No. 24

Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, Eroica

Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Symphony in E-flat, with the subtitle of “Eroica” or “Heroic” was voted as the greatest symphony ever written by 151 conductors asked to vote by the BBC Music Magazine. There is good reason for that. It was the symphony that made the symphony the most important musical genre of them all. After Beethoven’s “Eroica” no serious composer could avoid righting a symphony, not even the men who tried to turn music history from the symphony, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. The only major composer of the 19th century who managed to avoid writing a symphony was Giuseppe Verdi and his contemporary reputation paid for that fact. But that wasn’t all. Beethoven’s Third Symphony also shed its radiance behind it, justifying the continued place on the concert platform of Haydn’s and Mozart’s symphonies. Neither Haydn nor Mozart wrote their symphonies expecting that they would be played and enjoyed in the 21st century; yet they are. Beethoven did that; because he did expect that his symphonies would outlive him, and he wrote them as though he were Michelangelo carving stone. Beethoven’s Third Symphony is the musical equivalent of Michelangelo’s “David”.

Jan Swafford describes Beethoven as he composes the Third Symphony this way: In a winegrower’s cottage in Oberdöbling in summer of 1803, [Beethoven] settles down to work. As epic dreams unroll before his imagination, he rushes to realize them on the keyboard, in his head, in notes scratched onto the page. He spends hours lost in his raptus, improvising at the keyboard, ideas flowing from his fingers into sound, sketchbook on a table beside him to fix the sounds before they are gone. As he writes out the sketches he drums the beat with his hands and feet, cursing the notes for their recalcitrance. For Beethoven composing is a process physical as well as mental; his whole body is involved in it. Every day in all weathers he walks in hills and woods and country lanes, growling and howling and waving his arms conducting the music in his head, stopping to pencil ideas in the pocket sketchbooks he carries with him.

From Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford, Houghton Mifflin, 2011.

Top 40 Countdown

A few years ago the listeners to WNED Classical told us what they thought a TOP 40 list of Classical pieces should be. Six hundred and twenty-two different pieces were put forward, and over nine hundred listeners participated. The result, The WNED Classical Top 40, was both startling and comforting. There were a number of surprises, Stravinsky and Copland made the list; Mendelssohn and Schumann did not! It was comforting to know that the two most popular composers were Beethoven and J.S. Bach. The biggest surprise of all was the piece that crowned the list as No. 1.