In 1809-10—or only two or three years before the Seventh and Eighth
Symphonies—Beethoven was commissioned to write incidental music for
Goethe’s tragedy of the Netherlands under Spanish oppression, _Egmont_.
The F minor Overture ranks indisputably as one of his finest, if it is
less spare and less dour than the one to _Coriolanus_. It is a dramatic
tone poem, but not a theatrical compendium in the manner of the
“Leonore” Overtures. Yet it has an exultant coda not wholly dissimilar
to the tremendous close of “Leonore” No. 3. This coda is identical with
the so-called “Triumph” Symphony which concludes the play and was
actually composed before the overture proper.
The greater Beethoven overtures might be termed off-shoots or
by-products of the symphonies. Let us consider them briefly at this
stage irrespective of their precise dates of composition. Not all the
rest, to be sure, rise to the heights of the “Leonore” Overtures, the
“Egmont,” or the “Coriolanus.” But it is only proper to allude to such
symphonic prefaces as the early overture to the _Creatures of
Prometheus_ ballet (from the period of the First Symphony), the tenuous
ones for the Kotzebue plays _The Ruins of Athens_ and _King Stephen_,
the “Namensfeier” Overture (an “occasional” piece, written in 1814), and
the magnificent, if slightly known and largely undervalued,
“Consecration of the House,” composed as late as 1822 for the opening of
the Josefstädter Theater in Vienna. The influence of Handel is
powerfully manifest in this late creation, which is strongly
contrapuntal in its texture but at the same time strangely suggestive
from a dramatic, even a pictorial, standpoint.
Having paid something of a compliment to Handel in the “Consecration of
the House” Beethoven was on the point of composing an overture on the
letters of Bach’s name a couple of years later. The formula B-A-C-H
represents in German notation B flat, A, C, and B as employed
contrapuntally not only by Bach himself but by countless other masters
since Bach’s epoch. Unfortunately, though he worked on studies for such
an overture till 1825, Beethoven was too occupied with other schemes and
never lived to complete it.