Keeping score, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony:

1. The piece caused a sensation that changed the entire idea of what a symphony could be.
2. For the first time in music, the composer has projected himself as the hero of his own story.
3. This piece took Beethoven 3 years to write.
4. The Eroica is a contest between emotion and reason, and a search for what it means to be
human.
5. The first movement of the symphony is about life, about youth, hope, joy, frustration, anger,
confusion, celebration, and above all, energy!
6. The second movement concerns death, what has died? A hero? Hope? Innocence? How can we
make sense of this and go on after this?
7. The third movement answers the questions raised in the second movement because it takes up
the future and the joy of creativity.
8. The fourth movement is a shameless show off piece.
9. Beethoven presented himself as a musician to Vienna by playing some of his own compositions
but most importantly by improvising.
10. Beethoven’s improvisation were raw demonstrations of the unconscious which first drew people
to Beethoven’s art.
11. The improvisations were in fact rehearsals of daring musical ideas Beethoven would later explore
in his symphonies.
12. Beethoven is using the process of the symphony as a way of suggesting what really happens in
life: the wrong turns, the confusions, and the sense of hopelessness.
13. With Erorca, Beethoven predicted a world that later Wagner and ultimately Sigmund Freud would
explore: the realm of unconscious.
14. Beethoven was relying just on his powers as a musician when he came to Vienna.
15. Daniel Steibelt was a keyboard virtuoso, a musical showman and a master of special effects,
who encountered Beethoven, he had the ability to improvise freely on a theme of Beethoven’s,
which enraged Beethoven and he left the room. 8 days later they met for the second time, where
Steibelt was featured as a chamber music composer, and his quintet in D Major was being
performed: Right after the last notes of the piece were played, Beethoven turned the table on him:
He came up, grabbed the cellist's part, came over to the piano, turned the music upside down, then
he very rudely banged out a few notes he saw and commenced an hour long improvisation. This was
a big victory for Beethoven, establishing him as the pre-eminent musician in Vienna.
16. Steibelt was the creator of keyboard tremolo.
17. Eroica was inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution.
18. The second movement is called the Funeral March, a powerful musical evocation of the massive
state funerals then taking place in Paris.
19. In the second movement, the strings play as if they were drums. He could have used real drums
but he entrusts that rhythm to the strings.
20. Beethoven explores the whole expression of grief in the second movement.
21. The most rational form in music: The Fugue.
22. The Fugue in the second movement is huge, loud, slow, and drains every last bit of strength of
us.
23. In the second movement Beethoven uses the key of C minor to lock down the sense of tragedy,
and he uses the key of A flat Major to suggest possible visions of hope. It is the journey from
despair to hope, and back to despair. A symbol of the struggles he was having.
24. The third movement takes a new direction, it is based on energy. This movement is designed to
be amusing and fun, but a kind of human-fun.
25. The third movement and movements like it show how confident Beethoven was becoming in the
power of his imagination.
26. This symphony was originally to be the Bonaparte Symphony, but after Beethoven heard that
Napoleon has crowned himself as the Emperor of France, he erased the name of Napoleon
Bonaparte from the manuscript and the symphony became simply the Eroica, the heroic.
27. If the hero was not to be Napoleon, who was it? Maybe Beethoven: Having faced his own
demons after his hearing loss and choosing to continue making music, to continue living, he
embraced the hero in himself and ultimately in all of us.
28. The theme of the fourth movement is the theme Beethoven improvised on in his second
encounter with Steibelt, the notes he banged on the piano from the upside down cello part from
Steibelt's quintet.
29. Later in the fourth movement, Beethoven makes us realize that the simple notes from the theme
are worthy to express the triumphant climax of the life of a hero.
30. After the triumphant climax of the fourth movement, Beethoven has another very important
point to make, perhaps the most personal one in the whole symphony. He lets the music drift and
gradually it finds it's way back to those same notes we heard in the first pages of the symphony, but
now, they have been slowed down so they are like the yearning pulse of all life itself, and it keeps on
growing. Beethoven presents us utterly undisguised this sad concept of what it actually cost him to
write all of this.
31. Just like his improvisations he had to figure ant a way to end the piece with a big, solid, finish. A
Finalle Frenzy, a bunch of empty, noisy, virtuosity to let the audience know it's over!
32. Eroica was Beethoven’s favorite symphony, in this symphony, he envisioned where the music of
future was going.