Rock Around the Croc: Beethoven and the Symphony

Welcome back to your not-necessarily-weekly education in music and music history. I’m your host Sobek, and today my subject is the end of the Classical era and the beginning of the Romantic period. Alternate title, Beethoven Changes Everything Forever. Let’s start with a quote:

“Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of a woman”

That’s awesome. Now about some memes? Let’s see what we have around here…

If you search “Beethoven memes,” most of the jokes are variations on this one.

For the nerds

For Car in. No one else look.

Today I want to focus on Beethoven’s Third Symphony, titled Eroica (“Heroic”). You can listen to all 51 minutes of it here:

But unlike my post on Haydn’s 6th Symphony, I’m not going to break it down musically. Instead I want to focus on why it’s so historically significant. For the musical breakdown nerds, you can listen to this guy, who I think is very interesting. My one complaint is that he rushes really quickly through his musical examples, so if you can’t read music and aren’t familiar with musical analysis, you miss a lot.

He also starts off with a historical introduction, which is pretty important. The king of Sweden visited Beethoven and suggested the composer write a piece in honor of Napoleon, then a rising star general recognized for his brilliance on the battlefield. But by the time the piece was done, Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, and Beethoven wasn’t such a big fan, so he scratched out that title and renamed it “Heroic Symphony to Commemorate the Memory of a Great Man.” Not catchy; Eroica is better.

There are some important innovations going on in this piece of music that are the reason for my post today. All of the ingredients of a Classical Era symphony are present in Symphony No. 3. But Beethoven so thoroughly transformed those ingredients and he spelled the beginning of the end of the Classical Era and the birth of the Romantic. The symphony is much longer than what had gone before. Haydn’s No. 1 clocks in at under 14:00, his 27th is the first that comes in over the thirty minute mark, only ten of his 106 are over 30:00, and none are over 40:00. Mozart had two symphonies over 30:00 in length, and his longest was just over 40:00 (Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter”).

And although Beethoven has the ingredients of the Classical Era symphony, he has complete freedom to screw around with all of it. One of my favorite guitarists is Marty Friedman, formerly of Megadeth, who always wrote columns for Guitar World when I was a kid and I could tell how much he loved teaching guitar stuff. I like his philosophy on developing your own sound: learn the techniques that already exist, then deliberately screw them up to see what you can discover. Here’s an example of that:

I will add, science has never been able to explain how screwed up his right hand picking technique is – what on Earth is his doing cranking his hand around like that, and how has he not snapped his wrist into pieces yet? – but hey, it works for him, and I think he would agree that’s the point. When it comes to music, you do you. Also, Marty, if you read this, shoot me an email so we can hang out some time. You are amazing.

In a standard symphony, the first movement is usually in sonata form, and that’s exactly what Beethoven does here. But he introduces not two, but three themes. And why not? Take the normal thing and screw it up to make it your own. If you watched the Quick Guides video above, you know that right after he introduces his first theme, he ends it with a C#, which our enthusiastic guide describes as “possibly the most famous note in all symphonic music.” You and I have no conception of what that means, or rather what it meant in Beethoven’s day, because the C# is the same as a Db, which is just a flat 7 of the Eb Major scale. If that sentence is a bit on the nerdy side, I’ll rephrase it. We’ve switched from an E Major to an E Dominant chord. Still too nerdy? The dominant chord is probably the single most common chord in all of rock and roll. It is absolutely ubiquitous, it is the basis for all of the blues, it is the heart and soul of nearly everything written since the invention of rock, up until the coming of grunge in the 1990s (which featured a lot more chromaticism). It is, in a sense, the wrong note, which almost makes it the precursor to jazz. So we listen to that C# and think, hey, that’s lovely. What I wouldn’t give to be able to hear that note as a contemporary of Beethoven.

And I’m still not done. As our Quick Guides guy points out, one of the standout features of the piece is its “epic, tonal drama.” And at last we arrive at what Beethoven is most famous for, and what ultimately spelled the death of the Classical era. It is his overwhelming emotionality, which saw a total disregard for the rules when they interfered with that emotionality, that so appealed to the composers who followed him. Music was no longer seen as something written to glorify God, or as a pretty, decorative art, but as the artist expressing passions on a grand scale.

Beethoven also brought in the notion of overarching connectedness to the Symphony. You can hear this in his famous Symphony No. 5, where the fate motif and the horn motif reappear throughout the different movements. And in Symphony No.6, he uses the orchestra to conjure and describe a massive thunderstorm.

You hear the storm begin, with little patters of rain, at 30:16, and growing intensity, complete with thunder and lightning, until it runs it course and peace is restored. This symphony revolutionizes the concept of “theme” in concert music. Before now, a theme was a short musical statement that would be introduced and then subjected to the processes of whatever musical form it was (repeated but modified in a theme and variations, dissected and rearranged in a fugue, etc.). Here, the theme is outside of the notes themselves – it is this notion of a thunderstorm, and if you try to figure out what the musical theme is, you will leave quite baffled.

In Symphony No. 5, Beethoven proved that you can create a theme out of just four notes.

As Professor Greenberg notes, you can listen to Baroque-era music all day and, unless it’s an especially famous piece by Bach, Handel or Vivaldi, or unless you have a PhD and wrote your dissertation on a Corelli or Scarlatti, most likely the best you will be able to say is “this sounds like it was written during the Baroque.” But nothing in the world sounds like Beethoven after the Eroica. If you listen to Symphony No. 9 and the best you can do is say “this sounds Classical,” then you’ve been living in a cave or you’re just screwing with me. The point being, Beethoven so thoroughly transformed music that forever afterwards, composers did everything they could to inject themselves into the music. Once the Romantic period gets up and running, it makes very, very little sense to talk about Romantic music, rather than talking about Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, or Schubert individually.

Just so today. Last night I was thinking about how much I love Stone Temple Pilots’ debut album Core, but it really sounds a lot like any other grunge album released that decade (STP was unfairly mocked as a Pearl Jam rip-off, even though Core was released before Ten). But their second album, Purple, is pure STP – no one else sounds like that. Dean DeLeo is one of my favorite bass players, and it completely shines through here. His brother Robert on guitar is basing everything he does on a Mixolydian scale, which means a flat 7 – the exact note that was so shocking in Eroica.

And that’s it for this week. Before I finish I want to say that I didn’t write anything at all about the Classical era string quartet, or Classical era opera (but you all said you don’t like opera – and I would have had to do a bunch of research to say anything intelligible about it), or Classical era concerti. And I almost exclusively talked about the Big Three: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The point being that there is an enormous body of work from the Classical era that I didn’t touch at all. But no worries, we can always come back later and explore as much as we want.

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