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Henry E Rensburg Series
Petrenko’s Beethoven: Eroica
Thursday 15 September 2016 7.30pm
The National Anthem
It is thought that the first performance of the National Anthem, with the melody and words more or less as they are
today, was in 1745. Thomas Arne (1710-78) is given credit for standardising the words and music at this time, and
he is sometimes cited as the composer of the melody. However, the melody itself draws on elements of earlier
tunes, including music by John Bull (1563-1628) and Henry Purcell (1659-95), while Handel used a variant of the
tune in the Sarabande of his Suite No.4 in E minor, composed before 1720. Other theories about its origin abound,
including a widespread 19th-century belief that an old Scots carol, ‘Remember O Thou Man’, was the source of the
tune.
The words go back much further: as early as 1545, the phrase ‘God save the King’ and its response ‘Long to reign
over us’ were watchwords of the Royal Navy, according to the research of Percy Scholes. Many variants exist, with
verses written to emphasise a particular political standpoint – verses were written in 1745 to rally support both for
and against the Jacobite Rising – or to commemorate an event.
Ian Stephens © 2016
Musical Revolutionary: Beethoven
In 1794, the troops of Revolutionary France occupied Beethoven’s birthplace of Bonn. The young composer had
already left. But in 1805, and again in 1809, Beethoven would hear the gunfire of battle, and witness his adopted
home city of Vienna overrun by armed soldiers speaking a new language: a language of freedom, of change – in a
word, a language of revolution. Beethoven lived through the era that saw the explosive birth of modern Europe,
and no artist – no man, perhaps, apart from Napoleon himself – embodied that era more powerfully.
The facts of his career are straightforward: brought up in a musical family in the German city of Bonn, his talents
were spotted early, and in 1792, at the age of 21, he was sent to Vienna, Europe’s most musical capital, to study
composition. He was too late to study with Mozart, and he was too impatient to learn much from his lessons with
Haydn. Instead, he paid his way as a pianist, making young society ladies swoon with his impassioned playing and
bad-boy looks. In the new age of romantic literature, it was like meeting a hero from Goethe or Kleist – and getting
them round to play for you.
Before Beethoven turned 30, though, came the agonising realisation that he was losing his hearing. He reluctantly
gave up performing, and tore up his Third Symphony’s dedication to Napoleon when he realised that the
Revolution had been betrayed. Retreating into an ever more powerful imaginative world, he continued to
compose: an opera about love and freedom, Fidelio. Nine symphonies that turned the elegant forms of Haydn and
Mozart into huge, supercharged expressions of the human spirit. String quartets that pushed the language of music
into a visionary new world. And piano music that seemed to lay bare the human heart itself, composed by a man
who could hear only silence.
Beethoven never married, his behaviour was eccentric, and his temper was legendary. None of that mattered: even
before his death, he was universally acknowledged as a creative titan – in his own way, a hero. Beethoven is the
model for every musician ever since – Wagner, Mahler, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Amy Winehouse – who has
sacrificed their life to their art, and refused to be taken on any terms but their own. “There are and will be
thousands of princes”, he said to his patron, Prince Lobkowitz. “There is only one Beethoven”.
Richard Bratby © 2016
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Symphony No.1 in C, Op.21
Adagio molto – allegro con brio / Very slow – fast, with vigour
Andante cantabile con moto / At a walking pace, in a singing style. with movement
Menuetto e trio: allegro molto e vivace / Minuet and trio: very fast and lively
Adagio – allegro molto e vivace / Slow – very fast and lively
Beethoven’s First Symphony wasn’t just his first symphony – it was his first purely orchestral work. He’d
completed two piano concertos and two cantatas with orchestra, but nothing in which the orchestra carried a
musical argument entirely by itself. Admittedly, the symphony, as a form, didn’t yet enjoy its hallowed position in
western music (that would take even Beethoven another couple of decades to achieve), and the First Symphony’s
premiere wasn’t even the high point of the concert in which it occurred.
That concert – promoted by Beethoven himself in Vienna’s Burgtheater, on 2 April 1800 – included his second
piano concerto, a keyboard improvisation, various arias, works by Mozart and Haydn and the world premiere of
Beethoven’s Septet Op.20, before wrapping up (presumably somewhere around midnight) with the Symphony.
And there was no doubt what was the hit of the evening. “Send my Septet into the world at a more rapid rate,” he
urged the publisher Hofmeister later that year, “because the public is waiting for it”. At the same time, he offered
the symphony for publication at the knock-down rate of 20 ducats.
Yet the very fact that he’d waited so long to write a symphony indicates that he saw it as something significant. The
first sketches date from 1795, and he dedicated the finished work to Baron Gottfried van Swieten. Swieten was a
celebrated and discerning music lover; he’d introduced Mozart to the music of Bach, and prepared the libretti for
Haydn’s two late oratorios The Creation and The Seasons. Beethoven clearly trusted him to see further than his
contemporaries.
And that was certainly what the Symphony required. The very features that baffled contemporary listeners are
what make this concise work so irresistible today. “A caricature of Haydn pushed to absurdity,” proclaimed the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung; and yes – the tongue-pulling gesture of opening a C major symphony with an F
major chord, and the sense throughout the symphony of a boisterous spirit struggling to fit into his 18th-century
tailoring, are what make this work so unmistakably Beethoven.
When another writer grumbles that “there was more harmonie [wind-band music] than orchestral music proper,”
we recognise that Beethoven, by using the largest orchestra of any Haydn symphony and then adding a second
flute to complete the wind section, was taking the first step in the development of the Romantic orchestra. We
recognise the Menuetto as a fully-fledged symphonic scherzo. And when we learn that in 1809 one musical director
refused to play the introduction to the Finale on the grounds that it would “make the audience laugh” – well, we’re
grateful that, as always with Beethoven, we’re allowed to laugh as hard as we like.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No.2 in D, Op.36
Adagio – allegro con brio / Slow – fast, with vigour
Larghetto / Fairly slow
Scherzo: allegro / Scherzo: fast
Allegro molto / Very fast
With Beethoven, categories become meaningless. Everyone agrees that Beethoven’s Second Symphony has the
same basic layout as a Mozart or Haydn symphony. But equally, everyone agrees that it does something very
different. For the scholar Sir George Grove, this was the last and greatest classical symphony – “the farthest point
to which Beethoven could go before he burst into that wonderful new region into which no man had penetrated”.
To others, this was the turning point between Classical and Romantic.
So what did Beethoven say? A Romantic artist, surely, reflects his life in his work – and that work should come to
him, fully-formed, in a blinding flash of inspiration. Shouldn’t it? Yet at the end of the very summer (1802) in
which Beethoven completed the Second Symphony, he completed another document; a heart-rending letter to his
brothers, revealing the fact of his incurable deafness: “You who think me to be miserable, difficult and cynical, how
badly you misjudge me!… joyfully, I hasten to meet death”. How on earth does that relate to a symphony that’s
been described as “fresh as ever in its indomitable fiery flash and its irresistible strength”? And as for the bolt of
inspiration… Beethoven is supposed to have torn up three drafts of the piece. His biographer Ries, probing
Beethoven about a small change in the larghetto, got only a terse reply: “It’s better that way”.
Yet the fact remains – this is one of the sunniest, strongest, and most exhilarating symphonies ever written. Its
outer movements both begin with a surprise, and their allegros rocket off with breathtaking energy. You hardly
notice that none of the first allegro’s themes is given to the violins – but you can’t miss the dazzling verve with
which those fiddles, freed from their usual duties, flash across the musical landscape. The long, luxurious slow
movement is as profoundly soothing now as it was then. And in the high-octane comedy of the finale and the
scherzo (a three-note children’s game amplified to symphonic scale – like one of those giant versions of Jenga or
Connect Four you find in pub gardens) the jokes hit their marks as punchily as ever. When this Symphony was first
heard, in Vienna on 5 April 1803, it was the longest ever written. Let’s leave the historical categorisation at that,
and just enjoy a life-affirming and fabulously entertaining masterpiece – one in a class of its own.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No.3 in E flat, Op.55 ‘Eroica’
Allegro con brio / fast, with vigour
Marcia funebre (adagio assai) / Funeral march (very slow)
Scherzo: allegro vivace / Scherzo: fast and lively
Allegro molto – poco andante, con espressione / Very fast – at a gentle walking pace, with expression
What’s in a name?
Two chords slam out. Ludwig van Beethoven seizes the score of his newly-completed ‘Bonaparte Symphony’, tears
off its title page and, furious, hurls it to the floor. Few moments in music are more powerful than the opening of
Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and few musical christenings have been more dramatic. Napoleon Bonaparte was
just one year older than Beethoven. His rise from humble roots to become the most brilliant military leader of his
age – and his devotion to the revolutionary ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity – thrilled the composer. In
February 1804, Beethoven completed his musical homage, a symphony of unprecedented energy, scale and
ambition.
And then, on 18 May, Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor. “So he, too, is just a man like the rest!” exclaimed
Beethoven. “Now he will trample on the rights of humanity, pursue his own ambitions and become a tyrant!” On
the manuscript of the symphony, you can still see the tear where Beethoven scratched out the dedication to
Napoleon. He renamed the work Sinfonia eroica, composta per festiggiare il sovvenire di un grand ’Uomo –
‘Heroic Symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man’.
Napoleon Symphony
The Eroica was never a literal musical portrait of Napoleon. But Beethoven had spoken of his determination to
find a ‘new path’ for music – and in the Third Symphony he blasts that path wide open. After the Eroica, music
would never again be a polite entertainment. Classical rules would come second to inspiration, music would
express the ideals of the composer, and the orchestral symphony would reign supreme in western music for over a
century. The Eroica does for music what Napoleon did to the old European order – and more. “It’s a shame I don’t
understand the art of war as well as I do the art of music,” Beethoven remarked a few years later. “I would conquer
him!”
Revolution
Unsurprisingly, many have heard the symphony as a musical biography of Napoleon, or some classical hero – an
idea that comes unstuck when, in the symphony, the hero’s funeral march comes two movements before the
triumphant conclusion! The best approach is to let the music tell its own story. Those two opening chords set the
agenda immediately – yet within seconds, Beethoven’s throwing ‘wrong’ notes into the mix. The movement
climaxes with a series of huge, pounding dissonances, and moments later, as the orchestra waits breathlessly for
the grand return of the opening theme, the second horn suddenly jumps in early. The Eroica is full of such
‘mistakes’. In this new world of music, what was once ‘wrong’ is now gloriously right – and with such epic verve
that it’s impossible to resist.
War and peace
So why shouldn’t the Marcia funebre come second? Beethoven is making his own rules now, taking the muffled
drums and keening woodwinds of French Revolutionary march music and turning them into an expression of
mourning on a universal scale – one that breaks, mid-flow, into the most heartfelt personal emotion. Does the
Scherzo represent the ceremonial sports after the death of a classical hero, or the cheerfully bawdy song of an army
marching home from victory? Or just the joyous, natural musical reaction to the intensity of the Funeral March?
Take your pick. The central Trio section, scored for three horns (most classical symphonies only had two), is both
surprising and stirring.
A new-created world
But there’s a bigger surprise in store as, after a grand opening flourish, Beethoven launches his finale with – well,
what? It’s not even a theme at all, just a bare sequence of notes in the bottom of the orchestra. They’re repeated,
and the orchestra ventures the odd (very odd) comment, gradually building the music up from those bare bones
until, at last, the theme itself glides gracefully in. It’s a dance from Beethoven’s 1801 ballet Prometheus – a story of
an ancient hero leading humanity to enlightenment and freedom – and he didn’t choose it just because it was a
pretty tune. Is this symphony really just about one great soldier, or an idea as simple as Revolution? Decide for
yourself, as Beethoven slows the music to a serene, expressive Andante (it’s been described as a “vision of
Elysium”) before drums and trumpets sweep this ‘Heroic Symphony’ to a jubilant finish.
Programme notes by Richard Bratby © 2016