Beethoven's Eroica: The First Great Romantic Symphony by James Hamilton-Paterson

Author:James Hamilton-Paterson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-12-05T02:00:00+00:00

I ALLEGRO CON BRIO

A resemblance to the theme that opens the ‘Eroica’ has long been spotted in the tune with which the twelve-year-old Mozart began the overture to his little opera Bastien et Bastienne (1768): the notes, rhythm and key are identical to Beethoven’s. Scholars have pondered whether Beethoven could have known Mozart’s boyhood work, the consensus being that it is possible but unlikely. In any case the notes in question simply make up a chord of E flat major, and firmly establishing the key at the outset was a conventional way of beginning a piece of music. A large part of Beethoven’s genius lay in his ability to take the notes of a striking phrase—even just a common chord—and somehow construct an entire movement from them. It was this trick of making distinctive fragments yield up their hidden possibilities that gave rise to the concept of the Leitmotiv, which later gained particular currency through Wagner’s use of it. As always, Beethoven was ahead of his time.

How he actually began the ‘Eroica’ immediately confirms how little this symphony was to be beholden to anything that had gone before. The single chord with which he had opened the Op. 35 piano variations has now become two brusque chords for full orchestra that stand like twin great pillars forming the work’s portal. This might seem to derive from a similar device Haydn sometimes used in his later works as a ‘call to attention’, but in Beethoven’s hands his grand portal immediately opens onto an E flat tonal landscape that the cellos promptly subvert with a rogue C sharp. It is a completely unexpected move and immediately leaves the hearer slightly off balance:

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