By now Beethoven’s attention was increasingly focused on giving his music motivic ideas that he could develop in various ways and make to bear cumulative significance. In orchestral music this could be achieved by assigning the motifs to different combinations of instruments at their various appearances, thereby casting them in new light, and by expanding them or otherwise altering them to release unsuspected potential. It was a method that, if handled skilfully, could give the music an overall sense of unity that the ear understood without knowing quite how. In this way individual ideas could be ‘composed out’ during the course of a movement or even over an entire symphony. It was this radical form of music that Beethoven perfected at a stroke in the ‘Eroica’. The musicologists Joseph Kerman and Alan Tyson were to call it his ‘symphonic ideal’.

The conception of this symphonic ideal, and the development of technical means to implement it, is probably Beethoven’s greatest single achievement. It is par excellence a Romantic phenomenon, however ‘Classical’ one may wish to regard his purely musical procedures. It is also a feature that has offended certain critics, especially in the early part of the twentieth century, and set them against Beethoven. The composer himself was capable of producing a cynical and enormously popular travesty of his own symphonic ideal in the ‘Battle Symphony’ of 1813.¹

The Battle Symphony, Op. 91, aka ‘Wellington’s Victory’ or ‘The Battle of Vittoria’, was admittedly an aberration, although it was to bring Beethoven much needed money, exactly as he calculated. Pace the late scholars Kerman and Tyson, both of whom were lifelong academics on generous faculty salaries, it is not cynicism for an artist to scratch a living as best he may. Beethoven’s Battle Symphony never infringed his symphonic ideal, because as ‘characteristic’ (i.e., programme) music involving cannonades and fanfares it was less a symphony than what today would be a film score, something along the lines of Tchaikovsky’s celebrated 1812 overture. It told a story, dramatically and noisily, complete with national anthems. ‘Battle’ music had been a popular genre since at least the sixteenth century, and this whole period of wars and constantly clashing armies greatly revived it. The Bohemian composer Franz Kocžwara’s Battle of Prague (1788) was written originally for piano trio, but in its piano solo version it went through dozens of editions pirated all over Europe and proving especially popular in England, where no salon or drawing room was without a copy. Beethoven’s bid to cash in on this evergreen genre twenty-five years later was surely forgivable. Nor is it without interest. The hectic fugue with which it ends is not just accomplished writing but has pointers towards the Ninth Symphony. As Beethoven retorted to an adverse critic of the piece, ‘I can shit better than you can write.’

Beethoven’s ‘symphonic ideal’ is as good a name as any for the style of music he suddenly achieved with the ‘Eroica’. It needs to be called something, if only to mark the gulf it instantly opened up between that work and every other symphony that had gone before it. It was not just a gulf of musical form, however; it suddenly introduced a dimension that even early audiences recognized as an almost moral quality. The music seemed to suggest to its listeners a narrative of high ethical struggle that ended in triumph. It was like an opera—indeed, a rescue opera—but one without singers or book.

It was small wonder that early listeners found the sheer originality of the new style bewildering. Some gave up on the spot, like the man at the symphony’s first semi-public performance who shouted from the gallery in exasperation. Others no doubt struggled too but realized they were hearing a new and difficult kind of music with an energy that seemed to carry everything before it. And there was no doubt left in anyone’s mind that this symphony’s inner life was intensely personal. The hero of the piece might have been Napoleon, as apparently advertised; or it might have been the composer; or even some mystical fusion of them both; but the four movements recognizably carried the ennobling message of the triumphant progress of a soul. This brand-new phenomenon of nobility in music was the symphonic ideal that Beethoven would carry through into his Fifth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies especially. More than that, it was to lay the foundations of the symphony for the rest of the nineteenth century and even much of the twentieth as classical music’s touchstone of high seriousness. It was no coincidence that Elgar’s most characteristic musical marking was to be nobilmente. Soon orchestras were calling themselves symphony orchestras, and concert halls—especially in the United States—turned into symphony halls or even just ‘The Symphony’.

Despite his ‘new road’, it was Beethoven’s peculiar skill to retain as much of the Classical style in his music as he needed. In 1809, when his friend and patron Archduke Rudolph fled the French, together with most of Vienna’s court, Beethoven wrote for him the Piano Sonata, Op. 81a, that became known as ‘Lebewohl’ or ‘Les Adieux’. It is a very touching piece, straightforwardly programmatic, its three movements titled Das Lebewohl (‘Farewell’), Abwesenheit (‘Absence’) and Wiedersehn [sic] (‘Reunion’). The form of the first and last movements, oddly so for a middle-period Beethoven work, is of conventional sonata form complete with double bar-lines and repeats. The intensity of the sentiment is entirely his, especially in the bereft slow movement. Yet there is also a warm light-heartedness in the last movement that avoids the least hint of the sententious. All the same, by then a characteristic and essential ingredient of the Viennese Classical style was fast disappearing. This was the ability for music to be simultaneously intimate and amused. It had been one of the defining features of Haydn’s string quartets: urbane, witty exchanges between the instruments as though they were old friends chatting in a coffee house. This sense of good-natured intimacy was one of the sadder casualties of the dawning Romantic age, as Charles Rosen lamented: ‘The civilized gaiety of the classical period, perhaps already somewhat coarsened, makes its last appearances in the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, and in some of the movements of the last quartets. After that, wit was swamped by sentiment.’²

There was even precedent within the secular Viennese classical tradition for including fugue in a symphony, as Beethoven did in the ‘Eroica’. He was perfectly familiar with the last movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony and was doubtless as astonished as anyone by the perfection of its coda, when the movement’s four motifs or tunes are unexpectedly combined with each other while still making exhilarating music. Yet it was impossible not to feel that Mozart’s display of sheer contrapuntal technique also included the faintest suspicion of ‘showing off’. This element was completely foreign to the hard-won self-expression that preoccupied Beethoven and which is so apparent in the way he used fugue and other contrapuntal effects in the ‘Eroica’. As with his sonata form, Beethoven’s fugues were nothing if not personal. By the time he came to write the ‘Eroica’ he had mastered a counterpoint that could be successfully married to his symphonic ideal. Thereafter, the occasional fugues he incorporated into his music took on more and more of his personal voice until in the last movement of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata as well as in the Grosse Fuge (the original last movement of the String Quartet in B flat major, Op. 130) Beethoven was producing fugal writing that could have been composed by no one else either before or since, so unique and powerful was the style. In such ways Beethoven made personal the various musical forms he had inherited. Even when he seemed to have abandoned them altogether they were usually present in spirit, bringing order to seemingly wilful disorder.