Lewis, Beethoven, Napoleon

At four o’clock in the afternoon of 7 April 1805, the Corps of Discovery again headed west up the Missouri River, leaving behind their winter camp among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians in today’s North Dakota. It was a portentous step, as Lewis knew:

We are now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine.

A year and a half of preparation and eleven months of prologue had brought him and his party to this hour and to the place beyond which the course of his country’s destiny and of the world’s history was directed.

An Amazing Coincidence

On that same day, perhaps at that very hour, by one of those amazing coincidences that history leaves us to stumble upon by surprise, another kind of explorer was revealing his own “discovery” to an expectant and appreciative audience in Vienna, Austria. His name was Ludwig van Beethoven, and he was conducting the first public performance of his Third Symphony. Beethoven was thirty-five, the same age as William Clark; Lewis was thirty-one.

Nothing like Beethoven’s Third Symphony had ever been heard before. It spawned a new term, “masterpiece,” in the lexicon of music criticism, and initiated a Beethovenian lineage of musical touchstones by which the value of every other composition would be ranked until well into the twentieth century.

Also, it was a cornerstone of the Romantic era, which placed the heart in command of the head, and embodied values that were inimical to the Rationalist precepts by which Jefferson and his generation lived. Similarly, Lewis’s steps led not merely into an unfamiliar territory, but into a historical realm that would host a new idea of American nationhood, and a new concept of American citizenship and of the individual.

Both journeys were “experiments,” and both still inspire contemplation and admiration.

Heroic Visions

The beginnings of both voyages are hazy. Beethoven evidently began planning his symphony sometime in 1802, perhaps in late summer or early fall, about the time when Jefferson, newly aware of Alexander Mackenzie‘s successful crossing of the continent, may have begun shaping his plans for an American expedition to be led by Lewis.

Between June and October 1803 the sounds of Beethoven’s symphony emerged in the composer’s mind all the more clearly and forcefully, perhaps, as his increasing deafness blotted out the sonorous world around him. Simultaneously, the young American infantry officer wrapped up his preliminaries, set out down the Ohio in his custom-built military barge (called the ‘boat’ or ‘barge’ but never the ‘keelboat’), and directed the building of the winter’s camp at present Wood River, Illinois.

Beethoven had conceived his Third Symphony as a musical testament to his own faith in the ideals of democracy and as an homage to Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul of France, whom he regarded as a champion of equality and freedom.^[3]Beethoven once considered emigrating to America. So did Napoleon. On the title page the composer wrote, Sinfonia grande initolata Bonaparte del Sigr Louis van Beethoven— “Majestic symphony dedicated to Bonaparte by Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven.”

Within the year, Napoleon’s fatal hubris started him on his swift descent to ignominy, defeat, and exile.

In mid-May, 1804, France became officially the heartland of the Holy Roman Empire, with Napoleon as its Emperor. “So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man,” Beethoven railed to a friend. “Now he also will trample on all human rights and indulge only his own ambition.” Disillusioned and enraged, Beethoven erased his hero’s name with such vehemence that he tore the paper.

On 14 May 1804, the Corps of Discovery left Camp River Dubois at four o’clock in the afternoon to explore the Louisiana Territory, which Napoleon had sold to the United States in order to finance the bloody conquests by which he would personally, if only temporarily, revise the world’s geography.

Yet, as if reluctant to abandon his hero, the composer rewrote the dedication to read simply Sinfonia Eroica—“Heroic Symphony.”

Bonaparte’s Downfall

The date that Americans and Austrians called the 7th day of April, 1805 A.D. was, for the French people, the 18th day of the month of Germinal, in the year XIV of the Republican calendar.

It was a quiet day for the thirty-six-year-old Bonaparte, who was between conquests in the first of three successive wars. He signed a few letters and issued a few orders, unaware that it was his doomsday—the day Great Britain and Russia sealed a fateful alliance against him.

It is doubtful that any of the Corps of Discovery knew anything of Beethoven, nor he of them. Lewis may have heard his name mentioned in the social circles he frequented during his tenure as Jefferson’s secretary, but the President himself is not known to have had any interest in German music. No, the men of the Corps, including the two captains, probably would have preferred another kind of music—the shrill martial cadence of fife and drum, playing popular tunes like “Yankee Doodle.”

Moreover, not until 1843 would there be an orchestra anywhere north of Mexico City large enough to play the Eroica symphony.

Lewis and Clark . . . Beethoven . . . Bonaparte. All they had in common was their age, their courage, and some historical coincidences that converged on 7 April 1805.

Each marched to a different drummer.