What to us is the horrible history of those years was to him
the exciting news of the day; and it is not difficult to imagine the
changes of feeling with which he would follow the political changes in
France, the hopes of humanity now apparently lost in the gloom of the
Reign of Terror, and now the rising of the day-star, precursor of a
glorious day of republican freedom, in the marvellous successes of the
cool, determined, energetic, stoical young conqueror of Italy, living,
when Bernadotte fired his imagination by his descriptions of him, with
his wife, the widow of Beauharnais, in a small house in an obscure
street of the capital.
To us, then, the first movement of the "Heroic Symphony" is a study of
character. In the "Coriolanus Overture" we have one side of a hero
depicted: here we see lain, in all his aspects; we behold him in sorrow
and in joy, in weakness and in strength, in the struggle and in
victory,--overcoming opposition, and reducing all elements of discord
to harmony and order by the force of his energetic will. It may be
either a description of Napoleon, as Beethoven at that time understood
his character,--we are inclined to this opinion,--or it may be a more
general picture of a hero, to which the career of Napoleon had
furnished but the original conception.
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