Beethoven was good friends with the writer Goethe, often going for walks and discussing art and the world. Goethe had written a play in 1787 strongly influenced by Shakespeare’s tragedies which focuses on the Eighty Years’ War and is essentially a political manifesto for justice and national liberty.
The play focuses on the fight between the Count Egmont and the Duke of Alba. Egmont is a Dutch warrior, Alba the Spanish invader, and Egmont is sentenced to death, with his lover Klärchen ending her life in despair: Egmont then becomes a martyr for victory against oppression.
In 1810 Beethoven set the incidental music (like Purcell’s Oedipus and Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and today’s choice is the dramatic overture.
It combines the Spanish Sarabande (the ‘dum dum, de | dum dum, de’ etc) against a turbulent Allegro section that shows Beethoven in his middle period, particularly in the sharing of material across the wind section.
A slow, tragic moment (which we could read to be Egmont’s death) appears just before the transition to the major, where Egmont is hailed as a martyr.
The Listening Project Blog 