This essay is an analytical investigation of the ‘heroic’ emotions epitomized by both the finale and the slow movement of the Eroica symphony as an entry point into the topic of Beethoven and musical emotion. Whereas the history of emotions is a rapidly expanding field in the humanities, it has yet to take root in musicology or music theory. William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling (2001), a founding text of the history of emotion, explores the transformation of emotion in eighteenth-to-nineteenth-century France in terms of the politicization of sentimentality. Given the Eroica’s debt to the rhetoric of revolutionary France, it would seem plausible to map Reddy’s arguments onto the analysis of Beethoven’s formal processes. I will argue that musical emotion in Beethoven is pivotal between a culture of sociability and sentiment (after Hume and Smith) and the establishment of ‘emotion’ proper in the nineteenth century.

This chapter proposes a new theory of the sonata-form exposition from the viewpoint of contrast rather than from the more common perspectives of unity, symmetry or balance. Expositions end differently to how they begin, and so do sonata forms. Why, then, does music analysis, with an eye to tonal return, celebrate sonata form chiefly as a paradigm of conflict resolution, as epitomized in the dynamics of recapitulation? An equally pertinent issue is surely the formal contrast within an exposition, and moreover, the kind of contrast which survives into the recapitulation, when the modulation to the second group is diverted into the tonic. Thus a level of contrast more fundamental than the tonal rhythm of modulation and resolution which has occupied sonata theory since Tovey and Rosen. At this level, I will argue that an exposition divides into two groups because it needs to say the same thing twice – it must present its material in two ways, the first time conventionally, the second time distinctively. I call this the ‘two-time rule’, a rule which attends to the dialectics of Enlightenment semiotics, whereby convention is equally the vehicle for communication and its straitjacket. Given that communication involves schemata, it entails what psychologists identify as a dilemma between gist and detail in schematic perception. Much of this is common sense. On the one hand, something will not be perceived or remembered if it cannot be fitted into a stereotypical pattern.

How would the Western musical canon look to an outsider? Bruno Nettl, the doyen of American ethnomusicologists, reports the following experience:

Nettl's encounter rings true: our conceptual framework really does appear to have a blind spot for the master of Eszterháza. Why is this so? Special pleading, the watchword of Haydn studies, seems to address both scholars and listeners at cross-purposes to their needs, alternately preaching to the converted and lecturing to deaf ears. The defensive, frankly partisan, tone which permeates books such as Haydn's ‘Farewell’ Symphony is directed not to the merits of the composer, about which there is not a particle of doubt, but to the extraordinary gap between our critical encomiums and his historiographical neglect. Haydn, in short, is a victim of the way we construct historical narrative, a composer squeezed between his brother giants, Mozart and Beethoven.