Beethoven had planned his Symphony No. 3 as an homage to Napoleon Bonaparte, but had became so disillusioned with the French ruler by the time of the work's premiere that he violently scratched out the original dedication with a knife, calling the work instead merely a "Heroic Symphony."

As was the case with his piano concertos, Beethoven's first two symphonies recalled those of Mozart and Haydn; there were innovations, to be sure, but nothing that radically challenged the concertgoers of the day like his monumental third symphony would.

The massive opening movement alone is of a scale and length previously unknown to the audiences that first heard the work. Eschewing a traditional introduction, two bold chords are sounded, then Beethoven launches into the principal theme, constructed out of a simple major triad. Throughout the movement meter and tonality are questioned through the use of misplaced accents and striking dissonances.

It is difficult in a world where Stravinsky's and Schoenberg's most shocking music is nearly a century old to understand just how revolutionary Beethoven's Eroica symphony was and just how strange it must have sounded to its first listeners.

The slow movement is a funeral march, one that has become even more familiar than the symphony as a whole because of its frequent use to memorialize fallen public figures (although Barber's Adagio for Strings has in recent years largely assumed this role). The movement begins and ends in C minor, with a major-key central episode. Listen in particular to the closing bars, when the principal theme literally disintegrates in the violins.

The third movement, a lightning-quick scherzo, returns to E-flat major. Beethoven had written a scherzo—literally "joke," and usually in 3/4 time like a Haydn or Mozart minuet, but much faster—for each of his first two symphonies, but neither was like this one: faster than the wind, with offbeat accents blurring the distinction between strong and weak beats and often throwing the meter itself into question. Beethoven heightens the tension by sustaining a quiet dynamic through much of the movement, making the loud outbursts even more alarming. The tempo slows slightly at the trio—at which point we realize at last why Beethoven has scored the symphony for three horns instead of the usual (at the time) two. The scherzo material returns, although with some important changes including a brief, albeit shocking, change of meter from three beats in a bar to four.

The finale begins with a furious outburst before settling down to a set of variations on a theme that Beethoven had used several times before-in fact, the first several variations come more or less verbatim from his incidental music for The Creatures of Prometheus. Toward the end, the tempo slows, not for a moment of quiet repose, but to scale even more monumental heights, before subsiding. One of the most exciting codas in the literature rounds out the work.