Louis Ferdinand was a quite exceptional character. A nephew of Frederick the Great, he was a hopeless spendthrift and an authentic military hero in his own right, having already fought the French in several engagements and won widespread acclaim for his fearless leadership on the battlefield. At the same time he was also a first-rate musician and virtuoso pianist who had studied under Jan Ladislav Dussek. Beethoven had first met him on a visit to Berlin in 1796. The two had become friends, and Beethoven, the prince’s elder by two years and probably at the peak of his own brilliance as a pianist, reckoned Louis Ferdinand a better pianist even than Hummel: by implication second only to himself. The prince was also a composer of considerable originality and Beethoven evidently felt he had found a kindred spirit.

Quite how original a musician Louis Ferdinand was can best be gauged by the way his music would be championed by a later generation. Perhaps the composition that made the biggest impact was his Piano Quartet in F minor, Op. 6 (1806), his last work. Schumann’s diaries reveal an abiding interest in both the prince, whose music he studied in depth, and this piece. He wrote a set of piano variations for four hands on a theme from the quartet, now unfortunately lost. Schumann was also inspired by Louis Ferdinand’s exploration of unusual combinations of instruments such as in his Notturno, Op. 8, for piano, flute, violin, cello and two French horns. Clara Wieck, Schumann’s pianist wife, took part in a performance of the F minor Piano Quartet at which Mendelssohn was present and all agreed that Louis Ferdinand had been a composer before his time, a true proto-Romantic. The markings on the score of this piece were far more numerous and expressive than was customary at the turn of the nineteenth century: con anima, dolcissimo, smorzando, con passione, con molta forca [sic], con duolo: very much the sort of indications that were to become fashionable only later. Nor was it until the Romantic era that composers felt free to end their pieces on a hushed note. The prince had no qualms about letting the music of his piano quartet, already very dark and turbulent, die away (morendo) in shadows, ending with two soft pizzicato chords for strings alone. Not for him an upbeat Classical ending. Like Schumann, the arch-Romantic Franz Liszt was also deeply impressed by this piano quartet and in 1847 wrote an Elégie sur des motifs du Prince Ferdinand de Prusse.

But such accolades and homage lay far in the future. In 1804, while en route to Italy, Prince Louis Ferdinand stayed with Beethoven’s patron Prince Lobkowitz at his castle in Raudnitz (today’s Roudnice) north of Prague. Louis Ferdinand must have asked what Beethoven had been writing lately, and as the proud dedicatee of the ‘Eroica’ Lobkowitz had his orchestra play the new symphony. By now the players knew the music well, having already given its first performances. At the end Louis Ferdinand excitedly asked to hear the ‘Eroica’ a second time, and Lobkowitz happily obliged. When that was over the young prince wanted to hear it yet again. Lobkowitz insisted his orchestra should be given a rest and dinner before the tired players embarked on a third consecutive performance of the entire symphony, which they duly gave. It is unclear whether Beethoven was also present on this occasion but it seems likely that he was. Whatever else, the episode was eloquent testimony to Louis Ferdinand’s seriousness both as a musician and an admirer of Beethoven. What is certain is that both men renewed their friendship at this time and at least on one occasion the prince wined and dined Beethoven on terms of absolute equality, seated next to him at table (in those days an unthinkable solecism for a scruffy commoner like Beethoven). That his Third Piano Concerto had been dedicated to Louis Ferdinand is surely a mark of Beethoven’s esteem for this sensitive and accomplished prince.

Meanwhile, Napoleon Bonaparte was once again making himself impossible to ignore in Austria, and on 19 October 1805 the Austrian general Karl Mack lost his entire army to Napoleon at Ulm, after which nothing stood in the way of the French advance into central Europe. French troops captured Vienna in November 1805 and a month later achieved a crushing defeat of the forces of the Holy Roman Empire at the Battle of Austerlitz. Under acute pressure the following August Francis II dissolved the Holy Roman Empire and abdicated. That same month in 1806 Beethoven was staying with his friend and patron Prince Lichnowsky at his family’s castle at Grätz, 150 miles from Vienna in today’s Czech Republic. One night the prince asked him to play the piano for some visiting French officers and Beethoven truculently refused, saying that he wasn’t a servant to obey orders. Whether this was because the officers were French or it was just another flare-up in his often stormy relationship with Lichnowsky is not clear, but it escalated into a shouting match and allegedly a Count Oppersdorff only just managed to prevent Beethoven breaking a chair over his princely patron’s head. Beethoven left the castle in a fury there and then, arriving back ill in Vienna after a miserable three-day journey in carts and coaches, during which he and his trunk were soaked in a rainstorm, the water damage still clearly visible on the manuscript of the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata he was carrying with him.

The significance of this episode in the autumn of 1806 is that it was most likely at Grätz that Beethoven learned that his friend and fellow musician Prince Louis Ferdinand had been killed a few days earlier on 10 October at the Battle of Saalfeld, a preliminary skirmish before yet another crushing French victory at nearby Jena. On the last evening of his life the prince had performed his friend Dussek’s Double Piano Concerto, Op. 63. On the battlefield next day he spurned a French soldier’s offer of surrender and was duly run through. He was thirty-four. On 29 October in an article of deep mourning the Wiener Zeitung announced a forthcoming tribute edition of practically all the prince’s music. In the same issue the newspaper also gave notice of the first publication of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony and included the wording of Beethoven’s final Italian inscription on the title page. By then Beethoven was back in Vienna, no doubt still furious with Lichnowsky and the French and grieving for his heroic and talented friend. He could judge better than anyone the loss to music. The theory advanced by the German musicologist Peter Schleuning is that the ‘grand Uomo’ of his symphony’s new inscription is not Bonaparte at all but the gifted musician and dashing warrior slain by Napoleon’s troops, thus turning the ‘Eroica’ into a musical expression of German patriotism.⁴ If so, Beethoven could never have made this public. It would have compromised the symphony’s existing dedication to Prince Lobkowitz by implying that it honoured a greater man than the patron who had loyally stood by Beethoven with financial support. And revealing the great man to have been a Prussian prince rather than Napoleon could ruin the chances of the symphony ever selling in French-dominated Europe.

Whatever the truth, it is clear that Beethoven’s feelings about Napoleon were as mixed as everybody else’s and, like theirs, could border on the obsessive. However, when it comes to appreciating the ‘Eroica’, it is probably best not to attach too much importance to the connection with Bonaparte and certainly not to imagine the French emperor’s shadowy figure looming behind the score in his white waistcoat and braided coat and bicorne hat. It was still unclear what Beethoven really felt when he learned of his erstwhile hero’s death on St Helena in May 1821. Asked whether he might perhaps write some sort of requiem for him, Beethoven merely replied, ‘I have already composed the proper music for that catastrophe.’⁵ Presumably this referred to the Funeral March of the ‘Eroica’, but it might equally well have meant the entire symphony or, indeed, his own life’s work. In 1824 he remarked to his ex-pupil and friend Carl Czerny, ‘Once upon a time I couldn’t bear Napoleon. Now I think quite differently.’

              

* See Chapter 3.