Sir James Thornhill, Prometheus Stealing Fire From the Gods (1729)

by Julia Grella O’Connell, D.M.A., Director of Education and Community Engagement

In 1801 Beethoven was commissioned by impresario Salvatore Viganò to write the music for a ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, to be presented to Austro-Hungarian Archduchess Maria Theresa. As a dedicated adherent of Enlightenment ideals, the composer was eager to try his hand at this subject. Prometheus was a Titan of Greek myth, a demi-god whose existence preceded that of Zeus and the other Olympians; he was believed to have created mankind from clay and, moved by pity at men’s ignorance, to have stolen fire from Mount Olympus to enlighten them. The Prometheus of the ballet accomplishes this spiritually rather than literally: according to Viganò’s synopsis, he is a “sublime spirit, who . . . refined [the men of his time] through science and art, and imparted to them morals.” Viganò’s belief in the power of art to transform the human spirit was based on the philosophy of Friedrich Schiller, the great poet of the German Enlightenment and the author of “Ode to Joy” (which you will hear in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in March 2026). One of Schiller’s – and Beethoven’s – great themes was the power of art to liberate humanity from moral darkness: as Schiller put it, “It is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Beethoven’s music for the ballet was thus his own declaration of this power, one which he would restate in many of his most celebrated works. 

The overture to The Creatures of Prometheus begins with a series of stark chords in an indeterminate key, evoking the chaos of the universe before the demi-god Prometheus intervenes to arrange it within the elegant constraints of classical order. This is the Beethoven of his first period, composing under the shadow of Mozart and Haydn; indeed, the opening is reminiscent of the first bars of Haydn’s great oratorio The Creation, which had had its premiere in the same Viennese theater just two years earlier. The musical conventions of The Creatures of Prometheus would be shattered a mere two years later with the Third Symphony, about which Haydn – Beethoven’s one-time composition teacher – would say: “After today, everything is different.” 

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his First Cello Concerto in 1959 for the legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, his friend, former student, and fellow dissident. In 1948, Stalin had denounced Shostakovich as a “formalist” – a composer who wrote in an abstract Western style rather than in the socialist-realist style intended, in the words of propaganda minister Andrei Zhdanov, to “depict reality in its Revolutionary development.” Shostakovich was fired from his teaching position at the Moscow Conservatory, and his then-student Rostropovich resigned in protest. While the composer’s opposition to the Soviet government necessarily took the form of a kind of interior resistance which he chronicled in his music in veiled and subtle terms, the cellist was eventually exiled and deprived of his Russian citizenship for such overt anti-regime acts as sheltering the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The Concerto breaks new ground for the instrument, pushing its capacities to the limit while ricocheting between extremes of human emotion. The composer’s tone shifts from heavy irony – a stance he had developed across decades of alternate promotion and punishment by Stalin and his commissars – to abject grief and back again. He opens with a sardonic march quoting one of Stalin’s favorite Georgian folk songs, followed by long-lined, lyrical melodies that position Shostakovich as Tchaikovsky’s true heir, with the innovation of a harmonic structure that defies both conventional tonality and the atonal experiments of his contemporaries in the West. The second movement, with its ghostly duet between the celesta and the cellist playing overtones, gives way without pause to a grief-stricken solo passage, followed by a frenzied restatement of the earlier march theme cut short at its highest point by slashing blows of the timpani. The brilliant writing and devastating emotion of this work place Shostakovich among the greatest composers not only of Russia or of the twentieth century, but of the entire pantheon of music history as well.      

If The Creatures of Prometheus was clearly influenced by Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 is a kind of nostalgic, even ironic, tribute to these two giants of the Classical style. In the Eighth Symphony, one of his most light-hearted works, Beethoven revives the courtly dances of the eighteenth century, including a delightfully robust Ländler in the first movement and a minuet in the third, but fleshes out these formal structures with cleverly shifting harmonies and fortissimo blasts from an orchestra that was, for its time, enormous. The Eighth Symphony had its premiere in 1814 in a Viennese concert that also included the popular Seventh, and the work was received coldly: a critic noted drily that it “did not create a furor.” When his friend Carl Czerny remarked that the audience had compared the Eighth Symphony unfavorably with the Seventh, Beethoven shot back, “That’s because it’s so much better.”

Beethoven’s biographer Jan Swafford has contended that the Classical references in the Eighth Symphony are a kind of cheeky in-joke meant for music connoisseurs. Nevertheless, Beethoven’s brief return to high Classical style after a decade of innovation and experimentation poses a dare to every listener. At the same time that he flaunts his dazzling mastery of form, he declares with this symphony that he has both built upon and superseded the brilliant structures of Mozart and Haydn and that, moreover, he is a free man, one whose genius permits him to wield the tools of artistic expression in ways both brash and subtle. As Walt Whitman would write four decades later: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then, I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes).” Beethoven could not have said it better himself.