In 1798, General Bernadotte, Ambassador from France to Vienna, suggested that a symphony should be written to honor Napoleon Bonaparte. The naming of this symphony as “Eroica” had a twisted and violent history. The development of nineteenth-century symphonic music is traceable more to the ‘Eroica’ than to any other single work, and it took composers more than a century to exhaust its implications.” Paul Henry Lang wrote, “The ‘Eroica’ is the greatest single step made by an individual composer in the history of the symphony and the history of music in general.” Jonathan Kramer has written “Once the ‘Eroica’ existed, no subsequent composer could ignore it. The music’s impact was massive on subsequent composers. Sir George Grove has explained, “The Eroica first shows us the methods which were so completely to revolutionize (symphonic) music-the continuous and organic mode of connecting the second subject with the first, the introduction of episodes into the working-out the extraordinary importance of the coda.” Grove continues to cite more significant innovations: a Funeral March for the second movement, the title of “Scherzo” appearing for the first time in the symphonies (a replacement of the standard Minuet) and the rip-roaring Finale, which he calls “a daring romance.” Intimations of a new orientation were hinted at in his preceding symphonies but now the revolution became overt. From today I mean to take a new road.” This decision was realized in his Third Symphony.
In 1801, Beethoven wrote in his diary “I am not satisfied with my works up to the present time.