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BEETHOVEN: HERO / REBEL
7.00pm, Thursday 27 February, Queen Elizabeth Hall
BEETHOVEN HERO REBEL What does it mean to be a hero or a rebel? Dr Michael Rapport
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Reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow
o he too is nothing more than an ordinary man. Now he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition; he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant!’ In 1838 Beethoven’s friends and biographers Franz Gerhard Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries told the
story that on learning of Napoleon Bonaparte’s selfcoronation as ‘Emperor of the French’ in Notre Dame Cathedral on 2 December 1804, the great musician flew into a rage and tore up the title page of his Third Symphony, which he had inscribed with the word ‘Buonaparte’.