No symphony pulses more vigorously with the rhythms of political protest than Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’, whose defiant opening chords mark the arrival of the Romantic symphony.
In our novel introduction, BBC Radio 3’s Tom Service and conductor Nicholas Collon dismantle and reassemble this ground-breaking work, with the help of live excerpts, before we get under the skin of the work by performing the complete symphony from memory.
But first, Richard Strauss’s 1945 Metamorphosen. Scored for 23 solo strings, this ecstatic, elegiac work closes with an ‘Eroica’ quotation that mourns the devastation brought about by another, even darker, political regime.