‘Die and become’ was Goethe's injunction to humanity. It was also Beethoven's. Nietzsche, in celebrating the destruction of the tragic hero, was merely paying homage to the symphonic monument that towered over the nineteenth century. Wagner, too, bowed to its imperative. Even before his Schopenhauerian conversion, he already understood the Eroica Symphony as a ritual of annihilation and redemption. In the Eroica, the ‘purely human’ hero embraces his fate to claim his glory; ‘ecstasy’ and ‘horror’ are unleashed, says Wagner, as the hero hurls himself with ‘shattering force’ towards the ‘tragic crisis’ through which he will be immortalised. Thus the funeral procession of the second movement leads to the apotheosis of the last. The hero becomes ‘totality’ and ‘shouts to us the avowal of his Godhood’.

For Wagner, the Eroica Symphony stood as ‘a monument of an entirely new age’; its looming presence spurred him towards the future, lest its long shadow should eclipse his music. And he was not the only one overwhelmed by its apocalyptic power: ‘Thirty-six bars of the nineteenth century’, exclaimed Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl, on hearing the dissonant blows that pummel the hero at the heart of the movement (bs 248–83). ‘On your knees old world!’ commands Wilhelm von Lenz, ‘Before you stands the idea of the great Beethoven symphony … Here is the end of one empire and the beginning of another. Here is the boundary of a century.’