Ludwig van Beethoven’s improvisations that dazzled Vienna were, in a way, rehearsals of the daring musical ideas Beethoven would explore in his symphonies.
The first movement of his Eroica Symphony was unprecedented in scale, in part because he had so much to say. Beethoven uses a huge spectrum of sounds to express different worlds of emotion.
Each new experience of the themes gets darker and deeper. He develops the movement as a way of expressing what really happens in life—the wrong turns, the confusion, the sense of helplessness and entrapment.
In the first movement of the Eroica, Beethoven takes his listeners on a wild journey through the emotional extremes that can be wrought from a few simple themes.
And perhaps the best reflection of these emotional extremes is the Second Movement, which he titled “Funeral March,” a powerful musical evocation of the massive state funerals then taking place in Paris.
The music suggests the thunder of drums and the roar of the crowd. In this movement, Beethoven explores grief, its public face and its intimate expression.
The oboe solo at the beginning is a personalized and interior expression of grief within a public ceremony. It’s a modern solo in that it has tremendous psychological dimension.
The music is evocative—we can almost see the funeral procession pass before us and ask, What really has died here? Perhaps it is part of Beethoven that is being mourned.
In the years before he wrote Eroica, Beethoven realized he was going deaf, and his initial reaction was terror and shame. He tried to keep it a secret. He couldn’t bear for anyone to know that he—a musician—was not able to hear.
In the third movement it seems that Beethoven is tired of thinking about the past and heroes and revolutions. Now he only wants to think about the future, specifically his own future and the future of music.
The third movement shows how confident Beethoven was becoming in the power of his imagination. Here he was creating whole musical worlds. By sharing these worlds with us, he could communicate more personally than had ever been possible before.
The Finale of the Eroica starts out with the suggestion of fun and games. There are fugues, village dances, virtuoso solos. But you can’t miss the tenderness in this music.
You can’t miss its suggestion of that moment in life when we look at something or someone we’ve always taken for granted with new eyes and realized just how special they are.
Letting us understand this, Beethoven leads us even further. He makes us realize that these simple notes are worthy to express the triumphant climax of the life of a hero. This is the sum total of one person’s life.
Here is an amazing interpretation of this music, and personally I find it all the more meaningful because it is played at a somewhat more moderate pace by conductor Sergiu Celebidache:
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