S2 Ep 20. Beethoven. Part 2. Death and resurrection.

2019-12-07

Beethoven’s music put the struggle of the individual, the agony and ecstatic flight, at the centre of the performance. Music in his hands was being reshaped forming a new stage of human consciousness. This is the journey of the hero – hence the title: the Eroica. It may start with Napoleon and the politics of the day, it proceeds through the individual struggle of the greatest living composer rapidly going deaf and faced with suicide; but it then reaches out to the archetypal and tra...

Beethoven’s music put the struggle of the individual, the agony and ecstatic flight, at the centre of the performance. Music in his hands was being reshaped forming a new stage of human consciousness. This is the journey of the hero – hence the title: the Eroica. It may start with Napoleon and the politics of the day, it proceeds through the individual struggle of the greatest living composer rapidly going deaf and faced with suicide; but it then reaches out to the archetypal and transcendent.

The second movement, our topic in this episode, begins with the famous funeral march - the world’s greatest? Beethoven’s second movement divides in two parts – the death of the hero and the experience of 'resurrection'. The funeral march can then be thought of a descent into a symbolic death (depression, stagnation, loss, trauma and so on), which in this movement, amazingly, has a turning point and a rebirth.

Thanks to the BBC radio 3 recording of Beethoven’s 3rd symphony 2005 and made available on the Internet Archive on a Creative Commons label. All musical extracts in these podcasts taken from that source. https://archive.org/details/BBCSymphony3Beethoven_1

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