The Second Symphony is one of Beethoven’s happiest, but he wrote it during a time of morbid anxiety. The first symptoms of his deafness appeared while he was composing the work at Heiligenstadt, just outside Vienna. During this period, he wrote the so-called “Heiligenstadt Testament,” his famous outpouring of despair sent to his brothers that hinted at suicide. “What a humiliation,” he wrote, “when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance, and I heard nothing, or when someone heard the shepherd sing, and again, I heard nothing. Such occurrences brought me to the verge of despair.”
Whether Beethoven worked out these grim feelings through the writing of this letter or through the composition of the Symphony No. 2 we cannot know. In any case, the symphony itself—a burst of unrestrained exuberance—is free of them. Only later, in works such as the Fifth, would Beethoven make his darkest emotions an intrinsic part of his art.
On the surface, Beethoven’s Second Symphony would appear to be as far from the late, visionary Ninth as could be imagined. Yet there is an exhilarating moment near the end of the opening movement when the music suddenly soars through a series of modulations that transport it out of the 18th century into a new world of boldness and freedom. The Second looks forward in other ways as well. Its dance movement is so piquant that Beethoven abandoned the 18th-century “minuet” label from the Haydn-Mozart model and called his a “scherzo” (“joke”). As Berlioz eloquently pointed out, the Larghetto was a new kind of slow music: “It is not composed of a theme worked out in canonic imitations, but is a pure and direct song that at first is simply sung by the strings and then embroidered with rare elements by means of light and flowing figures … It is a ravishing picture of innocent pleasure, scarcely shadowed by a few melancholy elements.”
Berlioz went on to describe this supremely joyful work as “smiling throughout.” Beethoven’s contemporaries, however, were not smiling. Conducted by Beethoven in its 1803 premiere alongside that of the Piano Concerto No. 3 and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, the symphony received mixed reviews at best, including the infamous pan by a Leipzig critic—quoted in virtually every lexicon of musical invective—who called the scintillating finale “a repulsive monster, a wounded, tail-lashing serpent, dealing wild and furious blows as it stiffens into its death agony at the end.” The most frequent description of Beethoven’s music during this period, even by some of his admirers, was “bizarre.” Nonetheless, the revenue for this triple-header was handsome, and Beethoven, despite medical and critical setbacks, was undeterred. “I am only a little satisfied with my previous works,” he said. “From today, I will take a new path.”
Beethoven’s “Eroica” opens with a double whiplash of energy that forecasts a new dynamism in music. It is astonishing that the initial themes and rhythms, so novel in shape and sensibility, came to Beethoven within three years after completing his First Symphony. The first of Beethoven’s symphonies to break drastically with Classical models, the “Eroica” is “heroic” not so much for its extra-musical associations as for its radical originality. As Wagner pointed out, Beethoven blazed the trail to Romanticism, and the Third Symphony launched the transition with irresistible force, provoking fierce controversy. Admirers called the piece Beethoven’s greatest achievement, but conservatives decried it as a work of “inordinate length” and “utter confusion.”
As a signal moment in the history of music, one that set revolutionary imaginations ablaze, the “Eroica” should be a special occasion in our cultural life rather than a commonplace one. We might ponder a report by Berlioz of an “Eroica” performance 40 years after the work’s 1805 premiere: “One sees three pale women raising their eyes heavenward in a studied manner, and red-faced men trying hard not to fall asleep.” Clearly, the jadedness of the contemporary concert hall is nothing new, but a committed performance of the “Eroica” by a great orchestra should still raise goose bumps.
One possible barrier to hearing the work with fresh ears is the multiplicity of “programs” with which it has been burdened. First we have the famous about-face of Beethoven himself, who originally dedicated the symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, then changed his mind when Napoleon declared himself emperor, finally calling the work a “Heroic Symphony” dedicated to “the memory of a great man.” Later, a host of commentators—including Czerny, Berlioz, and Wagner—concocted elaborate scenarios, reading into the symphony (among other things) a memorial to Sir Horatio Nelson, a battle at sea, and a series of Homeric funeral games. In the 20th century, Igor Stravinsky—who confessed to being “disgusted” and “alienated” by “all the commonplaces voiced for more than a century”—registered this manifesto: “What does it matter whether the Third Symphony was inspired by the figure of Bonaparte the Republican or Bonaparte the Emperor? It is only the music that matters. But to talk music is risky and entails responsibility.”
Although superficially in sonata form, the first movement has a multiplicity of ideas that seem to grow out of each other rather than follow a formal scheme. A tense development section occurs in the middle, but it seems irrelevant to call it that, not only because another new theme is introduced in its tumultuous midst, but because throughout the movement, each theme spreads out and “develops” on the spot. The newness of all this was pungently summarized by George Bernard Shaw: “Haydn would have recoiled from the idea of composing—or perpetrating, as he would have put it—the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica,’ and would have repudiated all part in leading music to such a pass.”
The remainder of the work piles one epic experiment on top of another. The funeral-march second movement, with its infinite shadings of grief, represents a new kind of slow movement whose aftershocks are heard in Mahler, Shostakovich, and beyond. Its solemn grandeur made it the piece of choice to mourn the passing of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. The exuberant Scherzo is Beethoven’s alternative to the traditional minuet. An example of his innovations in orchestration occurs in the fiendishly treacherous fanfare for horns in the trio, which Leonard Bernstein called “every horn player’s nightmare.”
The Finale begins with Hadynesque humor, but uses it as a springboard for another daring experiment. This set of variations (frequently criticized in the past for providing a “weak” ending for such a huge work) confronts us in the sharpest possible way with the coexistence of Beethoven the visionary symphonist and Beethoven the uninhibited prankster. In a droll reversal of normal variation procedures, Beethoven begins with three fragmented, seemingly trivial variations before introducing the full-blown theme. This melody in turn launches a series of episodes that are not so much variations as self-contained worlds of energy and feeling. Beethoven’s increasing fondness for complex, dramatic fugues is allowed full play here, as is his predilection for asymmetrical rhythms. At the end, the same wild scramble of notes that opened the movement ushers in an ecstatic coda.
—Jack Sullivan
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