Nice youtube clip. click on it & first comment I saw is
Are you fucking retarded? 50 Cent? Did your whore of a mother feed you shit when you were a fucking baby? Are you insane?

Whoever made that comment, sign them up immediately for this thread. Exactly the critical acuity we're looking for.

I'm in, too!

For better or worse the BBC's excellent and freely listenable Discovering Music series has done various Beethoven symphonies, but not the third:

www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/discoveringmusic/listeninglibrary.shtml

Well worth a look for anything else you might be interested in.

Meanwhile, you might want to have a look at this dramatic reconstruction from the Beeb from a few years ago:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=J71gAMPz3_4

Oy, I can't seem to get past Beethoven and Lobkowitz being Englishmen.

Bruno wrote:
I hope Andy C will forgive me for throwing this out there-

When you listen to the last movement, which is a theme and variations, ask yourself two questions: What is the theme, and What is unusual about it?

I think I know what you're getting at here. It had never struck me before but thinking about it on the bus to work this morning, there is definitely something unusual. I'll keep quiet for the moment though, to give others time to listen to it.

I'm completely in. Classic FM is probably the only radio station I listen to these days, but it's always passive listening. I really need to step up my game because I'd love to become really engrossed with a new musical obsession, it's been a while since the last one.

All I know so far is that I like the popular stuff, don't like much of the modern stuff. Shall give the first installment a go within the next 24 hours...

I'm there with bells on.

We'll let you know when we do the 1812 Overture.

Unless they're cowbells, in which case he'll have to wait till we do Strauss' Alpine Symphony.

I've been trying to avoid referring to programme notes and analyses as I've been listening - I don't know whether trying to listen to the work in such a vaccuum is creating too artificial a context for something that, if it has any meaning at all, provides its meaning in the context of its interaction with the world. I wonder how many of us are doing this, and how many are exploring the background while they listen. Difficult to avoid the "Eroica" tag or the Napoleonic associations - is anybody trying to do this?

As for Bruno's teaser, I don't have anything like a pat answer. Is it that the theme is presented first as just a bass line? I suspect there's a lot more to it than that.

I think it's worth remembering that Beethoven was himself uncomfortable with the idea of 'program music.' He considered his Sixth Symphony, which is the most overtly programmatic of the lot (bird calls, storm, etc), as more an expression of feelings than as intending to represent specific pictures or events, which he would have considered too limiting for the listener. (That said, the storm music is quite obviously representative of a storm, and so qualifies as program music.)

To me the most fruitful approach to the Eroica Symphony is to consider it as something utterly unlike any symphony that had come before it - in terms of its form, harmonic & key structure, motivic development, unprecedented length, dramatic intensity, technical difficulty and so on. The 'Napoleonic' aspect is really very incidental (for me). This was simply a revolutionary break musically with the past, one of the few musical works for which the term 'revolutionary' is not really an exaggeration.

So I think Beethoven would have been far more keen on people perceiving what he was doing differently compositionally - even to the point of reconsidering what the art of music was really for - than what sort of extra-musical associations they might want to come up with.

Andy C wrote:
As for Bruno's teaser, I don't have anything like a pat answer. Is it that the theme is presented first as just a bass line? I suspect there's a lot more to it than that.

That's pretty much what I was thinking. Normally in a theme with variations, you would expect the movement to start with the theme. But here, what people would consider to be the theme (if asked "Sing me the tune from the lat movement of the Eroica") only comes in after three variations which build up the rhythmic/harmonic background on which it's based. I can't think of any other examples of this kind of construction, although I'm sure there must be.

steveeeeeeeee wrote:
I'm completely in. Classic FM is probably the only radio station I listen to these days, but it's always passive listening. I really need to step up my game because I'd love to become really engrossed with a new musical obsession, it's been a while since the last one.
An impressive turn around from the poster who once said that he couldn't listen to anything without a beat...

Well, you have the much earlier concept of "divisions on a ground" where essentially there's no upper melodic theme and the compose explores the possibilities that can be built upon that foundation.

Bruno's thoughts align pretty well with my own. the first movement is such a departure from traditional sonata form that it's really difficult to identify a definite second subject - taking the famous tune to be the first. actually, I think you can makw a case for those two great block chords at the start to be a theme. To me, those chords right at the start can't be mistaken for anything but "listen to this - it's important". Quite possibly the mightiest clearing of the throat in the history of the world. And the repeated, evenly-spaced chops keep reappearing (with increased harmonic complexity, saying "this is impostant, but it gets complicated", throughout the movement and throughout the symphony.

Added to that, you have the way that Beethoven sometimes places those repeated chords on the beat and sometimes across the inexorable 3/4 progress of the first movement.

Okay, so the last movement and its theme. I think this movement is an ideal example of why Beethoven was such a genius. Not being history's most eloquent or original spokesman, I'll just try a snappy bullet list:

* Well okay first, the curtain-raising opening bars leading up to the first 'theme' statement are astonishing. It's the unmistakably Beethovenian brio. As most are aware he was in the process of breaking out of the politer Classical mould of Mozart and Haydn, and these bars are exactly the sort of thing where you hear him thinking, "Mozart or Haydn would never write something with this much balls. Look at how fast I can sweep you from D minor to the dominant of E-flat by cramming so much chromatic activity into the 16th-note runs that your ears don't have time to process it all, and so you don't know exactly how you got here, but here you are, now pay attention to my little theme."

* Yes the main theme is a bass line, except then it isn't really, it's immediately doubled by the flutes (on the offbeats). There when the flutes and bassoon come, that's both a repeat of the opening phrase, apparently inherent to the "melody" itself (just as a hymn melody often repeats its opening melodic phrase) and a variation of the opening phrase. So the variations are underway before the first theme has completed its first statement.

* Toward the end of the opening theme statement, the orchestra just beats out the rhythm in unison. (Da-Da-Da. (pause) Daaaaaa...) It's a deliberate bit of musical humor but it's also part of Beethoven's constant desire to treat melodies motivically, as things to be broken into their components, or treated purely rhythmically, and developed into other motives.

* On subsequent variations, we hear what sounded like a "bass line" starting to sound less so. The violins and violas first take up the "bass line" and add the little 8th note figure to it (da-da-da-Daaa-da) and now you start to think, that's the melody, and that opening bass line was only foreshadowing it. Except that it still sounds unmistakably like an ornamented variant of something else.

* Ultimately you decide you've never heard a proper melodic theme, maybe just a collection of motives which all suggest any number of other motives or melodies. And you do eventually get a melody proper – the one that's blared out in augmented time by the horns near the end of the movement (but is first introduced a good ways before that) And listen to that passage – that’s Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture, four decades early. So there, you think, now that's the movement's real theme - or would be if it didn't entirely owe its existence to something that came long before it. One is reminded of Elgar's Enigma Variations; that piece's most famous melody (Nimrod) sounds like a culmination or full-flowering of a previous theme (which also was never played outright) in much the same way as the just mentioned horn passage in the Eroica.

* One of the variations is an extended fugue on the theme's first four notes. How cool is that? Beethoven was clearly keen (there's also the fugue in the funeral march second movement) to demonstrate his mastery of the old-style counterpoint, but of course he takes directions in fugue, particularly by treating it as a kind of conflict-ridden drama, that Mozart or Bach never would. People who say Beethoven struggled with the fugue don't know what they're talking about!

* After the fugue we get treated to a mini-slow movement- complete change of mood. This is something else that never would have happened in a standard-issue classical symphony. And of course this slow section also acts as a transition paving the way for the triumphant slow statement of the horn melody mentioned above.

* Speaking of skillful transitions, the movement's "curtain-raiser" material, discussed in my first bullet, with its sudden unexpected impact, does just as well to kick-start the fast-paced coda that enables Beethoven to give the symphony the ball-busting conclusion it demands.

All that and more of interest to be found in the other movements obviously. The first movement, with its expansion of sonata form alluded to by Andy, needs a full dissertation. I think this is altogether my favorite Beethoven symphony. I'm normally biased toward first things, this was his first great symphony, and what's so astonishing about it is how totally confident it sounds. Like a lot of groundbreaking works of art I suppose. I think if I could inhabit anyone else's brain for a short spell, it would be Beethoven's just after finishing the Eroica. What must that have felt like?

Just as an afterthought for anyone fairly new to classical music, Beethoven's 3rd is generally thought of as the clear beginning of Romanticism in music, for a host of reasons, and the piece which defines Beethoven's position as the main link between the Classical and the Romantic periods. And it would inhabit any very short list of 'most influential musical works of all time.'

it's immediately doubled by the flutes (on the offbeats)

That has me laughing out loud. Perhaps I've seen too many characters tiptoeing around in Merrie Melodies cartoons. (Not that I feel it's wrong or even corntrary to LvB's intentions to laugh - as Bruno says, Beethoven's sense of humour is there much more often than you'd expect from seeing that scowling portait.)

Beethoven's 3rd is generally thought of as the clear beginning of Romanticism in music

Yep, and that notion of it being such a starting-point was a big part of my reason for choosing it as the first piece on this thread. Corny, eh?

I can't promise to be very 'in' but I'll lurk with interest.

Beethoven's 3rd: I like it, but I like the 7th and the 9th better.

I imagine you were looking for something more than that.