Crossing Out Napoleon in Beethoven's Symphony No 3 "Eroica"
The Best Moments
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55
I'm Ludwig van Beethoven, and I'm glad to welcome you to the best moments of my Symphony No 3 "Eroica". You'll listen to the passages that carry the heart of a symphony roughly twice as long as most of its day, so you get its power in far less time. On this site my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our pieces the moment they begin, so give the Trainer a go whenever you like.
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Knock Knock, It's Me
I open the first movement with two loud E-flat chords, which is my way of knocking on the door so you know the music has started. Then a singing melody comes in, and I build the whole long movement out of that one simple idea.
Please Remain Seated, Very Slowly
After such a bold start I slow everything right down for a funeral march in C minor, marked Adagio assai, which is a polite way of saying very slow indeed. Nobody here is in a hurry, and people have played this march at memorials ever since, including the one for Mendelssohn in 1847.
The Joke Movement
I lighten the mood next with a scherzo, a word that means joke, so this is where I'm officially allowed to be playful. The music scurries along in lively, restless motion, and in the middle section I bring in three horns, which nobody had done before in a symphony.
Recycling Done Properly
I'll admit that in the finale I reuse a tune, because I'd already put it in a contredanse, in my ballet The Creatures of Prometheus and in some piano variations. This time I give it a full makeover with variations, a fugue, a slow stretch and a fast coda, so it hardly looks like the same tune.
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I hope you enjoyed learning about the best moments of Symphony No 3 "Eroica" as much as I enjoyed sharing them with you. When I think back on this symphony, I still hear the same thing: a piece that asks a great deal of its listeners and gives even more in return. I wrote it in the years after my Heiligenstadt Testament, when I was facing my worsening deafness and was determined to carry on with my art. Perhaps that is why the music sounds so human to me, with all its struggle, its grief and its stubborn hope. The first listeners in 1805 found it long and complex, and I understand that, because nothing like it had been heard before. Today, more than two centuries later, many conductors call it the greatest symphony of all, and I'm quietly pleased that the length no longer frightens anyone away. There is still so much more to explore in Symphony No 3 "Eroica", from the story of its dedication to the way the finale grew out of a theme I had used before. If you'd like to keep going, I invite you to click on the links provided and let the symphony show you something new. Listen once more with fresh ears, and I think you'll find that it has even more to say the second time around.
Recording: Internet Archive, http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/