As part of the events commemorating the inaugural season of Stanford University's new Bing Concert Hall, the Stanford Arts Institute and Stanford Humanities Center Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution organized a one-day conference on the role of heroism in the music of Beethoven and its reception. The conference was one of a series of Beethoven-oriented presentations and exhibits intended to complement this season's performances of the complete symphonies and piano concertos by the Stanford Symphony and Philharmonia in honour of their new principal venue. Six distinguished scholars travelled to Stanford from institutions near and far to speak before an audience gathered in the new hall's studio space. Though focused on a single composer and a handful of compositions, their presentations spanned a remarkably wide range of historical facets, historiographical questions and research methods.

The day began with three papers focused on various aspects of the substance, genesis and reception of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. Alexander Rehding (Harvard University) revisited the question of the work's hero in his paper ‘Heroic Deeds of Music’. At its outset he astutely invoked the ‘Fourth Plinth’ in London's Trafalgar Square – a statue pedestal left empty in the 1840s, whose actualization as a heroic monument has been rethought and debated over the many years since – as an analogue to Beethoven's ultimately undedicated symphonic monument. He went on to place early critical accounts of the symphony in the light of a late eighteenth-century concept of heroism articulated by Johann Georg Sulzer, which, drawing on early concepts of cultural memory and changing views of classical mythology, was predicated on the presence and consent of an audience. Pointing out that the musical ‘oddities’ that the Eroica presented to its earliest listeners were never normalized but rather embraced as such by a consenting public, he proposed that identifying the hero of the Eroica is not so important as recognizing the heroic qualities of the symphony itself, and their ramifications in the history of Beethoven reception.

In the second paper, ‘Complexities of Identity: The Eroica and Its Relationships to Napoleon, Prometheus, Beethoven, and Steibelt’, William Meredith (San Jose State University) delved further into the story of the Eroica, as opposed to the story in the Eroica. Departing from the fact that Beethoven's work on the symphony began with material from his ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Meredith drew on a wealth of archival detective work to elucidate the project's evolution from a ‘Prometheus’ symphony into a ‘Bonaparte’ symphony. The transformation of musical material accomplished in the theme and variations of the last movement – already richly suggestive when considered in the context of Promethean constructions of human creativity – is even more compelling when coupled with Meredith's ‘Westerby–Meredith’ hypothesis: that the theme of the Prometheus finale and the ‘Eroica’ Variations was originally derived by Beethoven from the cello part of the Piano Quintet Op. 28 No. 2 – turned upside down! – by his one-time pianistic rival Daniel Gottlieb Steibelt in the course of an acrimonious musical encounter before an audience of aristocratic patrons.

The question of how Beethoven's music conveys the heroic was taken up by Nicholas Mathew (University of California, Berkeley) in his paper ‘The Heroism Trope and the “Gestural Aesthetic” of the Eroica Symphony’. Building on his earlier efforts to close the stylistic and perceptual gap between the composer's ‘master’ works and the type of ‘occasional’ work exemplified by the battle piece Wellingtons Sieg, Mathew considered the ways in which musical procedures and narrative strategies in the Eroica, such as the presentation of its opening material in rapidly succeeding heroic and pastoral registers, may be interpreted as actively directing the listener's attention away from ‘external’ connotations and explicit meanings by creating the circumstances in which later critics could claim to focus on an ‘internal’ musical-technical dimension. He suggested that, through a kind of ‘narrative management’, Beethoven redirected the force of referential or poetic gestures and topics inwardly, into the unfolding musical design itself.

In its second half, the colloquy moved outward from the Eroica Symphony to issues related to our understanding of Beethoven's middle-period achievement more broadly. Thomas Pfau (Duke University) explored ‘Beethoven's Heroic New Path: Organic Form and Its Consequences’. The paper interrogated the nineteenth-century organicist model adopted by figures such as A. B. Marx as a way of elucidating Beethoven's middle-period formal procedures, and discussed how this model both altered the phenomenology of listening and redefined musical literacy.

In ‘Beethoven Grazioso’, Michelle Fillion (University of Victoria) offered a corrective to the reception of the composer as assertively heroic by drawing attention to his appropriation of the increasingly anachronistic designation ‘grazioso’ throughout his middle period, primarily in smaller piano works, songs and chamber genres – domestic music that has by and large been marginalized in the Beethovenian critical tradition. The term connotes not merely a tempo but a degree of charm and delicacy that might appear contradictory in the heroic period. Fillion suggested that Beethoven's earlier grazioso pieces reflected his efforts to ingratiate himself with the Viennese public, while his later works – in the last bagatelles and the ‘Diabelli’ Variations, for example – invoked the term as a form of Schillerian nostalgia for a ‘naïve’ poetic register.

With the final paper of the day, ‘Staging the Hero: The Lessons of Leonore’, Stephen Rumph (University of Washington) returned the Eroica Symphony to the fore, alongside Beethoven's contemporary operatic project. Exploring the Eroica's affinities to Leonore, he showed how ‘theatrical’ devices also shape our reception of the symphony – devices, such as the breathless syncopations that greet the famous opening C♯, that seem to provide a kind of self-conscious commentary, instructing and guiding listener response. Rumph went on to argue that the composer's use of dance rhythms in the first movement of the symphony manifests an Enlightenment preoccupation with sociability that undermines any notion of a singular hero. Like Beethoven's opera, Rumph suggested, the symphony could be read as portraying a community of heroes instead.

In sum, the conference offered a rare opportunity to learn about current developments in Beethoven research from eminent voices in the field. Each paper made a fresh contribution to our understanding of Beethoven and of the ‘heroic’ ideals that still mediate his middle-period achievements. The dialogue which played out between the various historical perspectives heightened their individual impact and that of the programme overall. The field would benefit significantly from the expansion and dissemination of the day's contributions in future literature.