether and with what the space between was to be filled out, I do not know. I was the first to bring him the intelligence that Buonaparte had proclaimed himself emperor, whereupon he flew into a rage and cried out: ‘Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!’ Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the title page by the top, tore it in two, and threw it on the floor. The page was rewritten and only then did the symphony receive the title Sinfonia eroica.2
No doubt at this moment the disillusioned Beethoven would have agreed with his contemporary, William Blake, that
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar’s laurel crown
as he would with Blake’s ‘I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create.’
Barely a month after this outburst the first, semi-public trial run of the symphony by Lobkowitz’s palace orchestra took place at an overlong ‘Academy’ with a programme of other challenging Beethoven works and after gruelling all-day rehearsals. Opinions were mixed, but on balance they were favourable even if, as the audience staggered out punch drunk into the warm Viennese night, a good many probably felt they would rather like not to hear another note of new music for quite some time. Two months later, in August, Beethoven told the publisher Härtel that the symphony’s actual title was ‘Bonaparte’. Did this mean his fit of rage in May over the self-proclaimed new emperor had been no more than a typically Beethovenish fury of the moment, or was it part of an increasingly ambivalent attitude towards Napoleon that was shared by many others?
We know that by the time Beethoven was at work on the symphony in Oberdöbling in the early summer of 1803, his adolescent enthusiasm for the French Revolution had considerably ebbed.* Nor was he alone in his pessimism. Those early years of the nineteenth century witnessed a painful reassessment of Napoleon and post-revolutionary France by many in Europe and particularly by German-speaking intellectuals. The Enlightenment had been enormously influential, and in terms of its complex interleaving of meaning and ideas, Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ can be viewed as having something in common with certain German non-musical works of the time, such as Goethe’s Faust, Jean Paul’s proto-Romantic novels (that were to so entrance Schumann as a youth), Hegel’s philosophy (the section entitled ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ in The Phenomenology of Mind) and even Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. But in the face of Bonaparte’s military conquests, pragmatic deals and his army’s increasing threat to German-speaking territory, much of the Germans’ former idealism had vanished to be replaced by an upsurge in nationalism. By 1805 Beethoven, in common with many intellectuals (including Jean Paul, Hegel and Caspar David Friedrich), had become more of a German patriot and even somewhat Francophobic. By March 1806 when a revised version of Fidelio was successfully launched in Vienna, the opera was widely understood by audiences as having an anti-French message, with Florestan in his lowest dungeon representing a Germanic world in dire need of rescue by a faithful Leonora, whether or not cross-dressed as ‘Fidelio’.
With all this in mind, how are we to construe the wording of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony’s title page when it was finally published in October 1806? The Italian inscription ran Sinfonia eroica / composta per festiggiare il souvenir di un grand Uomo, and it is nearly always taken for granted that the ‘grand Uomo’ is Napoleon. Certainly the surviving and much amended title page of the original manuscript bears Beethoven’s own inscription in pencil: ‘geschrieben auf Bonaparte’, although this has its own ambiguity. The ‘auf’ could imply something done in someone’s name or in their honour, or it could just mean ‘on’ as in the title of an essay or a poem (Montaigne’s ‘On Solitude’ or Auden’s ‘On Sunday Walks’). Beethoven’s ‘On Napoleon’, then?
A fresh theory has emerged that proposes a quite different and plausible identity for the grand Uomo.3 After Napoleon’s resounding defeat of the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz in December 1805 the Prussian army came in for heavy criticism for having abandoned its allies to their fate. Those closest to the Prussian king, Frederick William III, pleaded with him to avenge Austerlitz. They argued that the Prussian army should confront the upstart Napoleon anywhere on German territory. Foremost among those putting this case was the young Prince Louis Ferdinand.