Six years passed from the date of its conception before it
lay complete upon his table, with the single word "Bonaparte" in large
letters at the top of the title-page, and "L. Beethoven" at the bottom,
with nothing between. And what, according to Marx, is this product of
so much study and labor? A musical description of a battle; a funeral
march to the memory of the fallen; the gathering of the armies for
their homeward march; a description of the blessings of peace. A most
lame and impotent interpretation! Marx somewhere says, that Beethoven
never wrought twice upon the same idea; hence the funeral march of the
Symphony cannot have been originally intended in honor of a hero,--we
agree with him so far,--for this task he had once already accomplished
in the Sonata, Op. 26. But then, if the first movement of the Symphony
be a battle-piece, how came its author to compose another, and one so
entirely different, in 1812?
How any one--with the recollection of Beethoven's fondness for
describing character in music, even in youth upon the pianoforte,--with
the "Coriolanus Overture" before him, and the "Wellington's Victory at
Vittoria" at hand,--and, above all, with any knowledge of the
composer's love for the universal, the all-embracing, and his contempt
for minute musical painting, as shown by his sarcasms upon passages in
Haydn's "Creation"--can suppose the first movement of the "Heroic
Symphony" to be in the main intended as a battle-picture, passes our
comprehension.
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