“Eh! Eh!” said Beethoven. “The Eroica.”
“I should have guessed the C minor,” said Kuffner.
“No, the Eroica.”
Anton Schindler wrote in his life of Beethoven:
“First in the fall of 1802 was his [Beethoven’s] mental condition so much bettered that he could take hold afresh of his long-formulated plan and make some progress: to pay homage with a great instrumental work to the hero of the time, Napoleon. Yet not until 1803 did he set himself seriously to this gigantic work, which we now know under the title of Sinfonia Eroica: on account of many interruptions it was not finished until the following year.... The first idea of this symphony is said to have come from General Bernadotte, who was then French Ambassador at Vienna and highly treasured Beethoven. I heard this from many friends of Beethoven. Count Moritz Lichnowsky, who was often with Beethoven in the company of Bernadotte, ... told me the same story.”[7] Schindler also wrote, with reference to the year 1823: “The correspondence of the King of Sweden led Beethoven’s memory back to the time when the King, then General Bernadotte, Ambassador of the French Republic, was at Vienna, and Beethoven had a lively recollection of the fact that Bernadotte indeed first awakened in him the idea of the Sinfonia Eroica.”
These statements are direct. Unfortunately, Schindler, in the third edition of his book, mentioned Beethoven as a visitor at the house of Bernadotte in 1798, repeated the statement that Bernadotte inspired the idea of the symphony, and added: “Not long afterward the idea blossomed into a deed”; he also laid stress on the fact that Beethoven was a stanch republican and cited, in support of his admiration of Napoleon, passages from Beethoven’s own copy of Schleiermacher’s translation of Plato.
Thayer admits that the thought of Napoleon may have influenced the form and the contents of the symphony; that the composer may have based a system of politics on Plato; “but,” he adds, “Bernadotte had been long absent from Vienna before the Consular form of government was adopted at Paris, and before Schleiermacher’s Plato was published in Berlin.”
The symphony was composed in 1803-04. The story is that the title page of the manuscript bore the word “Buonaparte,” and at the bottom of the page “Luigi van Beethoven”; and “not a word more,” said Ries, who saw the manuscript. “I was the first,” also said Ries, “to bring him the news that Bonaparte had had himself declared emperor, whereat he broke out angrily: ‘Then he’s nothing but an ordinary man. Now he’ll trample on all the rights of men to serve his own ambition; he will put himself higher than all others and turn out a tyrant!’” There is also the story that when the death of Napoleon was announced, Beethoven exclaimed: “Did I not foresee the catastrophe when I wrote the Funeral March in the Eroica?” Vincent d’Indy argues against Schindler’s theory that Beethoven wished to celebrate the French Revolution en bloc. “C’était l’homme de Brumaire” that Beethoven honored by his dedication. The autograph score, sold at auction in Vienna in 1827 for three florins, ten kreutzers, shows the erasure of two words under “Sinfonia grande” on the title page: one is plainly “Bonaparte”; under his own name, Beethoven wrote, in large characters, “Written on Bonaparte.” Paul Bekker, arguing that the Eroica is not the portrait of any one hero, but that the symphony represents his concept of human heroism, believes that the first movement is the only one of direct connection with Napoleon: “The hero’s deeds have resulted in victory, the restless will has achieved fulfilment.”[8]
There can be nothing in the statements that have come down from Czerny, Dr. Bartolini, and others: the first Allegro describes a sea fight; the Funeral March is in memory of Nelson or General Abercrombie, etc. There can be no doubt that Napoleon, the young conqueror, the Consul, the enemy of kings, worked a spell over Beethoven, as over Berlioz, Hazlitt, Victor Hugo; for, according to W. E. Henley’s paradox, although, as despot, Napoleon had “no love for new ideas and no tolerance for intellectual independence,” yet he was “the great First Cause of Romanticism.”
The first performance of the symphony was at a private concert at Prince Lobkowitz’s in December, 1804. The composer conducted, and in the second half of the first Allegro he brought the orchestra to grief, so that a fresh start was made. The first performance in public was at a concert given by Clement at the Theater an der Wien, April 7, 1805. The symphony was announced as “A new grand Symphony in D sharp by Herr Ludwig van Beethoven, dedicated to his Excellence Prince von Lobkowitz.” Beethoven conducted. Czerny remembered that someone shouted from the gallery: “I’d give another kreutzer if they would stop.” Beethoven’s friends declared the work a masterpiece. Some said it would gain if it were shortened, if there were more “light, clearness, and unity.” Others found it a mixture of the good, the grotesque, the tiresome.