LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Egmont Overture, Op. 84 Born: December 16, 1770, in Bonn Died: March 26, 1827, in Vienna Work composed: 1810 World premiere: June 15, 1810, in Vienna

Beethoven’s music expresses a wide range of moods: boisterous humor, deep serenity, pathos, joy and more. But as noted above, his most characteristic tone is that of strife leading to ultimate triumph. That emotional transformation is vividly effected in Beethoven’s Overture to Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1788 drama Egmont. Beethoven created this piece for a new production of the play in Vienna, in the spring of 1810. The composer had been acquainted with Goethe’s writings since his youth and, like so many of his generation, he regarded the poet as one of the great spirits of the age. “Goethe’s poems have tremendous power over me,” Beethoven once declared, adding: “I am tuned up and stimulated to composition by his language, which builds itself into higher orders as if through the work of spirits, and already bears in itself the mysteries of harmonies.” With Egmont, moreover, the composer had two themes which were especially attractive to him: the martyrdom of a hero in the cause of liberty; and the selfless devotion of a woman who loves him. Beethoven was no stranger to these ideas, having already dealt with them at length in his opera Leonore (ultimately called Fidelio). The composer’s contribution to the 1810 production of Egmont was an overture and a series of incidental pieces — songs, entr’actes, etc. — performed at various junctures during the drama. Of these pieces, only the overture is substantial enough to stand alone as a concert work. It begins with an introduction in slow tempo. Here Beethoven’s massive initial chords express an unmistakable sense of power and crisis. From these great blocks of sound emerge plaintive woodwind phrases that accelerate into the main body of the work. There, a certain kinship with the composer’s famous Fifth Symphony becomes evident. The music conveys the same sense of elemental struggle encountered in the symphony’s first movement, and it even makes use of the famous four-note rhythmic figure which dominates that piece. In the overture’s coda, the parallel between the two compositions becomes unmistakable. Like the last movement of the symphony, this concluding passage emerges from a mysterious, dark realm where time and motion seem suspended and soars triumphantly on rising scales, bright harmonies and the tones of trumpets.

What to Listen For The great chords of the opening measures have a volcanic quality that was unprecedented — and must have been shocking — in Beethoven’s day. In the faster main portion of the work, a repeated four-note motif (dee-dee-dee dah) reprises the rhythm Beethoven had used so effectively in his Fifth Symphony.

© Paul Schiavo