Although this overture was composed late in his career, Beethoven looked backwards, taking his inspiration from Baroque composers generally (in adopting the style of the French overture with its slow introduction followed by a lively fugue) and Handel in particular. At the time, Beethoven confided in his friend and future biographer, Anton Schindler, that he had devised two possible fugue themes for the work: one in a rather free style and the other in a more strict Handelian style. Handel won out and it is this theme from which the grand fugue that closes the work is developed.

It is interesting to note that in the stately, chorale-like opening, Beethoven uses the three trombones of the orchestra to great effect, but they only play during the first 37 measures of the work. The eminent British musicologist Donald Francis Tovey provided the following evocative description of the overture:

It consists of a solemn slow march, followed by a passage of squarely rhythmic fanfares for trumpets, through which bassoons may be faintly heard in a sound suggestive of hurrying footsteps; then there is the tread of some concourse not less excited, but more certain of its goal; a moment of solemn calm; silence, and the first faint stirring of a movement impelled from some vast distance by a mighty rushing wind, which then seizes us in the career of a great orchestral fugue, rising from climax to climax in a world which is beyond that of action or drama because all that has been done and suffered is now accomplished and proved not in vain.