The French Revolution

Romanticism, as we shall see, was originally a literary movement. Though well under way by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was not yet influential in Vienna; and, in any case, Beethoven did not have a very literary sensibility. At the root of Romanticism, however, lay one great political upheaval that made an enormous impact on the composer’s generation. This was the French Revolution. Beethoven was one of many artists who felt compelled to proclaim their sympathy with the ideal of freedom symbolized by that cataclysmic event.

When the Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in 1789, Beethoven was a highly impressionable eighteen-year-old, already grounded in liberal and humanistic ideals. In 1803 his admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte as hero of the revolution led him to an extravagant and unprecedented gesture — writing a descriptive symphony called Bonaparte. Retitled the Eroica (Heroic) Symphony, it was the decisive breakthrough work of Beethoven’s maturity, the first work to show his full individual freedom as an artist.

Before Beethoven could send the symphony off to Paris, liberal Europe received an ominous jolt: Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France. Beethoven scratched out the dedication on his score in a fury, and his feelings for Napoleon and France were never the same again. But idealism dies hard. To many at the time, the French Revolution still stood for an ideal of perfectibility — not so much of human society (as Beethoven himself acknowledged by deleting Napoleon’s name) as of human aspiration. That ideal, too, is what Beethoven realized by his own triumph over his deafness. The point was not lost on those of his contemporaries who were swept away by his music.

And that is what listeners have responded to ever since. Listening to the Eroica Symphony, we sense that it has less to do with Napoleon than with the composer’s own self-image. The quality of heroic striving and inner triumph is what emerges so magnificently in Beethoven’s most famous compositions.

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Storming the Bastille, an eighteenth-century engraving of the most famous event of the French Revolution. Leemage/Corbis.
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The revolution betrayed, as painted by Jacques-Louis David: After crowning himself emperor, Napoleon crowns his wife, Josephine, empress of France in 1804. Today this huge (20 by 30 feet) and pompous painting repels some viewers almost as much as the actual event it depicts enraged Beethoven. Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.