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Beethovenfest 2009

October 30, 2009

The Eroica Symphony is a revolutionary opus inspired by Napoleon Bonaparte. Listen to parts of the Third Symphony performed by the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and Paavo Jarvi.

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Paavo Jarvi
Image: DW

Much has been written and said about Beethoven's Third Symphony, a revolutionary work from a revolutionary era. It was inspired by Napoleon Bonaparte, who ignited the dreams of a generation. Maestro Jarvi, however, is skeptical about the value of words when it comes to understanding a musical masterpiece of this magnitude.

DW asked him to find a few words of description for each Beethoven symphony. "It doesn’t matter how musicologically advanced you might be and how much homework we have done and how much experimentation and how much reading we have done about it: the funeral march in 'Eroica' will mean something entirely different to a 15-year old than to somebody who went through the Second World War. It will mean something different for a person who has lost their child or for a person who is just conceptionally thinking of a military funeral which he or she has never seen," said Jarvi.

Whatever images may come to mind in this performance of the Funeral March from the "Eroica" (music from the year 1803), they will be just as real as any scholarly treatise.

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