The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ludwig van Beethoven · a symphony in E flat major, Op. 55, published as “Sinfonia Eroica” · four movements, the second a funeral march, the fourth variations on a bass and theme from the Prometheus ballet · about 45 to 52 minutes in performance
Mode
Symphony as ethical and historical drama; sonata form as process, funeral march, scherzo and variations on a bass
Mythos
The hero’s agon, death and afterlife; Prometheus, who brings fire and art to men
Phase
Four movements; E flat, C minor, E flat, E flat, with C and its relations the threat throughout
Presentation
Concert music; four movements for an orchestra of paired woodwind, three horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings
Register
From two hammered chords and a broken theme to a public grief, a hunt in the open air and a contredanse made a hymn; no word anywhere
Scale
One self, a city in mourning, a titan and the order he founds; one triad
Governing Proposition
A theme that cannot finish itself is broken in a crisis and remade until it stands whole; a death is then mourned in the street, energy returns from a murmur, and a new order is built upward from a bare bass. The wager of the work is that a self is not given but achieved, and that its achievement passes through a death that is public.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Two chords, struck by the whole orchestra on E flat, and then the theme. It is built on the notes of the E flat triad, the plainest material in music, in three beats to the bar, and it does not finish. In the seventh bar it falls to C sharp, a note outside the key, and the line that sounded like a beginning is heard to be a question. The self begins unfinished. The movement, Allegro con brio, E flat, 3/4, spends its whole length answering that step, and its exposition, marked to be repeated, is counted here with the repeat.
In the development the music turns on itself. Sforzando chords cut across the bar, two beats against three, and grind on a dissonance of E against F until the music seems to break. The exposition’s material cannot go on as it was. What follows the crisis is new: a theme in E minor, which the exposition never held, and which is required because what came before has been broken. A development was where a symphony worked its themes; here it is where a theme is lost and something else must be found.
Before the recapitulation a single horn enters pianissimo with the theme in the tonic while the violins still hold the dominant, four bars early. Ries, by his own account, took it for a mistake. The recapitulation comes before it is due, and the C sharp returns as a turning point. Then the coda, which is not appendage but a second development. At its height the trumpets give the theme as a tonic melody, whole for the first time. The triad of the first bars has become a tune, and the movement has shown how: through crisis, not around it.
Movement II
Marcia funebre: Adagio assai, C minor, 2/4. In place of a slow movement Beethoven writes a funeral march. It opens muffled, in the minor, and the basses answer the theme with a growling ornament like a drum. This is not a private lament. It is a funeral in the street, a procession, a grief that belongs to a city, and it comes directly after the first movement’s achievement. The death in this symphony stands second, in the middle of the life, and not at its end.
Then the march becomes a fugato. The theme is taken up voice after voice in counterpoint, and the entries pile on one another and rise into a fortissimo of a whole city’s mourning. Counterpoint here is not learning on display but mass: many voices carrying one grief, each entering because the one before could not carry it alone. The fugato is load-bearing. Take it away and the march stays a procession that passes; with it, the procession is joined by everyone.
At the end the theme falls apart. It is given in pieces, separated by silences, until there is nothing left to give. The first movement took a broken theme and made it whole; the march takes a whole theme and unmakes it. The page has been taken far outside the concert hall. The march became a model for funeral music in concert and in public life, it is played at state funerals and memorials, and Strauss quoted it in Metamorphosen in 1945.
Movement III
Scherzo: Allegro vivace, E flat, 3/4. After the funeral, energy returns, and it returns from almost nothing. The scherzo begins as a murmur, quiet and quick, and builds. It sets three beats against itself and breaks into sudden bars of two, the same rhythmic command that cut across the first movement’s development, now turned to play. The scherzo’s opening is brilliant rather than elevated, and it is meant to be: what has died does not come back in grandeur but in motion.
The trio belongs to the three horns. The orchestra is paired flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, two trumpets, timpani and strings, with three horns, and here the three have the music to themselves. They give a call in the open air, the music of the hunt, and reach a pastoral grandeur. The instrument that entered alone and early in the first movement now speaks as a choir.
Of the four movements this is the one the cycle could most easily do without. It is perfect of its kind, but it could be exchanged for another of its kind and the argument of the whole would largely stand. Its place in the law is clear all the same. After a theme has been taken apart into silence, the scherzo rebuilds energy out of a murmur, and so prepares a finale that will build a theme out of a bass.
Movement IV
Finale: Allegro molto, E flat, 2/4. The finale gives its bass line alone, bare and pizzicato. It is not yet a theme; it is the ground of one. Two variations are built on it before the theme proper arrives above it. The finale does not present its subject but constructs it in the hearing, from the bottom up, and the listener hears an order being made.
Bass and theme come from Beethoven’s ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Op. 43 (1801), the story of the titan who brings fire and art to men. He had used the tune in a contredanse, WoO 14, and in the piano variations Op. 35 (1802). A dance from the Viennese ballroom becomes the material of a creation myth, and the finale’s process is the myth: a bare line given form, then voice, then a whole society of voices.
Then the chain: fugatos, an episode in G minor in the Hungarian manner, and near the end a Poco andante in which the contredanse slows into a hymn before a Presto whirls the work to its close. The chain is looser than what came before; its sections could be reordered or shortened with less loss than anything in the first two movements, and dance, fugue and hymn stand side by side as if under different laws. They are under one. Unmade in the march, the material is remade here, from the bass, as the first movement’s theme was remade from its crisis.
Movement V
The symphony was composed chiefly in 1803 and 1804. It was first heard privately at Prince Lobkowitz’s in 1804, and in public on 7 April 1805, at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, with Beethoven conducting. It was roughly twice the length of a typical late symphony by Haydn or Mozart, the longest symphony then written, and the early reviews complained of it. The scale was not permitted by the argument but compelled by it: a theme that must be broken and remade needs the room to be both.
A copyist’s score survives with a title that names the work “intitolata Bonaparte”; the words are scratched out so hard that the paper is torn. Ferdinand Ries told of Beethoven tearing a title page when he heard that Napoleon had made himself emperor, in May 1804; that is testimony, not document. When the parts were published in Vienna in 1806, by the Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie, the work was dedicated to Lobkowitz and called “Sinfonia Eroica”, a memorial to “un grand Uomo”. The hero is no longer named. The crossing-out has become part of what the work means.
The performance tradition has never settled it: Habeneck in Paris, Wagner, Weingartner, Toscanini, Furtwängler, Klemperer and the period-instrument readings each made a different work of the march’s tempo, the repeat and the horn. Schenker gave it a long analysis in 1930, and Burnham’s Beethoven Hero followed in 1995. The heroic style is named after it, and the century of symphonies that followed measured itself against it. Who the hero is stays open. What the work shows does not: a self is not given but made, through a crisis and through a death that is mourned in public.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not charged; the question is whether the parts are required. The first movement resists the subtractive test almost everywhere. The C sharp of the seventh bar is the seed the movement spends its length resolving; the development’s new theme in E minor is required because the climax before it has broken the exposition’s material; the coda is not appendage but the place where the theme first sounds whole. The march’s fugato and its last crumbling of the theme bear load. The test finds give in two places: the finale’s chain of variations, whose fugatos, G minor episode and Poco andante could be reordered or shortened with less loss, and the scherzo, which could be exchanged for another of its kind with the cycle’s argument largely intact.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a self is not given but achieved, through crisis, and its achievement passes through a death that is public. The first movement’s theme cannot become itself until the development has broken it with hammered dissonance and the music has remade it; only in the coda does it stand as melody. The march then puts that self into a collective grief, a funeral in the street rather than a private lament. The finale shows a new order built from the bass up, as the Prometheus fable says culture was made. Held down because the listener assembles the proposition from a sequence whose order, death in second place and a dance after it, stays open to more than one meaning, and much of its force is affect rather than claim.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height reaches the ceiling of the symphonic repertory of its age, and often. The two opening chords; the development’s sforzando hemiolas grinding on a dissonance of E against F until the music seems to break; the pianissimo horn of the false recapitulation, in the tonic over the dominant; the coda’s trumpets. In the march, the muffled C minor opening with the basses’ growling ornament, the fugato rising to a fortissimo of a whole city’s mourning, and the last page, the theme in pieces between silences. The horn trio reaches a pastoral grandeur, and the Poco andante turns a contredanse into a hymn. Held from the top by the scherzo’s opening and much of the finale’s variation work, brilliant rather than elevated, and by forces smaller than the Ninth’s.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The hero’s agon, his death and the life that follows it are the order of the cycle: struggle in the first movement, a public funeral in the second, the return of energy in the third, and in the fourth a creation myth whose material is literally Prometheus’s, the ballet tune of the titan who brings fire and art to men. The finale’s process, from bass to theme, stages the Promethean act in sound. The particular stays particular: a Bonaparte crossed out, a memorial to “un grand Uomo”, a contredanse from Viennese ballrooms. Held below the summit because part of the myth is carried by title, source and history outside the notes, and the relation of funeral to finale is suggested, not narrated.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the symphony of Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven’s own first two. The departures are many: a first movement of a new scale, whose coda is a second development; a dissonance held in the development past any precedent in a symphony; a new theme in the development; the horn’s early entry, which Ries, by his own account, took for a mistake; a funeral march in place of a slow movement; a trio for three horns; a finale of variations on a bass that begins bare and pizzicato. The stake was real: a public of 1805 that found it too long, and a dedication withdrawn from the most famous man in Europe. Held below the top by a road Beethoven had prepared himself, in the piano variations Op. 35 on the same theme, and by movement types stretched but still the classical four.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The sonata form here is a process, not a container: the theme is a triad left unfinished at its first statement, and the form’s stages, exposition, crisis, a new theme in the development, a recapitulation that arrives before it is due and a coda as fulfilment, are the stages of its becoming a melody. Recast as a single programmatic overture, the work would lose the death and its aftermath; as separate pieces, the sense that the funeral stands in the middle of a life. The finale starts from the bass alone and adds the theme only after two variations, so the listener hears construction. Held below the top because the later variations are less necessary than the first movement’s every stage.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence, over two centuries. The performance tradition is unbroken and contested: Habeneck in Paris, Wagner’s conducting, Weingartner, Toscanini, Furtwängler, Klemperer, and the period-instrument readings of the last forty years, each producing a different work in the march’s tempo, the repeat and the horn’s entry. In print: A. B. Marx, Wagner’s essay, Berlioz’s, Schenker’s long analysis of 1930, Walter Riezler, Lewis Lockwood’s sketch studies, Scott Burnham’s Beethoven Hero (1995), Thomas Sipe’s handbook and Dahlhaus. The questions stay open: who the hero is; whether the work is biography, politics or a theory of form; why the funeral comes second; what the C sharp means; whether the finale resolves or abandons the first movement’s argument.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The work reorganised what a symphony could be, from entertainment of the highest order into an ethical and historical drama of one shape across four movements, and it fixed the symphony as the culminating public genre of instrumental music. The concept of Beethoven’s middle period is in large part dated from it. Part of the reach is shared with the Fifth and the Ninth, which carried the same redirection within one maker’s work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: decisive and immediate. The heroic style is named after it; the nineteenth-century symphony, from Schubert’s Ninth through Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler, measures itself against Beethoven’s, and this is the first to make that demand. Its march became a model for funeral music in concert and in public life, and Strauss quotes it in Metamorphosen (1945).
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated on form, presence and fabric. The score survives whole and authoritative in Beethoven’s text, with no lost or doubtful movement. It has been in the concert repertory since 1805, in every orchestra’s, and has been recorded from the early electrical era in many dozens of versions; its march is played at state funerals and memorials. The surface fixed to its moment is Napoleon, and the crossing-out has turned that date into part of the work’s meaning rather than a stain on it. Two centuries, a text whole and performed, and a presence as wide as any concert work’s earn the tenth above the usual centre that wide presence may earn. No more: two centuries do not outscore millennia.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The making bears weight at the highest level. Motivic economy: a triad and a chromatic step generate the whole of the first movement. Rhythmic command: hemiolas and syncopations set 3/4 against itself in the development, and the scherzo breaks into sudden bars of two. Counterpoint bears structure in three places, the march’s fugato and the finale’s two fugatos. The horns are given a new role, three of them in the trio and one alone at the false recapitulation. The charge is small and specific: some of the finale’s transitions are formulaic, the wind writing sometimes doubles where a later Beethoven would have voiced, and the balance of brass and strings in the tuttis has needed conductors’ attention since Wagner. Level with Winterreise; below the Goldberg’s contrapuntal command.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the march’s last bars, where the theme dies in pieces, and the finale’s Presto, a whirl of triumph on a contredanse. One law governs both: material is unmade and remade. The first movement’s theme is broken and rebuilt; the march’s theme is taken apart into silence; the scherzo rebuilds energy out of a murmur; the finale builds its theme from a bare bass. The key scheme serves the law, E flat, C minor, E flat, E flat, with C and its relations the threat throughout, and the C sharp of the seventh bar returns as a turning point in the recapitulation and coda. The strain is in the finale, where dance, fugue and hymn stand side by side and the law holds less audibly.
Score: 9.1 / 10
For a work without words the orders held are many, and one law holds them. Consciousness, in the self that breaks and remakes itself; history and the state, in the revolutionary hero, the withdrawn dedication and the public funeral; death and mourning, collective rather than private; the social order, in a march for the street and a contredanse for the ballroom; myth and the sacred, in Prometheus and the hymn of the Poco andante; the natural order, glimpsed in the open air of the horn trio. What holds the axis here is absence and medium: the family, love and labour do not appear, and a symphony holds its orders as forces, not as persons in a world. History and the state lie inside the structure, which sets it above Otello and Winterreise.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable and The Made at 9.5, then The Living Form at 9.4. Two centuries of contested performance and analysis, a redirection of the symphony that the century after it measured itself against, a text whole and everywhere performed, and a making in which a triad and a chromatic step generate a movement whose form is the theme’s becoming.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.2: for a work without words it holds many orders, with history and the state inside its structure, but the family, love and labour are absent and a symphony holds its orders as forces. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 8.8, a proposition the listener assembles from an order of movements open to more than one meaning, and The Inevitable at 9.0, held by the finale’s looser chain and a scherzo that could be exchanged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.5, The Swerve at 9.3, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score of the Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55, in its standard performing version: the four movements as published in parts in Vienna in 1806 and played in the modern repertory, with the first movement’s exposition repeat counted as part of the work, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music. No score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. No later arrangement, cut or retouching is scored, and no single performance is the object. There are no sung words. Beethoven’s headings and markings are given as he wrote them; the only other words quoted are from the title on the surviving copyist’s score and the title page of 1806. Ries’s account of the torn title page is reported as testimony. Figures that could not be verified, among them the bar counts of the first movement, its coda and its development, the date the sketches began, the fate of the autograph and whether a third horn had a precedent in a symphony, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.