Premiered in Berlin, but composed in Paris, Arthur Honegger’s Mouvement symphonique n° 3 was a commission for the Berlin Philharmonic, and Chapter 5 deals with its reception, bringing the book back to its two major European centres. For reviewers, Swiss-German Honegger’s work, the third in a trio of symphonic movements that began with Pacific 231 and Rugby, was unambiguously neither French nor German, and it reveals mechanisms by which commentators sought either to assimilate the work with, or expel it from, Germanic idealist aesthetic traditions. Despite the work’s ‘sober and unprepossessing’ title, this chapter suggests that Mouvement symphonique n° 3 had a critical political programme – even if programmatic aspects were barely acknowledged in the critical reception. Manipulating the symphonic form, and referencing Beethovenian subjective narratives in particular, the work considers the changing relationship between the individual and the collective within a tumultuous era of political and industrial/technological upheaval, ultimately lamenting over the ruins of both the symphony and the utopian political project it represented.

This coda considers how music might be put to queer use through a reading of Amy Levy’s poem “Sinfonia Eroica”.

Chamber arrangements of Beethoven’s large-scale works ‘especially his symphonies’ were so prevalent in the nineteenth century that to ignore them is to miss an essential part of the reception or ‘life history’ of the works in question. The depth and dissemination of the arrangements of Beethoven’s works show that these arrangements, rather than the original versions, were an essential means by which Beethoven’s music took effect. In an era when concert performances were still relatively few, an arrangement was often the first instantiation of a Beethoven orchestral work that one would hear. This chapter explores these arrangements as nineteenth-century reception documents, looking at what they tell us not only about Beethoven, but also about the arrangers themselves and the processes of canon formation at the time. The chapter then considers the apparently new ways in which meanings are constructed for the symphony, through performance, and how these relate to Eroica myths and legends born in Beethoven’s day. It discusses ways in which the work has been performed, represented visually, and marketed in the twenty and twenty-first centuries, including the 2003 BBC production, Eroica.

The early reception of Beethoven’s Eroica proves to be a complex phenomenon. The new audiences that emerged around 1800 were interested in understanding music both through listening and through reading about it in new journals devoted to music. Beethoven’s music was considered very difficult, but worth the challenge. The dominant image of Beethoven and the status of the symphony both played an important role in the Eroica’s early reception. From the nineteenth century onwards there has been a strong desire to understand Beethoven’s music by relating it to biography. In the case of the Eroica Symphony there has been a focus on the title, and on the unnamed great man or hero, as well as on the interpretation of the Marcia funebre. Authors such as Hector Berlioz, Ferdinand Ries, Anton Schindler and Carl Maria von Weber contributed to interpretations that ranged from relating the symphony to the ancient world to the attempt to establish a programme related to Napoleon, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Admiral Horatio Nelson or General Ralph Abercromby. So the Eroica has been understood variously as a political statement. Others commentators, such as Richard Wagner, saw Beethoven himself is the hero of this symphony.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, Beethoven’s Third Symphony is programmed regularly by the world’s leading orchestras and remains popular with audiences. In contemporary mainstream classical musical culture, the Eroica continues to be the pre-eminent musical emblem of heroism and revolution. In visual media, the Eroica retains classical music’s conventional generic meaning of wealth and superior status, but it is also deployed in film, television and video game soundtracks to track markedly intelligent heroes and culturally sophisticated revolutionaries. As new critical theories engage with the symphony’s traditional interpretations, alternative readings of the Eroica are emerging in musical scholarship alongside the heroic/revolutionary trope. The pastoral, politics and freedom figure prominently in several recent close readings, while the Eroica is fast becoming a pivotal musical work in disability studies. As a central example in both heroic narratives of overcoming and human narratives of adaptation, the Eroica endures.