Egmont, Op. 84

The overture opens with slow, heavy chords in a minor key, a gesture often heard as representing the weight of foreign occupation pressing on the Dutch hero Egmont. A mournful oboe melody rises over this, before the music quickens into an agitated, driving main section full of sharp contrasts between loud outbursts and hushed, tense passages. This struggle builds to a sudden collapse, a hushed pause standing in for Egmont's execution. Out of that silence comes the famous "Victory Symphony," a blazing, triumphant coda for full orchestra that turns defeat into a celebration of freedom. When the complete incidental music is performed rather than just the overture, the overture is followed by a set of shorter pieces Beethoven wrote to accompany specific moments in Goethe's play: entr'actes played between acts, two songs for a soprano playing the heroine Clärchen, a melodrama in which spoken text is layered over orchestral music, and a closing piece that repeats the triumphant music of the overture's ending. Listeners coming for the overture alone will recognize its outline instantly, since it is one of Beethoven's most frequently performed concert openers, but hearing the fuller sequence reveals how closely the composer tracked the emotional turns of the story scene by scene.

In 1809 the Vienna Burgtheater invited Beethoven to write incidental music for a revival of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1787 tragedy Egmont, which dramatizes the sixteenth century Dutch nobleman Lamoral, Count of Egmont, executed for resisting Spanish rule in the Netherlands. Beethoven, a great admirer of Goethe, took on the commission without payment beyond what the theater offered, drawn to the play's theme of a hero's sacrifice for political freedom. He composed an overture and nine additional numbers, including entr'actes, songs, melodrama, and a closing "Victory Symphony." The production opened in Vienna in 1810. While the play itself is rarely staged in the United States today, the overture became one of Beethoven's most popular concert works, prized for compressing the drama's arc of oppression, death, and triumph into about eight minutes.