It’s springtime — the flowers are blooming, new shoots are poking up through last winter’s leaf-litter, and the herring are swimming heroically upstream to spawn. We are struck by “that familiar conviction that life [is] beginning over” again, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.
In honor of that heroic rebirth that the world goes through each Spring, and because it is Sunday morning, here is Beethoven’s wonderful First Movement of his Third Symphony, the Eroica or Heroic Symphony.
Beethoven, Symphony No. 3, Mvmt. 1
The Third Symphony is often considered part of the transition from Classicism to Romanticism that accompanied the French Revolution (The French, incidentally, are having their General Election today, between centrist President Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen; the French far-right has been opposed to the Republic since 1789).
Beethoven, in common with artists, musicians, poets, and writers like Wordsworth, both Shelleys, Lord Byron, and others, found themselves entranced and intoxicated by the democratic and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution. For Beethoven, as for others in his generation, these ideals were embodied in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte.
(Jacques-Louis David, “Napoleon Crossing the Alps,” 1801-1805. Via Wikimedia Commons)
This was a common-place viewpoint. The Revolution, and Bonaparte as its most successful general, swept away the accrued weight of a thousand years of feudalism in France, of course, but also in Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, The Netherlands, and elsewhere across Western and Central Europe. Even philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who was more of a fan of the Prussian state than democratic egalitarianism, considered Napoleon to be the personal and corporeal embodiment of World-History (which had strongly metaphysical overtones for Hegel).
Yet when Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French in 1804, Beethoven was outraged, and reportedly tore up and/or crossed out, depending on the version of the story, the dedication page to this, his Third, “Heroic” symphony, originally intended as a paean to Bonaparte.
I have several quite substantial articles in progress, that are requiring a bit of research and leg-work to make sure I am getting accurately — in the meantime, though, I wanted to share some music that will hopefully cheer this vernal Sunday.
And as Beethoven would no doubt have joined our friends in the French Republic in saying — Liberte’, Egalite’, Fraternite’! (Liberty, Equality, Siblinghood)!