Beethoven very likely remembered from Mozart’s little Bastien und Bastienne overture, but he uses it here in the grand manner. The Funeral March begins with a striking phrase in C minor. A tender lyric passage in C major introduces an elegiac element into the sternness of the dirge. The Scherzo (“Allegro vivace” in E-flat major) is an enormously energetic movement and is interrupted by a Trio, prophetic in its turn of the Ninth Symphony and including a particularly brilliant and difficult passage for the horns.
The theme of the concluding variations (“Allegro molto” in E flat major) Beethoven had previously employed in his ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus. This theme, simple as it appears, contains the germ of one of the most remarkable sets of variations ever put down on paper.
The Third Symphony is universally known today less by its number and its key than by the title “Eroica” (“Heroic”). Everybody is familiar with the story of the relation of this symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte. Beethoven, sympathetic toward the republican ideals of the French Revolution, originally hailed General Bonaparte as the Great Liberator, but when in May 1804 he accepted the imperial crown of France, Beethoven saw him in an entirely different light. Such was his rage that he was on the point of destroying this symphony, which he had intended to dedicate to Bonaparte as a tribute to his services to mankind. Fortunately he desisted, tore Bonaparte’s name from the inscription, and entitled the work “Eroica.” It should not be forgotten, though, that when seventeen years later he heard of the death of Napoleon at St. Helena, he remarked, “I have already composed the proper music for that catastrophe,” which was an allusion to the Funeral March.
The meaning of the symphony as a heroic work is clear enough to anyone who hears the first movement and the Funeral March. Perhaps only Anton Rubinstein has ever questioned the heroic quality of the first movement and nobody has or could doubt the heroism of the mighty threnody that follows. But to fit the brilliant Scherzo and the dazzling set of variations into the picture has occasioned any amount of controversy. To go at length into the various theories is impossible here, but one might point out that the Scherzo has been interpreted as a scene in the hero’s camp, as an excited crowd waiting for the hero’s return and his triumphant address in the Trio, and as a picture of funeral games at the grave of the hero, such as one finds in the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, this last theory being that of Berlioz. The variations of the Finale have been plausibly explained as the nations of the earth bringing each its tribute of flowers to deck the hero’s monument. The first performance of this transcendent symphony took place in Vienna on April 7, 1805.
Symphony No. 4, in B-flat Major, Opus 60
Three years elapsed between the completion of the “Eroica” Symphony and the emergence of the Fourth Symphony. The latter was brought out in Vienna at a special subscription concert organized for Beethoven’s benefit in the middle of the latter part of March 1807. Little is known about the origin and composition of this work and its relation to the other circumstances of Beethoven’s life. Apparently he had been busy with his C minor Symphony (the Fifth) when in 1805 he laid that aside to write a symphony in B flat. This act of his is in line with his general procedure with regard to his symphonies, a lighter work following one of deep import. Robert Schumann, a distinguished critic as well as a great composer, likened the Fourth Symphony as related to the “Eroica” and the Fifth to “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants.” This comparison, however, lays too much emphasis on youthful ingenuousness, for humor and the joy of living have their place here, and romance as well, with touches of passion and of mystery. One of its admirers has called it a “symphony of love.”