Cambridge Companions to Music: The Cambridge Companion to the Eroica Symphony by November Nancy

Author:November, Nancy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

The same heroism carried Beethoven through the difficulties of his last years. In a letter to Moscheles from the final year of his life:

Truly, a hard lot has befallen me! But I yield to the will of fate and only pray that God in His divine will so order it that as long as I have to endure this death in life I may be protected against want. This will give me strength to endure my lot, hard and terrible though it may be, with submission to the will of the Most High.106

The Eroica symphony, beside the Christus oratorio, is among Beethoven’s first attempts to work out this philosophical position in musical terms: a lesson, conceived in music, in learning to die now, to ‘endure this death [G minor] in life [E♭ major]’, in order to live again. With the Eroica, Beethoven himself becomes an exemplar for a way of life. As Sullivan put it, it is ‘a transcription of personal experience’, ‘heroism as a principle manifesting itself in life’, in which one ‘accept[s] … suffering as in some mysterious way necessary’. If the Eroica has a message, it is Beethoven’s own words from the Heiligenstadt Testament: ‘May the poor unfortunate take comfort in finding one of his own kind.’107

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.