Beethoven’s Funeral March, Third Symphony, and Goya’s Third of May

Beethoven’s funeral march plays as we stare into the eyes of Goya’s Third of May. A slow march in a minor key. A dotted rhythm to push as along as we grieve. The oboe and its sighs seem a solitary individual in the gathered crowd. Contrasts of light and dark, the church a shadow in the background. The clear, straight lines of rifles. A French firing squad, Napoleon’s machine. A neoclassical nightmare (read reason, clarity) about to happen. Beethoven’s tragic-sounding fugue knits its separate strands—trills suspended in time, rising and falling step-wise motions, continuous staccato eighth notes cutting across the grain. The fugue exhausts itself in the end as all grief and reason and heroes like Napoleon will exhaust themselves in the end. The trumpets repeated high notes mark the moment of transition, of waiting, of anticipation, of fate. The slaughtered are shown slain, blood in the fields. The terror of others as they wait in line to be next. Goya’s loose brushwork on the central Christ-like figure is bathed in God’s or Reason’s or the Soldier’s bright light. The funeral march returns, a disturbing new rumbling in the bass. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor, Beethoven erased his name from the score.*

*Both Goya and Beethoven first held out high hopes for Napoleon. Beethoven at first dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon before erasing his name from the title page.

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