Strange things have been done by conductors to Beethoven’s overture. We remember Franz WÜllner in Berlin slackening the pace in the allegro section when he came to the heavy chords that are supposed by some commentators, finders of sunbeams in cucumbers, to represent Alva, and then playing the chords with brutal emphasis and a long pause between them. Another conductor, no less a person than Arthur Nikisch, made a long hold on the short, incisive violin stroke just before the coda, and then brought the figure slowly down portamento. We doubt if he did this in later years.

This overture was composed in 1810; it was published in 1811. The music to Goethe’s play—overture, four entr’actes, two songs sung by ClÄrchen, “ClÄrchen’s Death,” “Melodrama,” and “Triumph Symphony” (identical with the coda of the overture), for the end of the play, nine numbers in all—was performed for the first time with the tragedy at the Hofburg Theater, Vienna, May 24, 1810. Antonie Adamberger was the ClÄrchen.

When Hartl took the management of the two Vienna Court theaters, January 1, 1808, he produced plays by Schiller. He finally determined to produce plays by Goethe and Schiller with music, and he chose Schiller’s Tell and Goethe’s Egmont. Beethoven and Gyrowetz were asked to write the music. The former was anxious to compose the music for Tell; but, as Czerny tells the story, there were intrigues, and, as Egmont was thought to be less suggestive to a composer, the music for that play was assigned to Beethoven. Gyrowetz’s music to Tell was performed June 14, 1810. It was described by a correspondent of a Leipsic journal of music as “characteristic and written with intelligence.” No allusion was made at the time anywhere to Beethoven’s Egmont.

The overture has a short, slow introduction, sostenuto ma non troppo, F minor, 3-2. The main body of the overture is an allegro, F minor, 3-4. The first theme is in the strings; each phrase is a descending arpeggio in the violoncellos, closing with a sigh in the first violins; the antithesis begins with a “sort of sigh” in the wood-wind, then in the strings; then there is a development into passage work. The second theme has for its thesis a version of the first two measures of the sarabande theme of the introduction, fortissimo (strings), in A flat major, and the antithesis is a triplet in the wood-wind. The coda, allegro con brio, F major, 4-4, begins pianissimo. The full orchestra at last has a brilliant fanfare figure, which ends in a shouting climax, with a famous shrillness of the piccolo against fanfares of bassoons and brass and between crashes of the full orchestra.

Long and curious commentaries have been written in explanation of this overture. As though the masterpiece needed an explanation! We remember one in which a subtle meaning was given to at least every half-dozen measures: The Netherlanders are under the crushing weight of Spanish oppression; Egmont is melancholy, his blood is stagnant, but at last he shakes off his melancholy (violins), answers the cries of his country-people, rouses himself for action; his death is portrayed by a descent of the violins from C to G; but his countrymen triumph. Spain is typified by the sarabande movement; the heavy, recurring chords portray the lean-bodied, lean-visaged Duke of Alva; “the violin theme in D flat, to which the clarinet brings the under-third, is a picture of ClÄrchen,” etc. One might as well illustrate word for word the solemn ending of Thomas Fuller’s life of Alva in The Profane State: “But as his life was a mirror of cruelty, so was his death of God’s patience. It was admirable that his tragical acts should have a comical end; that he that sent so many to the grave should go to his own, and die in peace. But God’s justice on offenders goes not always in the same path, nor the same pace; and he is not pardoned for the fault who is for a while reprieved from the punishment; yea, sometimes the guest in the inn goes quietly to bed before the reckoning for his supper is brought to him to discharge.” The overture is at first a mighty lamentation. There are voices of an aroused and angry people, and there is at the last tumultuous rejoicing. The “Triumph Symphony” at the end of the play forms the end of the overture.