Beethoven: Symphony # 3 «Heroica» op. 55

Tonality

My biggest bemol. The funeral march of the second movement is in minor.

Instruments

• 2 flutes
• 2 oboes
• 2 clarings
• 2 fages
• 3 tubes
• 2 trumpets and timbals
• Rope (violins, violas, cello and contrabajes)

From the atril

Beethoven thought to dedicate his Third Symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he admired as a liberator of the peoples. But when he knew, in 1804, that he had proclaimed himself an emperor, he exclaimed furious that he too would trample on the rights of man, and he removed his name from the cover so strongly that he broke the paper. The work was published as «Heroic symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man».

It's the symphony that changed the history of gender. It almost doubles that a Haydn symphony, and its first movement, which opens with two dry chords as blows, is of an unknown amplitude and tension, with violent disonances and immense development. The second movement is a funeral march of tragic greatness. Follow a dizzy scherzo with a threesome for three tubes, and an end of variations on a theme of your ballet The creatures of Prometheus. For the orchestra, it is a work of resistance and precision, and one of the great pillars of the repertoire.

What to hear

• The two initial chords.
• The funeral march.
• The three-tube trio of the scherzo.