Page:Rolland - Beethoven, tr. Hull, 1927.pdf/45

 often I should always be very valiant"; in the score of Egmont; and even in his Pianoforte Concertos, in the one in E flat, Opus 73 (1809), where even the virtuosity is heroic: whole armies of warriors pass by. Nor need we be astonished at this. Though when writing the Funeral March on the death of an hero (Sonata, Opus 26), Beethoven was ignorant that the hero most worthy of his music, namely Hoche, the one who approximated more closely than Bonaparte to the model of the Eroica Symphony, had just died near the Rhine, where indeed his tomb stands at the top of a small hill between Coblentz and Bonn. He had twice seen the Revolution victorious in Vienna itself. French officers were present at the first production of Fidelio in Vienna in November, 1805. It was General Hulin, the conqueror of the Bastille, who stayed with Lobkovitz, Beethoven's friend and protector, to whom he dedicated the Eroica and the C minor Symphony. And on 10 May, 1809, Napoleon slept at Schönbrunn.