Coriolan Overture in C minor, op. 62

Program notes

About the Work

Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture is an overture to a play that almost nobody remembers, and it has long outlived its source. It was not written for Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, as is often assumed, but for a tragedy of the same subject by the Viennese playwright and court official Heinrich Joseph von Collin, which had been staged at the Burgtheater in 1802 and had some success there. Beethoven composed the overture in 1807, when the play was no longer a fixture of the repertoire, and it was first heard not in a theatre but in a concert: at the private subscription concerts given at the palace of his patron Prince Lobkowitz in Vienna in March 1807, the same series that introduced his Fourth Symphony. It is, in effect, a free-standing concert overture, one of the first great examples of a genre that Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Brahms would later make their own.

The story it depicts comes from Roman legend, retold by Plutarch. Gaius Marcius, called Coriolanus after his victory at the town of Corioli, is a proud and brilliant general who despises the common people of Rome. Banished from the city, he goes over to its enemies, the Volscians, and leads their army to the gates of Rome, intent on revenge. The city sends envoys to plead with him, and he refuses them all, until his mother and his wife come out to beg him to spare his homeland. Torn between wounded pride and love, he yields, and withdraws the army. In Collin’s version, unable to live with the dishonour on either side, he takes his own life.

Beethoven, who admired heroic defiance and was himself no stranger to stubborn pride, found in this material a perfect image of inner conflict. He did not attempt to narrate the plot. Instead he distilled it into two opposed musical characters: the implacable, violent will of Coriolanus and the gentle, pleading voice of the women who confront him. The overture is in C minor, the key Beethoven reserved for his most intense, combative music: the key of the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata, the Third Piano Concerto and the Fifth Symphony, which he was working on at around the same time. In only eight or so minutes it achieves a dramatic concentration that few of his larger works surpass.

Its most striking feature is its ending. Where a conventional overture would close with a brilliant flourish, Coriolan simply disintegrates. The main theme breaks apart into fragments, the tempo seems to slacken, and the music fades out in a few quiet, isolated notes in the low strings, one of the most daring and disquieting endings in the orchestral repertoire, and an unmistakable image of a proud man’s collapse. Richard Wagner, who wrote a programmatic commentary on the overture in the 1850s, heard in it the whole tragedy of the hero’s defeat by his own heart. In this programme it also has a pleasing historical connection with what follows: the Fourth Piano Concerto belongs to the same years, and is generally thought to have received its first, private hearing at those same Lobkowitz concerts in 1807.

What to Listen For

The overture opens with one of Beethoven’s most arresting gestures. The strings play a long, held unison C, which swells and then is cut off by a sharp, slashing chord from the full orchestra. This happens three times, each time on a more dissonant chord, before a silence. Then the main theme bursts out in the violins, agitated and restless, pressing forward in short, driven phrases. This is Coriolanus himself: proud, stubborn, perpetually in motion.

The contrast comes soon. Listen for the second theme, in the brighter key of E-flat major: a flowing, yearning melody in the violins, far gentler than anything around it, often heard as the voice of Coriolanus’s mother pleading with him. Notice how Beethoven keeps undercutting it with the restless figures of the opening; the two forces are never allowed to rest side by side for long. Through the central part of the overture the music argues back and forth between them, the aggressive material growing more fragmented, the gentle theme returning in different keys.

Save your closest attention for the end. The opening held notes and slashing chords return, but instead of building to a triumphant close, the main theme starts to break apart. It is passed down through the strings in ever smaller pieces, growing quieter and slower, until only the bare outline remains in the cellos and basses. The last three quiet notes, plucked in the low strings, are among the most final sounds Beethoven ever wrote. Let the silence after them register before the next piece begins.