In the summer of 1801, while composing his Second Symphony, Beethoven disclosed the secret of his deteriorating hearing in a long letter to a childhood friend, Franz Wegeler. After recounting assorted professional successes, the 30-year-old composer went on to relate that the “jealous demon, my wretched health, has put a nasty spoke in my wheel; and it amounts to this, that for the past three years my hearing has become weaker and weaker.” Since Wegeler was a physician who lived in the composer’s native Bonn, Beethoven provided a detailed account of symptoms and lamented the constraints placed on his personal life (“I have ceased to attend any social functions just because I find it impossible to say to people, ‘I am deaf’”) and professional situation (“If my enemies, of whom I have a fair number, were to hear about it, what would they say?”).
A little more than a year later, just as he was completing the Second Symphony, Beethoven penned his “Heiligenstadt Testament,” the famous unsent letter to his brothers in which he expressed utter despair over his loss of hearing. In this revealing confession, he stated that on account of his torments, “I would have ended my life. Only my art held me back. It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me.” What if Beethoven had killed himself in the fall of 1802 at age 31? What had he accomplished at this point in his career and how would he have been remembered? The question assumes a special poignancy when one considers that Schubert died at the same point in his life. Mozart had not lived much longer. Beethoven, fortunately, had another 25 years.
The Beethoven who contemplated killing himself at 31 ultimately became a mythic figure who redefined music and whose life in so many ways epitomizes that of the Romantic artist. During his 20s he was better known as a performer—a brilliant pianist and improviser—than as a composer. He had written a good many works in various genres, but nowhere near what Mozart, Schubert, and other masters accomplished by the age of 30. He was about to embark on a “new path,” as he told his student Carl Czerny.
The genre of the symphony—of which his idol Mozart had written dozens, and his teacher Haydn more than 100—offered new challenges. Beethoven had ventured to write one during his teenage years in Bonn, but did not get very far. A later attempt in Vienna, during the mid-1790s, likewise proved unsuccessful, although some of the musical ideas in it eventually made their way into his First Symphony. He began sketching the Second Symphony as early as 1801, but most of the work took place during the summer and early fall of 1802—exactly at the time he confronted the crisis explained in the “Heiligenstadt Testament.”
The boundless humor and vitality of the Second Symphony—French composer Hector Berlioz later remarked that “this symphony is smiling throughout”—challenge the simplistic connections so often made between the immediate events at a given time in Beethoven’s life and the music he then created. Indeed, as with his witty Eighth Symphony (1812), also written during a period of considerable personal distress (in the aftermath of his affair with the “Immortal Beloved”), Beethoven may have sought refuge in musical “comedy” at times of personal “tragedy.”
Despite its good cheer, the Second Symphony initially challenged listeners. One critic remarked in 1804: “It is a noteworthy, colossal work of a depth, power, and artistic knowledge like very few. It has a level of difficulty, both from the point of view of the composer and in regard to its performance by a large orchestra (which it certainly demands), quite certainly unlike any symphony that has ever been made known. It demands to be played again and yet again by even the most accomplished orchestra until the astonishing number of original and sometimes very strangely arranged ideas becomes closely enough connected, rounded out, and emerges like a great unity, just as the composer had in mind.” Today we might assume such an observation would be about the monumental Third Symphony that we hear paired with it on this program. Yet this early reaction is echoed by other contemporaries, who also initially found the Second Symphony difficult, imposing, and puzzling.
Early–19th-century listeners, of course, were hearing it in the context of the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, and of Beethoven’s own initial one. In fact, Beethoven premiered the Second Symphony at a concert in Vienna on April 5, 1803, that also featured the First Symphony, as well as the premieres of the Third Piano Concerto and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. Comparisons were therefore inevitable—and his First Symphony won, in part, because “it was performed with unforced ease, while in the Second a striving for novel and striking effects is more visible.” The “striking effects” begin with the slow introduction to the first movement. Other sections that follow, especially in the third-movement Scherzo and in the humorous finale, elicited the word perhaps used most often to describe Beethoven’s music at the time: bizarre.
Beethoven’s teacher Haydn typically began his symphonies with a slow introduction. Mozart generally did not, and Beethoven was nearly evenly split in his nine symphonies. The lengthy Adagio molto he wrote for the Second Symphony is far more imposing than that for his First and leads to an Allegro con brio theme in the lower strings and a somewhat military march–like second theme for clarinets, bassoons, and horns.
Berlioz called the following Larghetto “a delineation of innocent happiness hardly clouded by a few melancholy accents.” The Scherzo eschews the polite dance forms typical of Haydn and Mozart or the composer’s earlier symphony for a faster and more manic romp with a slower trio section in the middle. Berlioz called the finale (Allegro molto) “a second scherzo in duple meter, and its playfulness has perhaps something still more delicate, more piquant.” Beethoven’s sense of humor may be gruffer than the wit of Haydn, but nevertheless is ingeniously comic.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Born on a small cattle ranch in the desert mountains of eastern California during a blizzard, Jessica Hunt earned a Bachelor of Music degree in composition and piano performance from Columbia College Chicago, a Master of Music degree in composition from DePaul University, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan. She has composed for large orchestras and chamber ensembles, the operatic stage, theater and film, electronic media, chorus, and instrumental and vocal solos and duos. A former fellow in Gabriela Lena Frank’s Creative Academy of Music and an instructor in music theory at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, Hunt’s current projects include Thurso’s Landing, a new opera that incorporates a libretto adapted from poetry by early–20th-century American poet Robinson Jeffers.
Climb was commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra, honoring Beethoven’s 250th birthday by performing his symphonies in dialogue with music by composers of today. The work was to have received its world premiere in March 2020 on a program with Beethoven’s Second and Third symphonies, but those concerts were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the belated premiere on a Digital Stage concert in October 2020, and conducted it again last September as part of the Kimmel Center’s reopening celebrations in Philadelphia in front of a live audience for the first time.
For her “dialogue” with Beethoven, Hunt looked not just to the composer’s Second and Third symphonies, but also to the space between the works—one of great suffering for Beethoven. In the fall of 1802, Beethoven wrote his “Heiligenstadt Testament”—his account of despondency over ever-increasing hearing loss and frustration at overcoming physical and emotional infirmities. As Hunt writes: “The first time I read that document, Beethoven’s isolation, fear, and diminishing hope leapt off the page and pierced my heart. I recognized those fears—that anguish—they resonate deeply within my own chronically ill body.”
Currently living with the chronic autonomic nervous disorder dysautonomia, Hunt found a deep and personal connection with the despair and anxiety with which Beethoven lived. Just as deafness permeated every aspect of his life, Hunt notes that “every single one of my body’s autonomic functions” are affected by her condition. Climbing stairs has become a particular challenge; she describes the experience as “terrifyingly dangerous. My heart races, my vision darkens, my ears ring—it feels like gravity is pulling me backwards. It is in these moments that I must make an active choice to keep fighting, to claw my way up, until I can triumphantly rest at the top.” Connecting with Beethoven’s mourning his loss of hearing and accepting a “new normal,” Hunt claims that in reaching the top of the stairs, her “new reality is confirmed, but is also changed by the previous triumph and joy. The title is chosen to represent the challenge of living with any invisible illness or obstacle: Some of us cannot simply walk up a flight of stairs; instead, we must climb.”
Scored for the same instrumentation as the Second and Third symphonies, Climb is partly autobiographical, exploring aural representations of the physical sensations that are part of Hunt’s daily life with dysautonomia. As she describes: “The piece opens with a frantic burst of adrenaline that soon surrenders to the sensation of stomach-dropping nausea and tinnitus.” The opening orchestral gesture establishes the musical metaphors of adrenaline rush, dizziness, panic, tinnitus, and nausea with a heartbeat motif that leads to a “tachycardia / racing heart” section. The piece reaches for the key of E-flat Major (the same as the “Eroica” Symphony), but the gravity of the key of D Major pulls the music back. Optimism surfaces, but is then overwhelmed by the glissandos of dizziness and transitions into violent palpitations that lead to exhaustion. Punctuated by brassy flashes of pain, the orchestra-body steels itself with determination—even optimism—before a violent attack of palpitations shatters its progress, melting into mourning for a wholeness that will never come again. After the last pitch, the string section inhales together and performs an up-bow gesture without touching the string, seemingly an upbeat to a final resolution that never comes, hinting at one last measure that Hunt asks the audience to imagine—a balance of hope, hopelessness, and uncertainty.
Climb is Hunt’s “letter-through-time” to Beethoven, expressing gratitude for his work and acknowledging their silent kinship. She writes: “Every single person has a struggle that feels monumental to them. Many of our struggles are invisible, but we can find community when we share our experiences. I hope that inviting the audience to embody, for five minutes, what it feels like to live with this chronic illness will help to raise awareness and empathy for others. If it were possible for Beethoven to hear this message, I hope he would know that he has inspired so many of us to persevere, but more importantly, that he wasn’t alone. None of us are.”
—Nancy Plum
The monumental “Eroica” Symphony represents a turning point not only in Beethoven’s career, but also in the history of music, a stature shared by few other compositions. The work raises fascinating biographical issues: the personal circumstances of its genesis at a crucial juncture in Beethoven’s life; its relationship to the political events of the day, specifically to Napoleon Bonaparte; and the ways in which audiences at the time first received what many found to be a “horribly long” and “most difficult” piece of music.
It is striking that early critics, those writing during the initial 10 years or so of the work’s existence, did not talk about the issues most often discussed today: the symphony’s relation to Beethoven’s life or to Napoleon. They viewed the “Eroica” as a bizarre but original composition, more sublime than beautiful. Its unprecedented length, technical challenges, and uncompromising aesthetic stance seemed to aim beyond entertainment, forcing Beethoven’s contemporaries to rethink what a symphony should be and do.
During the summer of 1802, Beethoven’s doctor suggested that he move to the suburb of Heiligenstadt so as to escape the heat and hassles of Vienna. It was there, in the early fall, that Beethoven poured out his heart in an unsent letter to his brothers:
O you men who think or say that I am hostile, peevish, or misanthropic, how greatly you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause that makes me seem so to you. From childhood on, my heart and soul were full of tender feeling of goodwill, and I was always inclined to accomplish great deeds. But just think, for six years now I have had an incurable condition, made worse by incompetent doctors, from year to year deceived with hopes of getting better, finally forced to face the prospect of a lasting infirmity (whose cure will perhaps take years or even be impossible).
This “Heiligenstadt Testament” has exerted a tremendous influence on posterity’s view of Beethoven. The anguished words also had a powerful effect on the understanding of his music, especially a work like the “Eroica,” which seems to express in music the struggles that the composer, never a fluent writer, had tried to put in prose.
The “Eroica” helped launch the middle period of Beethoven’s career, which lasted for roughly a dozen years. These were years of astounding—one could say “heroic”—productivity: “I live only in my notes, and with one work barely finished, the other is already started; the way I write now I often find myself working on three, four things at the same time.” His problems were initially hidden, denied, and fought, but by 1806 Beethoven wrote in a sketch: “Let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art.”
Beethoven began the symphony around the time he wrote the “Heiligenstadt Testament” and did the most concentrated work starting in May 1803. It was the first of his symphonies for which he gave public indications of an extra-musical program. Originally, he planned to dedicate it to Napoleon and call it “Bonaparte.” Disillusioned when the French military leader crowned himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven so vigorously scratched out the title that his pen tore the manuscript paper. In the end, the work was published as “Sinfonia Eroica … composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” It was initially heard in private and semi-private performances, the first of which took place in June 1804 at the Viennese palace of his patron, Prince Lobkowitz, to whom the work is dedicated. The public premiere took place on April 7, 1805, at the Theater an der Wien.
The early reviews show that most critics wanted to praise the composer and work, but were often confused by what he was trying to do. A critic commented that general opinion was sharply divided:
One group, Beethoven’s very special friends, maintains that precisely this symphony is a masterpiece, that it is in exactly the true style for more elevated music, and that if it does not please at present, it is because the public is not sufficiently educated in art to be able to grasp all of these elevated beauties. After a few thousand years, however, they will not fail to have their effect. The other group utterly denies this work any artistic value and feels that it manifests a completely unbounded striving for distinction and oddity, which, however, has produced neither beauty nor true sublimity and power.
The critic goes on to discuss a “middle” group of commentators, who admire its many excellent qualities, but are dismayed at the disjointed surroundings and at the “endless duration of this longest and perhaps most difficult of all symphonies, which exhausts even connoisseurs and becomes unbearable for the mere amateur.”
Within a couple of years, however, the tone began to change. It often takes time before musicians and the public feel comfortable with the demands of difficult new music. In the case of the “Eroica,” as a Leipzig critic remarked, “One must not always wish only to be entertained,” a sentiment echoed by another: “But the connoisseur will only enjoy it as a complete work (and a repeated hearing doubles his spiritual enjoyment) the deeper he penetrates into the technical and aesthetic content of the original work.” Musicians in particular seem to have gone out of their way to embrace “this most difficult of all symphonies.” Regarding a Leipzig performance in 1807, we are informed that “the orchestra had voluntarily gathered for extra rehearsals without recompense, except for the honor and special enjoyment of the work itself.” A few years later, a critic commented that the symphony “was performed by the orchestra with unmistakable enjoyment and love.”
The innovations of the “Eroica” begin with the two striking tonic chords of the first movement (Allegro con brio), which usher in a sweet cello melody that is soon derailed by an unexpected note—C-sharp—that does not belong to the home key. The motivic, metric, and harmonic surprises continue throughout this lengthy movement. A new theme (in fact related to the opening) appears during the development that has elicited comment for two centuries now. There are other unexpected details: The French horn seems to enter prematurely in the recapitulation, an effect that Beethoven’s contemporaries initially thought to be a mistake.
The second movement (Adagio assai) is a funeral march and one of the most influential pieces of music Beethoven ever composed. Schubert alluded to it in two late works (his song “Auf dem Strom” and in the second movement of his Piano Trio in E-flat Major) to honor Beethoven’s death, just 20 months before his own. Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Mahler, and others would also write marches, often funereal in character, within their symphonies that can in many ways be traced back to Beethoven. The C-minor opening presents the somber theme in the violins over a drum-like bass that is taken up by the oboe. The tone brightens at moments in the movement, notably in sections in major keys, but also becomes more austere with a fugal passage of extraordinary intensity. The opening theme returns at the end, deconstructed so that only fragments remain.
An energetic Scherzo (Allegro vivace) changes the tone (confusing some commentators—why the mirth after a funeral?), but not the intensity. Beethoven plays with metric ambiguities—is the movement in duple or triple time?—and also gives the French horns a chance to shine in the middle trio section.
Beethoven employs another formal innovation for the Finale (Allegro molto), which he casts as an unusual set of variations. The theme takes some time to emerge, with initially only its harmonic skeleton given in the bass. For the theme proper, Beethoven returned to a melody he had already used in three previous pieces: in one of his contredanses, in his ballet music for The Creatures of Prometheus, and as the theme for the Piano Variations in E-flat Major, Op. 35. Beethoven referred to these as the “Prometheus” Variations, and the work is closely related to the last movement of the symphony. Indeed, as Lewis Lockwood has observed, the Finale was conceived of first and became the “springboard” for the entire work. It seems natural that Beethoven was attracted to—dare we say identified with?—Prometheus, the rebellious Greek Titan who incurred the wrath of the gods of Mount Olympus by stealing their sacred fire. Prometheus resisted, took risks, and suffered in order to help humanity. That mythic hero’s music provides a fitting conclusion for this heroic symphony.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Program notes © 2021. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association and/or Nancy Plum.