About this Piece

As the musicologist Paul Mies has remarked, heroism was a major concern of Beethoven’s times. Not surprisingly, the composer gravitated toward protagonists who dared much against repressive forces in his rare forays into music for the theater.

Egmont is a case in point. In 1809 Beethoven was commissioned to compose incidental music for the Vienna revival of the play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). This was Goethe’s free interpretation of Count Egmont’s 16th-century struggle for Dutch liberty against the autocratic imperial rule of Spain. Egmont is imprisoned and sentenced to death, and when Klärchen, his mistress, fails to free him, she commits suicide. Before his own death, Egmont delivers a rousing speech, and his execution becomes a victorious martyrdom in a fight against oppression.

Beethoven’s incidental music begins with a powerful, strikingly original overture that summarizes the course of the drama, from its ominous slow introduction (suggesting the oppressive tread of Spain with the rhythm of a sarabande) to the manic transformation of tragedy into triumph in a brilliant coda, which Beethoven echoed at the end of the play as a “Symphony of Victory.” —From the Los Angeles Philharmonic archive