Thursday November 26, 2009

Colorado Symphony Orchestra
Miguel Harth-Bedoya, conductor
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Opus 55 (Eroica) (10/2-4/09)
Also, Charley anticipates the Opus Two (William Terwilliger, violin; Andrew Cooperstock, piano) recital at the Boulder Public Library.
Aaron Copland: Ukelele Serenade
Azica 71205 Track 9 4:28

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Opus 55 (Eroica)
I. Allegro con brio
II. Marcia funèbre: Adagio assai
III. Scherzo: Allegro vivace
IV. Finale: Allegro molto

As early as the spring of 1798, so the legend goes, the French ambassador to Vienna, General Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, suggested that Beethoven write a symphony about Napoleon Bonaparte. At the time, Napoleon was one of Beethoven's idols, but it wasn't until 1801 that the composer first sketched ``Third Symphony, written on Bonaparte.'' He worked on it during 1803 in the countryside near Vienna and finished during the spring of 1804.
The title page originally read ``Grand Symphony composed on Bonaparte.'' But in May, 1804, Beethoven heard the news that Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor. Beethoven flew into a rage, tore up the title page, and bellowed: ``Is he too no more than a mere mortal? Now he will trample on all the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!'' He later gave the symphony a new title, ``heroic symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man,'' and dedicated it to his patron Prince Lobkowitz.
After several private performances, the Third Symphony received its first public performance in Vienna on April 7, 1805. One critic found the work ``strident and bizarre,'' but another recognized ``the true style of really great music.'' The Director of the Prague Conservatory banned the piece as a ``dangerously immoral composition.''
When the Third Symphony was published, Beethoven included a note, requesting that ``this Symphony, being purposely written much longer than is usual, should be performed nearer the beginning rather than at the end of a concert...if it is heard too late it will lose for the listener, already tired out by previous performances, its own proposed effect.'' At the première, one heckler in the audience exclaimed, ``I'd give a kreutzer with pleasure if it would only end.'' But others were undeterred by the size of the Third Symphony. Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia once insisted on hearing it three times in a single evening.
Paul Henry Lang called the Eroica ``one of the incomprehensible deeds in arts and letters, the greatest single step made by an individual composer in the history of the symphony and the history of music in general.'' For Richard Wagner, ``the first movement embraces, as in a glowing furnace, all the emotions of a richly-gifted nature in the heyday of unresting youth.'' When, in 1821, Beethoven heard the news of Napoleon's death, he remarked: ``Well, I've written the funeral oration for that catastrophe seventeen years ago,'' referring to the second movement, a funeral march. Donald Francis Tovey said the third movement is ``the first in which Beethoven fully attained Haydn's desire to replace the minuet by something on a scale comparable to the rest of a great symphony.'' The Finale is a set of twelve variations on a tune Beethoven first used in a little country dance in 1801, then again in The Creatures of Prometheus ballet and also in the Eroica Variations for piano. Edward Downes comments that ``each variation is a little cosmos in itself and the sum of them is overwhelming.''
The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.