Since I'm going to be picking up N:TW very soon, I've started to think a bit more about the era and its participants. Of course, the era had one artistic giant: the German/Austrian composer Ludwig van Beethoven, and it struck me how much he was a man of his times.

We all know the story of how he wanted to dedicate his groundbreaking Third Symphony to Napoleon until Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor. Given that he was in Hapsburg Vienna that would have been a dangerous thing to do!

But something else occurred to me recently while listening to the Sixth Symphony, the "Pastoral". Clearly much of the inspiration was remenicences of the time Beethoven spent ion the country in a period where he needed some seclusion to sort himself out, so to speak. But it also occurred to me that it was written at the height of the wars when Europe faced utter chaos. And there are few better musical pictures of chaos (while maintainign structure and form) than the fourth, "storm" movement, followed by the blessed calm and stability of the final movement, and I found myself thinking "is Beethoven longing for peace to supplant the wars of his time?". Which is a fascinating way to look at the Sixth.

It strikes me one could learn a lot about the Napoleonic era, in terms of what it felt like to be living in those times, from Beethoven and his contemporaries.