Beethoven's Third Symphony introduced by Mariss Jansons

[Seán]

Of course it is difficult to say which Beethoven symphony is my most beloved – all these symphonies are wonderful. But if you really press me to choose one, it would be the Third Symphony that sits even deeper than the others in my world. It must have been part of my conducting life for at least 40 years. I didn’t want to mark my interpretation in some special or historic way when I recorded the piece in Tokyo in 2012, but all the same it was a time when I was very much connected to Beethoven.

I believe the Third Symphony represented a big step forward for Classical music, because in the First and Second Symphonies, yes, you feel it’s Beethoven, but it’s very connected to Mozart, to Haydn. Although you can already hear what I would call the special Beethoven spirit in the Second Symphony, it was the Third Symphony that brought a revolutionary change. It marked a complete change of direction for the symphonic repertoire. I refer both to the harmonic structure and to the design of the symphony. This was a revolution in every conceivable way. You could argue that a similar scherzo had already been written in the Second Symphony, but it was in this piece that Beethoven had a very monumental idea.

The second movement contains incredibly profound music, and the variations in the last movement represent a big step forward. The second movement is a funeral march, but above all it’s a march. In this march, it is essential to recognise that each beat is a crotchet, not a quaver, because if you treat each quaver as an individual step, as one beat, then you will end up taking the music incredibly slowly. You must also be careful to avoid making the music sound agitated, so you must take the music in two.

‘Sometimes composers use a mass of percussion and wind, but the content and atmosphere they produce are not as strong as this’

Perhaps this symphony is a little bit ‘Romantic’, say, in the third movement, because the horns give a kind of representation of nature, but I would not say it is the first Romantic symphony as such. For me it is Classical, but with a very, very big idea at its heart and enormous musical language. For example, in his finale, when Beethoven expresses the big culmination of the second theme using just three horns, double winds and strings, it feels as though he embraces the whole world, Mahler-style. It is unbelievable how this man could, with such limited means, achieve this spirit. It is the same orchestra that he’d used before, but with just one extra horn. What genius to introduce and fulfil big, profound and cosmic musical ideas with such limited resources. Sometimes composers use a mass of percussion and wind, but the content and atmosphere they produce are not as strong as this.

There are accidentals and chromatic notes scattered within the piece, but the first movement is clearly in E flat major and the second is in C minor, which is closely related. The third movement is again in E flat, so there is no very dramatic change in tonality. In this respect, the piece is very, very Classical. Even between his First and Second Symphonies, there is a great difference. The symphony that followed this one, No 4 in B flat, is perhaps not so dramatic a symphony, but in each work he said something new in musical terms.

Even by the time of his Second Symphony, Beethoven had written his Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he stated that he did not wish to live any more. I have read it many times and always there are tears in my eyes, yet at the same time he wrote such unbelievable music, full of light and optimism and even humour. He was a very highly developed spirit, a man above our world, with enormous spiritual energy. Of course, he wanted to dedicate the piece to a great man, so perhaps this greatness of feeling and ideas in the musical language was there because he wanted to express great, revolutionary ideas.

Although this is pure music, it does go beyond the traditional limits that were very common in Beethoven’s time. It goes much wider. It is a gigantic piece. It is one of the greatest symphonies any human being has created. The music expresses so much that there are not enough words to express what I feel when I conduct this symphony. It is so great and so profound.

We can assume and imagine, but we can never know for sure, how this symphony was performed in the composer’s time, because the contemporary accounts and markings from those who were with Beethoven are very difficult to judge. As far as the metronome markings are concerned, some continue to say that they are right and others say that they’re not. We know from the letters to Czerny that when Beethoven himself conducted, it was not easy to maintain ensemble because he introduced very many rubatos. So too many conflicting instructions and pieces of evidence make it hard to come up with any definitive guide to performance. All I can say is that we try to follow what is written in the score, but I don’t like dogmatic decisions based on assumptions about the past. In performance, even though this music goes through my inner world, it’s not a question of what I want. Together, we just want to express the wishes and the music of the composer. Where is the truth?

[fergus]

Beethoven 3 / Jansons:

I did not know Jansons’ version so I have listened to it a number of times on the clip provided which I thought was a really very good performance….



Right from the opening bar we hear the maturing voice and musical language of Beethoven. The whole concept of the work is so very different to what went before. It is a tremendous work. I think that the wonder of this work is its breadth, scope and emotional content given the period in which it was written; Jansons says that “it was in this piece that Beethoven had a very monumental idea. It is unbelievable how this man could, with such limited means, achieve this spirit. It is the same orchestra that he’d used before, but with just one extra horn. What genius to introduce and fulfil big, profound and cosmic musical ideas with such limited resources. Sometimes composers use a mass of percussion and wind, but the content and atmosphere they produce are not as strong as this”. For example, in his finale, when Beethoven expresses the big culmination of the second theme using just three horns, double winds and strings, it feels as though he embraces the whole world, Mahler-style. The major difference here though is the size of the orchestra both men had at their disposal and what they did with those resources. I think that the strength of this work is the manifestation of the spirit of Beethoven [as Jansons calls it]; the way in which Beethoven finds a way to express that sense of spirit, noble mindedness, a very strong sense of optimism and strong progressive ideas for Mankind. The genius of the man is how he managed to express and present these abstract concepts into his musical language. There must be a thesis in there on that alone!

The first movement is clearly in Sonata form so Beethoven is not shedding the “old style” and dramatically creating something new. What he did was to develop and extend what already existed. This revolutionary change that is talked about happens within this framework because what he did was to develop and expand both the development section and the coda. The purpose of both of these sections is to develop and elaborate on existing material already introduced and then to close off or round off the movement as with the case of the coda. It was the content and treatment of these two elements that make this work so remarkable when compared with what went before; the sheer multiplicity of ideas and, as a direct result of this, the sheer size of the movement.

The second movement is also a novel innovation in symphonic form i.e. the fact that it was a march was most unusual if not unique. As Jansons says the second movement contains incredibly profound music. So both the form and musical language/content of this movement are great departures from what has gone before. Beethoven lays bare his soul in this music and I have read somewhere in the past that this is a farewell to his previous life after he went deaf; the basis for this comment was that this symphony was written not long after Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament. Even here, however, Beethoven is not content to give us a simple march but he goes on to give that march the full development treatment.

The third movement Scherzo is a somewhat troublesome movement to get to grips with. I have read that some musicologists interpret this movement as a band of warriors gathering together after a battle for a drinking session and to celebrate. The very beginning of the movement is somewhat ambiguous in the presentation of its time signature. It is in fact written in 3/4 time but sounds like 4/4 until the oboe comes in. The strings and woodwinds argue this point out up to the section which employs syncopation to really knock the whole equilibrium off balance. I have checked the score and it really sounds different than it looks! Looking at the score also shows that the tonality is very vague, leading to more instability and tension. Is this deliberate to give the impression of drunken instability? Things settle down in the wonderful Trio section except that, naturally, the instability returns with the recapitulation and we go round and round again [in our drunken celebrations and merrymaking?] Does that sudden syncopation illustrate some drunken warrior falling over?

In the final movement Beethoven has one last big innovation for us in that he abandons the usual Rondo form for a Theme and Variations form. Apparently the theme for the fourth movement is a simple tune that is found in his 12 German Contradanses WoO 14, Die Geschöpfe des Promethus (The Creatures of Prometheus) Op 43 as well as the Variations, Op 35. In the Theme and Variations form it is usual for the theme to to be played in its entirety so that the listener will recognise and remember it when the subsequent variations come along. However, in this case, Beethoven elects to initially single out the bass part of the particular contradanse and use this as the theme. For the third variation Beethoven uses the treble [as opposed to the bass] theme played by the full orchestra and to make subsequent variations on this. As the movement moves on one can even hear the contradance itself being presented by the full orchestra. I find this a wonderful movement full of energy and lively interchanges and the work concludes with a fitting climax.

[Seán]

Gosh Fergus that is a marvellous post, well done.

[fergus]

Gosh Fergus that is a marvellous post, well done.

Thank you Seán; a labour of love done primarily for myself but published here as a courtesy to your having had the interest to and having gone to the trouble of posting the articles in the first place. What I have read so far has been very interesting and has made me rethink some aspects of my thoughts on these works.

[james]

Thanks Fergus for a great writeup .. it's one of my favourite symphonies.

James

[fergus]

Thanks Fergus for a great writeup .. it's one of my favourite symphonies.

James

Cheers James; it is indeed a great work. Do you have a particular favourite performance?

[james]

Probably because it was the first version I heard my favourite is Karajan. For years I though the Karajan version was too expensive and bought some other cheap version but finally gave in and got the Karajan version maybe ten years ago ..



Nowadays classical music is extremly cheap but I remember when DG records cost 47/6.

I still prefer the odd-numberred symphonies [except no.1] and no.7 is my favourite.

[fergus]

Probably because it was the first version I heard my favourite is Karajan. For years I though the Karajan version was too expensive and bought some other cheap version but finally gave in and got the Karajan version maybe ten years ago ..


Nowadays classical music is extremly cheap but I remember when DG records cost 47/6.

I still prefer the odd-numberred symphonies [except no.1] and no.7 is my favourite.

Well you obviously cannot go too far wrong with that particular cycle James! In general, as you well illustrate, although it can be a bith rich and expensive, the cream of performances usually does come to the top. I would have to mark No. 6 down as my favourite with No. 7 not too far behind!

[Seán]

From the Guardian website: http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomser ... om-service

Symphony guide: Beethoven's Third ('Eroica')
The story of the dedication of Beethoven’s Third is the stuff of symphonic legend. Whatever the truth, the victory at the end of the piece doesn’t just stand for Napoleon, or Beethoven, but for the possibilities of the symphony itself

by Tom Service

Imagine if events hadn’t intervened, and Beethoven had stuck to his original plan, and his Third Symphony had been called the “Bonaparte”. Imagine the reams of interpretation and analysis that would have gone into aligning the piece with the Napoleonic project, its humanist ideals and its all-too-human historical realisation. Yet that is what Beethoven wanted the piece we know now as the Eroica symphony to be: this piece, during its composition and at its completion in 1804, and even when he was negotiating its publication, was a piece for and about Napoleon. Beethoven designed the piece as a memorial to the heroic achievements of a ruler who he hoped would go on to inspire Europe to a humanist, libertarian, egalitarian revolution. That’s why the piece, you could say, describes Napoleon’s heroic struggles (the huge first movement), then narrates the sorrow of his death in grand public style (the funeral march slow movement), and, with the open-air energy and teeming imagination of the scherzo and finale, demonstrates how his legacy and spirit were to have lived on in the world.

Instead, the story of how the piece’s original dedication to Bonaparte was defaced by Beethoven is the stuff of symphonic legend, based on Ferdinand Ries’s memory of what happened when he told the composer that Napoleon had styled himself Emperor in May 1804. With that Napoleon became, for Beethoven - as Ries reports the composer saying - “a tyrant”, who “will think himself superior to all men”. (In fact, it’s even more complicated than that, since Beethoven the apparently great revolutionary was also willing to change the symphony’s dedication in order not to jeopardise the fee due from a royal patron.) Yet that scrawling out of Napoleon’s name doesn’t change the specificity of Beethoven’s inspiration in writing this symphony, the longest and largest-scale he had ever been composed, and the profound human, philosophical, and political motivations behind the musical innovations of this jaw-dropping piece.

And it’s those novelties that usually inspire the panegyrics with which the Eroica is often described: the shattering dissonances and rhythmic dislocations of the first movement, the expressive grandeur and terror of the funeral march, the ludicrously challenging horn writing of the scherzo, the gigantic expressive range – from comic to tragic to lyrical to heroic – in the fourth movement, a set of variations that in one fell swoop reinvent the symphonic finale in a way that arguably only the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth comes close to.

And yet, these musical revolutions are not so - well, revolutionary as they might at first seem. In this piece as much as anything he composed, Beethoven didn’t want to compromise his music’s communicative power. For his music to sound its message of change, to inspire audiences to consider a new world-view just as they are also asked to participate in a new scale of symphonic drama, Beethoven needed to make sure he was taking his listeners with him. Which is why this vastly complex piece is also completely clear in its structure and in its extreme states of expressive character.

Think about the first movement: yes, its scale of thought and ambition are unprecedented when you consider the whole structure, but on the level of its themes and their working out, Beethoven’s music is built on simple, graspable ideas: those two E flat major thunderbolts with which the symphony opens (Beethoven’s initial thought was actually to start with a dissonance, as he had done at the start of his First Symphony), and the undulating arpeggio in the cellos that starts out so serenely but which soon introduces a foreign note, a C sharp, the grit in the oyster that signals this movement’s emotional and harmonic ambition. The most radical moments are shocking when heard in isolation, like the grinding harmonic clash at the centre of the movement which seems to bring the music to a shrieking, shuddering impasse; or the enormity of the movement’s coda, turned by Beethoven into another opportunity to develop and explore his themes rather than simply to tie the room together with a handful of clichéd closing gestures. And there’s also a moment that made Hector Berlioz – otherwise Ludwig van’s greatest admirer – splutter with indignation that “if that was really what Beethoven wanted … it must be admitted that this whim is an absurdity”; the passage when the horn seems to announce the return to the main theme a few bars early. It is what Beethoven “really wanted”, but Berlioz’s comments remind us just how weird it actually is.

Yet when you hear a performance such as Frans Brüggen’s with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, or Otto Klemperer’s with the Philharmonia (strange bedfellows, you might think – one a period instrument guru, the other a big-band maestro of the old-school - but both create a mighty, granite-hewn first movement) it’s not so much the individual moments that take your breath away, but the cumulative momentum that builds from the first bar to the last. That’s the real revolution in the first movement of the Eroica symphony, and the fact that this implacable musical force should have been inspired by the representation of a great man’s works only makes it more remarkable: this movement is the definitive symphonic alchemy of musical structure and poetic meaning.

As is the rest of the symphony. One thought to guide you through the next three movements from the funeral march to the explosion of joy in the final bars: this music is simultaneously rigorously symphonic yet novel in its cavalcade of dramatic and expressive characters. The achievement of the Eroica is not that Beethoven “unifies” all of this diversity, but rather that he creates and unleashes a symphonic energy in this piece that both frames and releases this elemental human drama. It’s that mysterious momentum that is the true “heroism” of this symphony, so that the victory at the very end of the piece doesn’t just stand for Napoleon, or Beethoven, but for the possibilities of the symphony itself, which is revealed as a carrier of new weight and meaning as never before in its history. What started out as a (pre-) memorial to a great man and his humanist ideals turns into an essential embodiment of symphonic life-force.

Five key recordings
Roger Norrington/London Classical Players: this performance still breathes the air and energy of a performance practice revolution in action.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt/Chamber Orchestra of Europe: less iconoclastic than Norrington’s period instruments, Harnoncourt’s recording still thrills with discovery, as he takes the lessons of the historically informed movement to the modern instruments of the COE players.

Otto Klemperer/Philharmonia Orchestra: an interpretation that locks you into a mighty symphonic momentum from the first chord to the final coda.

Frans Brüggen/Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century: period instruments maybe, but Brüggen’s performance has a gigantic structural and emotional power.

Arturo Toscanini/NBC Symphony Orchestra (1939): not just the uncompromising Toscanini of implacable energy, there’s a flexibility and lyricism here that makes the music flow as well as foment a symphonic revolution.

Mark Elder conducts Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony at the BBC Proms on 9 August with the Hallé Orchestra.

[fergus]

From the Guardian website: http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomser ... om-service

Symphony guide: Beethoven's Third ('Eroica')
The story of the dedication of Beethoven’s Third is the stuff of symphonic legend. Whatever the truth, the victory at the end of the piece doesn’t just stand for Napoleon, or Beethoven, but for the possibilities of the symphony itself

by Tom Service

Imagine if events hadn’t intervened, and Beethoven had stuck to his original plan, and his Third Symphony had been called the “Bonaparte”. Imagine the reams of interpretation and analysis that would have gone into aligning the piece with the Napoleonic project, its humanist ideals and its all-too-human historical realisation. Yet that is what Beethoven wanted the piece we know now as the Eroica symphony to be: this piece, during its composition and at its completion in 1804, and even when he was negotiating its publication, was a piece for and about Napoleon. Beethoven designed the piece as a memorial to the heroic achievements of a ruler who he hoped would go on to inspire Europe to a humanist, libertarian, egalitarian revolution. That’s why the piece, you could say, describes Napoleon’s heroic struggles (the huge first movement), then narrates the sorrow of his death in grand public style (the funeral march slow movement), and, with the open-air energy and teeming imagination of the scherzo and finale, demonstrates how his legacy and spirit were to have lived on in the world.

Instead, the story of how the piece’s original dedication to Bonaparte was defaced by Beethoven is the stuff of symphonic legend, based on Ferdinand Ries’s memory of what happened when he told the composer that Napoleon had styled himself Emperor in May 1804. With that Napoleon became, for Beethoven - as Ries reports the composer saying - “a tyrant”, who “will think himself superior to all men”. (In fact, it’s even more complicated than that, since Beethoven the apparently great revolutionary was also willing to change the symphony’s dedication in order not to jeopardise the fee due from a royal patron.) Yet that scrawling out of Napoleon’s name doesn’t change the specificity of Beethoven’s inspiration in writing this symphony, the longest and largest-scale he had ever been composed, and the profound human, philosophical, and political motivations behind the musical innovations of this jaw-dropping piece.

And it’s those novelties that usually inspire the panegyrics with which the Eroica is often described: the shattering dissonances and rhythmic dislocations of the first movement, the expressive grandeur and terror of the funeral march, the ludicrously challenging horn writing of the scherzo, the gigantic expressive range – from comic to tragic to lyrical to heroic – in the fourth movement, a set of variations that in one fell swoop reinvent the symphonic finale in a way that arguably only the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth comes close to.

And yet, these musical revolutions are not so - well, revolutionary as they might at first seem. In this piece as much as anything he composed, Beethoven didn’t want to compromise his music’s communicative power. For his music to sound its message of change, to inspire audiences to consider a new world-view just as they are also asked to participate in a new scale of symphonic drama, Beethoven needed to make sure he was taking his listeners with him. Which is why this vastly complex piece is also completely clear in its structure and in its extreme states of expressive character.

Think about the first movement: yes, its scale of thought and ambition are unprecedented when you consider the whole structure, but on the level of its themes and their working out, Beethoven’s music is built on simple, graspable ideas: those two E flat major thunderbolts with which the symphony opens (Beethoven’s initial thought was actually to start with a dissonance, as he had done at the start of his First Symphony), and the undulating arpeggio in the cellos that starts out so serenely but which soon introduces a foreign note, a C sharp, the grit in the oyster that signals this movement’s emotional and harmonic ambition. The most radical moments are shocking when heard in isolation, like the grinding harmonic clash at the centre of the movement which seems to bring the music to a shrieking, shuddering impasse; or the enormity of the movement’s coda, turned by Beethoven into another opportunity to develop and explore his themes rather than simply to tie the room together with a handful of clichéd closing gestures. And there’s also a moment that made Hector Berlioz – otherwise Ludwig van’s greatest admirer – splutter with indignation that “if that was really what Beethoven wanted … it must be admitted that this whim is an absurdity”; the passage when the horn seems to announce the return to the main theme a few bars early. It is what Beethoven “really wanted”, but Berlioz’s comments remind us just how weird it actually is.

Yet when you hear a performance such as Frans Brüggen’s with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, or Otto Klemperer’s with the Philharmonia (strange bedfellows, you might think – one a period instrument guru, the other a big-band maestro of the old-school - but both create a mighty, granite-hewn first movement) it’s not so much the individual moments that take your breath away, but the cumulative momentum that builds from the first bar to the last. That’s the real revolution in the first movement of the Eroica symphony, and the fact that this implacable musical force should have been inspired by the representation of a great man’s works only makes it more remarkable: this movement is the definitive symphonic alchemy of musical structure and poetic meaning.

As is the rest of the symphony. One thought to guide you through the next three movements from the funeral march to the explosion of joy in the final bars: this music is simultaneously rigorously symphonic yet novel in its cavalcade of dramatic and expressive characters. The achievement of the Eroica is not that Beethoven “unifies” all of this diversity, but rather that he creates and unleashes a symphonic energy in this piece that both frames and releases this elemental human drama. It’s that mysterious momentum that is the true “heroism” of this symphony, so that the victory at the very end of the piece doesn’t just stand for Napoleon, or Beethoven, but for the possibilities of the symphony itself, which is revealed as a carrier of new weight and meaning as never before in its history. What started out as a (pre-) memorial to a great man and his humanist ideals turns into an essential embodiment of symphonic life-force.

Five key recordings
Roger Norrington/London Classical Players: this performance still breathes the air and energy of a performance practice revolution in action.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt/Chamber Orchestra of Europe: less iconoclastic than Norrington’s period instruments, Harnoncourt’s recording still thrills with discovery, as he takes the lessons of the historically informed movement to the modern instruments of the COE players.

Otto Klemperer/Philharmonia Orchestra: an interpretation that locks you into a mighty symphonic momentum from the first chord to the final coda.

Frans Brüggen/Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century: period instruments maybe, but Brüggen’s performance has a gigantic structural and emotional power.

Arturo Toscanini/NBC Symphony Orchestra (1939): not just the uncompromising Toscanini of implacable energy, there’s a flexibility and lyricism here that makes the music flow as well as foment a symphonic revolution.

Mark Elder conducts Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony at the BBC Proms on 9 August with the Hallé Orchestra.

I don't usually watch the Proms Seán but I may watch that performance tonight; I will see.