Word: eroica
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...hearts stay firm." Tiredly, Propagandist Joseph Goebbels eulogized: "Even the greatest leaders of history will be faced with occasional setbacks." Discreetly the radio did not play the Horst Wessel Song or the refrain: Today Germany, tomorrow the world!; instead, it broadcast a Handel Concerto Grosso, Beethoven's Eroica...
...parts of Shostakovitch's work which have rung true in the past have been the slow, introspective, semi-ecclesiastical movements like the first movement of his Fifth symphony. Here he is presenting the sombre, God-seeking element of Russian life that he understands. Beethoven was successful with his "Eroica" symphony in memory of Napoleon, because he himself was a big enough man to make the music strong and sincere. Shostakovitch is no Beethoven, and the twenties was not a time for breeding heroic figures, but what the present lacks in faith and breadth, it partially makes up in technique...
...prison like turtles into a pond, Stalin decided to hear Lady Macbeth. He did not like it, walked out before it was over. Murder from boredom struck him as a bourgeois idea. Besides, Stalin's musical taste runs to simple, more tuneful things, zigzags between Beethoven's Eroica and Verdi's Rigoletto. Also, he had a seat directly above the brasses...
...Westminster Choir singers, robed in white and maroon, the four soloists. Then sounded music of humanity, solace, peace, triumph: Beethoven's great Missa Solemnis, under the magic Toscanini touch. In later concerts, with the orchestra alone, the First and Second Symphonies emerged in shining clarity and freshness, the Eroica with towering architecture, and blazing spirit. By the time the Beethoven series ends, all nine symphonies, five overtures and the Triple Concerto will have been played...
...another, a seven-piece orchestra attempted Beethoven's Eroica...