of the Symphony in C minor, 1805 to 1808, the grand epic of glory. This is really the first music breathing the revolutionary feeling. The soul of the times lives again in it with the intensity and purity which great events have for those mighty and solitary souls who live apart and whose impressions are not contaminated by contact with the reality. Beethoven's spirit reveals itself, marked with stirring events, coloured by the reflections of these great wars. Evidences of this, (perhaps unconscious to him) crop up everywhere in the works of this period, in the Coriolanus Overture (1807), where tempests roar over the scene; in the Fourth Quartet, Opus 18, the first movement of which shows a close relation to this Overture; in the Sonata Appassionata, Op. 57 (1804), of which Bismarck said, "If I heard that
Napoleon. Breaking out into a fury, he cried: "He is only an ordinary man"; and in his indignation he tore off the dedication and wrote the avenging and touching title: Sinfonia Eroice composta per festeggiare il souvenire di un grand Uomo. (Heroic Symphony composed to celebrate the memory of a great man). Schindler relates that later on his scorn for Napoleon became more subdued; he saw in him rather the unfortunate victim of circumstances worthy of pity, an Icarus flung down from Heaven. When he heard of the St. Helena catastrophe in 1821, he remarked: "I composed the music suitable for this sad event some seventeen years ago." It pleased him to recognise in the Funeral March of his Symphony a presentiment of the conqueror's tragic end. There was then probably in the Eroica Symphony and especially in the first movement, a kind of portrait of Bonaparte in Beethoven's mind, doubtless very different from the real man, and rather what he imagined him to be or would have liked him to be—the genius of the Revolution. Beethoven, in the Finale of the Eroica Symphony, used again one of the chief phrases of the work he had already written on the revolutionary hero par excellence, the god of liberty, Prometheus, 1801.
