Two decades into the twenty-first century, Beethoven’s Third Symphony is programmed regularly by the world’s leading orchestras and remains popular with audiences. In contemporary mainstream classical musical culture, the Eroica continues to be the pre-eminent musical emblem of heroism and revolution. In visual media, the Eroica retains classical music’s conventional generic meaning of wealth and superior status, but it is also deployed in film, television and video game soundtracks to track markedly intelligent heroes and culturally sophisticated revolutionaries. As new critical theories engage with the symphony’s traditional interpretations, alternative readings of the Eroica are emerging in musical scholarship alongside the heroic/revolutionary trope. The pastoral, politics and freedom figure prominently in several recent close readings, while the Eroica is fast becoming a pivotal musical work in disability studies. As a central example in both heroic narratives of overcoming and human narratives of adaptation, the Eroica endures.

Why study recordings of Haydn's symphonies? What can they tell us that the usual sources of music-historical data, i.e., paper documents, cannot? The most obvious answer is that recordings capture a performance, providing evidence of performance practices of the past as well as the present. Recordings are also important documents of reception history and can reveal patterns of consumption, changes in taste, variations of musical meaning, and shifts in the musical qualities essential for the definition of a particular musical work. But since the recording process itself is just as much a performance as the activity of the musicians, a study of recordings is also a study of technology. In addition to preserving musical practices, recording inspires them, profoundly altering our musical values.

The ontology of recording

In studying recorded performances, the ontology of a recording is of vital importance. As a historical document, a recording offers a unique portal to a particular moment in the performance history of a musical composition. But the conceptual separation of the recording from the recorded musical object is crucial, for a recording of a Haydn symphony is not simply a recording of Haydn's music. Neither is it a recording of a single performance of a symphony by a particular conductor and orchestra. Also recorded are the acoustics of the hall or studio, the unique properties of the equipment used to make the recording, the placement of the microphones, and the sound of the storage medium itself.