The Eroica and Me

I love Beethoven.

Ten or so years ago, I got a ticket and went to see Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, the Eroica, because I thought Eroica translated roughly to Erotic, i.e. romance. No. It means Heroic. So I was disappointed. More than that – it turned out the 3rd Symphony was not one of my favorites of Beethoven's compositions. It failed to touch me almost at all.

My four-year-old is at this moment having a rest time in her room, listening to Beethoven's 3rd. I'm having her listen because it's an important piece of music, even if I don't love it.

While I tend the baby in my room, I listen too. I start to think of Beethoven's disillusionment with Napoleon, to whom he initially dedicated the 3rd Symphony. I rock my little one, and I wonder how Beethoven dealt with the 3rd Symphony still being out there, after he changed his mind about the Emperor. How would I cope if I wrote something and was later embarrassed, not by its quality, but by its content – by what I believed when I wrote it?

And just like that, as I'm stroking Baby's hair and sweating on a hot day, the Symphony starts to make sense to me. The reason it never resonated with me before is that it's a symphony expressing how Beethoven thought about heroism, about leadership and bravery. His feelings on those things didn't change, only his feelings about Napoleon. I feel differently about those concepts than Beethoven did. I would write different music to fit them, if I were a composer. But as I listen to the first movement – Allegro con brio – with ears of understanding, it is beautiful.

I begin to care for the piece, because I care how Beethoven thought about heroism. I want to know. How awesome is the depth of himself he exposed in the music. Ideally, I would not have had to search for the understanding of it – on the other hand, my lack of immediate comprehension may have been due to my own immaturity, or to such a wide gap between me and the time and place in which it was composed.

But the whole situation serves to remind me of the kind of art I want to make. I think about times when I'm blown away by music I hear, a book I read, a painting I study. And the best kind of being blown away is when it isn't about what a work means to me. I like it best when the person who made a piece of art poured their passion into it so fully that I connect with their fire when I open myself to the work, when it becomes about what they believe, not what I believe. It doesn't agree with me – it overpowers me. And this – this is the kind of book I want to write, over and over again.