At the end of his life, Mozart had left behind almost all of the gallantry and grace of typical late 18 th. Haydn toyed with the norms and expectations of Classical style and rhetoric as cat plays with a caught mouse, and the works of this Sturm und Drang period are full of as much raw anger, pathos and anguish as anything Beethoven would ever write. Mozart and Haydn were every bit as innovative and radical a pair of composers as ever lived, and neither let himself be constricted by the stylistic expectations of his audience or peers.
Too many commentators fall into the trap of describing Beethoven as somehow throwing off the conservative shackles of Mozart and Haydn’s Classical language in favour of a new, more experimental way of composing. Written mostly in 1803 it was one of two works (the other being the “Waldstein” Sonata for Piano in C major) in which the new “heroic” language of what we now call Beethoven’s “Middle Period” first came to the fore.īeethoven’s musical relationship to his two most important musical forbears, Mozart and Haydn, is often misunderstood. Nevertheless, there is no doubting that the Third Symphony differs from its predecessors in important ways. Even from his earliest works like the Opus 1 Piano Trios, Opus 9 String Trios, opus 5 Cello Sonatas, and Opus 2 Piano Sonatas, Beethoven’s breadth of spiritual vision, his profundity of emotion, his sky-lifting wit and unconstrained audacity are fully developed.
His first two symphonies, while less monumental in scale, are every bit as radical as the Third, or, for that matter, any of the symphonies which followed it. Although it was only the third of his nine symphonies, Beethoven had already written well over half of his total output, and done a great deal to change music forever. Beethoven’s Third Symphony is a work of such monumental historic and artistic importance that it’s worth prefacing a discussion of it by reminding the reader that even if Beethoven had died before composing it, he would have already secured his place in the pantheon of the greatest composers who had ever lived.
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