ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by retelling a story that has been told for almost two hundred years: the story many generations of listeners have heard in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony. The first forty-five bars of the Eroica Symphony comprise one of the most raked-over pieces of musical property in the Western hemisphere. Several critics of the twentieth century give the developmental and transitional features of this opening section a psychological reading. Pausing to take stock of the various readings of the first forty-five bars, the authors notice that all their critics have identified in one way or another those aspects of Beethoven's style which are particularly characteristic of his middle period. While analysis such as Schenker's gives the impression of careful and strategic preparation of an end determined by the deep structure of the movement, most programmatic reactions to this chapter of the development indicate a process carried dangerously afield by its own destiny-driven engine.
