For early listeners, then, the Third Symphony was associated with a broader heroic ideal. The published title page read: ‘Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand uomo (‘Heroic Symphony, composed to celebrate the remembrance of a great man’). As Scott Burnham points out, ‘it was an age of renewed interest in epic heroes and heroic dramas’, from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare to Goethe and Schiller. There have been many theories put forward about who was the great man Beethoven might have had in mind, though Napoleon was not referenced in reviews – hardly surprising in the political circumstances. Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia was one proposal, or Beethoven’s early patron Maximilian Franz, the Elector of Bonn. It may not have been a man at all, but a god who was being celebrated. The theme of the Third Symphony’s finale came from Beethoven’s ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus: the figure of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to bring humans life and civilisation, combined hero and rebel.

For some, the hero and rebel was Beethoven himself. His hearing was worsening and while he took a defiant stance in some letters, it diminished his willingness to socialise which, in turn, threatened to impact his professional standing, as well as his ability to perform and compose. The long letter to his brothers known as the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ was written in October 1802. Again, it was not discovered until after his death, which added an extra layer of tragedy to Beethoven’s explanation of how hard life had become: ‘Though born with a fiery, lively temperament, susceptible to the diversion of society, I soon had to withdraw myself, to spend my life alone. […] it was impossible for me to say to people, “Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf”’. He admitted he had contemplated suicide: ‘Only my art held me back […] it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me’. Beethoven’s determination to overcome adversity was furthered by the ‘new way’ of composing he announced to friends around the same time, of which the Eroica Symphony is exemplary.

The sense of heroism and rebellion inherent to the music of the Symphony is perhaps the greatest significance of the title Eroica. The sheer length of the work was audacious. Beethoven even added a note to the violin part of the first edition that the Symphony was ‘purposefully written to be longer than is usual’. While he did not depart from the conventional four movement model, Beethoven expanded each movement from within, playing with harmonic and formal expectations. Nineteenth-century critics resorted to poetic imagery and narratives to explain the characters and structural peculiarities of the Symphony. One likened the opening chords to ‘two blows from the heavy cavalry that split the orchestra like a turnip’. Beethoven apparently approved of Berlin critic A.B. Marx’s description of the first movement as a battle from which the hero emerges victorious; the second as a walk through a corpse-strewn battlefield; the third as troops massing together; and the fourth as the warriors returning home in peacetime.

The ‘continuous tumult’ of the Symphony’s orchestration may have supported Marx’s militaristic programme for the work. It was also a point of contention, with critics complaining about the noisiness of the score. The ensemble is no larger than was typical for the time, but Beethoven takes full advantage of the varied timbres of the orchestra. In fact, only one instrument is added: a third horn. On the one hand, the prominence of the horn section throughout the Symphony enhances its heroic aspects, as when they take over the central Trio of the third movement. On the other hand, the third horn proves troublesome; it seems to enter a bar early at the recapitulation of the first movement – a deliberate ‘mistake’ or, perhaps, a small act of rebellion on Beethoven’s part. There is a similarly unsettling moment at the start of the Symphony, when the simple triadic melody played by the cellos suddenly diverts from E flat major to a C sharp: a revolutionary harmonic move, which suggests that the hero’s journey will not be straightforward. During the Napoleonic Wars, funeral marches by François-Joseph Gossec and Luigi Cherubini were very popular in Vienna. The rumbling bass-line of the second movement may be heard as a muffled drum-beat, reminiscent of the funeral march from Ferdinando Paer’s Melodramma eroico after Homer’s Iliad, Achille, which Beethoven had much admired at its premiere in 1801. Perhaps Achilles was another rebel-hero for the Eroica Symphony. Beethoven liked to quote Homer: he copied several lines from the Iliad into his Tagebuch, including Apollo on Achilles’ desecration of Hector’s corpse: ‘For Fate gave Man the courage to endure’.

Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony received its public premiere at a benefit concert for the violinist Franz Clement at the Theater an der Wien on 7 April 1805. Clement’s Violin Concerto was given its first performance on the same programme. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, composed less than two years later, shares the same key and use similar orchestral forces. Both Clement and Beethoven make prominent use of similar figuration in the solo violin part, especially the use of broken octaves – as are heard in the opening ascending line of Beethoven’s Concerto. While it is unclear whether Beethoven was paying homage to his friend or showing how things might have been done better, there are clear connections between them. Indeed, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto received its first public performance at another benefit concert for Clement, on 23 December 1806. It was preceded by an overture by Méhul; the rest of the programme consisted of overtures and choruses by Handel, operatic numbers by Mozart and Cherubini, and Clement improvising a violin phantasy and his long-established party trick of playing ‘a Sonata on one string played with the violin upside-down’. The autograph score bears the inscription ‘Concerto par Clemenza pour Clement, primo Violino e Direttore al theatroa Vienne, dal L.v.Bthvn. 1806’, Beethoven characteristically punning on the violinist’s name, although the work itself was dedicated to his childhood friend, Stephan von Breuning.

While Beethoven may have turned his back on Napoleon by the time he began to compose his Violin Concerto, the strongest models for the genre, for both him and Clement, came from France. According to Arnold Schering, ‘The French Violin Concerto is a product of the mood of the Revolution, a blood brother of the youthful operas of Cherubini, Méhul, representing the best qualities of the French nation’. Beethoven was familiar with the playing styles and concertos of renowned violinists Giovanni Battista Viotti (an Italian who worked in Paris and London) and the Frenchmen Rodolphe Kreutzer and Pierre Rode (both of whom had violin sonatas dedicated to them by Beethoven). Concertos of the French school tended to begin with a movement in (revolutionary) military style, followed by a ‘romance’, and ending with a rondo. The three-movement lay-out of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is similar, with the march-like opening beats on the timpani a possible nod to the trend for militaristic sound effects.

The central Larghetto varies the simple lyricism of the Romanze over a chaconne bass. If, in the first movement, the soloist seems embedded in the orchestra, there is now a clearer sense of dialogue between instruments, with the violin line meditating on the musical ideas offered by the strings and winds. The slow movement leads directly into the finale, as was fairly common for the time – Beethoven makes similar links in his Triple Concerto and the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos. Although Beethoven may blur the boundary between soloist and orchestra in this Concerto, in each movement he provides opportunities for a cadenza. There was a risk in so doing that a violinist might take this as the opportunity for them to show off their skills at length – although it seems that Clement refrained from playing his instrument upside-down on this occasion. Beethoven, renowned for his virtuosic improvisations at the keyboard and unafraid of challenging tradition, might have saluted the performers as heroes and rebels.

Laura Tunbridge is a Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and author of Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (Viking, 2020).