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You will surely remember the "Carosello" during which a very strong Dutch amaro was advertised... Do you remember the fist covered with an iron glove that slammed down on the table and the music that accompanied this strong and heroic gesture... a long unison in fortissimo of the strings on a blank screen that prepared the explosion of a full orchestra chord, underscoring the peremptory strike on a table of the closed fist of an armiger. Thanks to a Dutch amaro with a strong taste, Beethoven's Coriolan Overture - or at least one of its fundamental cells - thus became part of the listening experiences familiar to millions of Italians.
Coriolanus is the nickname attributed to the legendary Roman patrician Gnaeus Marcius, the architect in 493 B.C. of the conquest of Corioli, the capital of the Volsci. Exiled from Rome after a failed attempt to have himself appointed consul, Coriolanus, seeking revenge, took refuge with Tullus Aufidius, king of the Volsci, to lead their army against Rome; but, when he reached a few miles from the city, he was stopped by the words of his mother and wife who reminded him of the values of patriotism.
The story of Coriolanus, narrated by Plutarch in the Parallel Lives, had already inspired, among other things, the eponymous tragedy by Shakespeare (1607-1608, properly The Tragedy of Coriolanus), serious works by numerous musicians, and a choreography. To these was added Beethoven, with this Overture in C minor composed between January and March 1807 for the eponymous tragedy written by his friend Heinrich Joseph Edler von Collin, which had been successfully performed at the Court Theatre in Vienna in 1802 and is now completely forgotten. The first performance took place in Vienna in March 1807 during two concerts at Lobkowitz Palace, during which the Fourth Symphony and the Fourth Piano Concerto were also presented. On April 24 of the same year, the Overture, which is dedicated to Collin, was performed for the first time on the occasion of a revival of the tragedy that had inspired it, and in 1808 it was published in Vienna as op. 62.
Despite the relative success enjoyed at its appearance by Collin's tragedy, it was immediately clear that Beethoven's creation was infinitely superior to the drama that had inspired it: E. T. A. Hoffmann, in an enthusiastic review of 1812, particularly emphasized the greatness demonstrated by Beethoven in managing to elevate "a construction of great art" with "extremely simple elements". Certainly, in the story of the unfortunate Coriolanus, Beethoven was able to find ideal elements that were particularly dear to him, such as the confrontation with history, classicism, and the Roman world and the dramatic contrast between the man's feelings and his ethical sense; this contrast, just like the one between the angry impetus of an offended soul and the conciliatory and pacifying voices of the mother and the wife, seems to have been born to be condensed in the opposition between poles of a sonata-form structure.
Thus is born this extraordinary page of highest music, traversed, after the impressive fortissimo opening chords, by a continuous tension expressed with a panting pace, obtained through the continuous shifts of accent caused by syncopations and long pauses of silence used in an expressive key; the tension, mitigated for a few moments by the appearance of the highly singable second theme, is also heightened by the dazzling conciseness of the piece, in which every note seems to be absolutely inevitable.
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