Beethoven's Eroica Sketches: A Form-Functional Perspective (Sketches for Symphony No. 3)

00:32 Nottebohm's study of the sketches
01:41 Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman's Commentary
04:20 Donald Francis Tovey's Explanation of Beethoven's Blunders
04:50 The central conundrum - Why did Beethoven keep so many of the supposed "problems"?
05:05 Ferdinand Ries on the Horn Entry
06:07 Introducing a Form-Functional Approach for Analyzing Beethoven's Eroica Sketches
08:52 First Sketch
16:59 Second Sketch
21:36 Third Sketch

Download my published, peer-reviewed article on Beethoven's early Eroica sketches here:
https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/beethov...

In this video, I reconstruct Beethoven’s first three exposition sketches to his colossal third symphony, “the Eroica,” as symphonic piano reductions, analyze them, and perform them on the piano. I’ve had lots of fun imagining what it might have been like to be Beethoven’s neighbor. Perhaps my reconstructions and performances would be similar to what his neighbors might have heard coming out of his apartment windows some 220+ years ago as he worked on the piece at his piano. This video previews components of my dissertation, where I explore Beethoven’s sketches to the Eroica in more breadth and depth.

If you want to see and hear my performances of the reconstructions, but don’t care too much about the context or my scholarly position, you can skip ahead in the video to the times listed above.

Conference Abstract:
In this paper, I reconstruct the first three single-line, continuity sketches of Beethoven’s Eroica exposition (Lockwood and Gosman 2013) into “proto-pieces” by realizing the harmonies and textures that the single-voice sketches imply. Using Caplin’s theory of formal functions (1998, 2013), I analyze these proto-pieces to elucidate and compare Beethoven’s formal and phrase-structural strategies. I argue that the sketches show Beethoven’s multiple innovative approaches for problematizing a lyrical subordinate theme in order to elevate rhetorically the arrival of a new lyrical theme in the development, which parallels Adorno’s analysis of the final published piece (Vande Moortele 2015).

For example, in the first exposition sketch, Beethoven writes a modulating transition that moves chromatically through three distant tonal areas. Thereupon he builds an energetic subordinate theme, part 1 (ST1), while avoiding a lyrical ST2 by bringing back main-theme material in the same keys that were foreshadowed earlier. In the second sketch, Beethoven omits the tonally innovative ST2 from the first sketch and instead writes a fake exposition repeat—a remarkable rhetorical ploy whereby the new ST2 material sounds like a codetta, a re-transition, and a seeming restart of the exposition.

In reconstructing and analyzing the sketches with form-functional theory, I seek a new approach for understanding the Eroica sketches. Instead of characterizing passages in the sketches that differ from the published version as problems that Beethoven revised or purged to create an artistic piece, I valorize them to form a more complete “biography” of the work through its fascinating compositional genesis.


This video was made for presentation at the joint 2020 Society of Music Theory and American Musicological Society Conference.