Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 ‘Eroica’ — II. Marcia funebre, Adagio assai

About this work

The ‘Eroica’ funeral march begins sotto voce in the low register of the first violins. The other strings establish a restrained pulse broken by rests before the theme changes colour and scale. The march draws its weight from that steady tread as much as from the melody: if the pulse freezes, the phrase loses direction.

Follow the changes of timbre in the full score rather than only the upper line. Winds, strings and brass take up the argument in different colours; later, a contrapuntal passage brings the voices in one after another and turns the march into a collective progression. Releases and breaths matter there as much as attacks.

In rehearsal, establish the relationship between pulse and silence first, then build crescendos across several phrases. The 248 bars alternate restraint, expansion and more exposed returns. A loud dynamic only has meaning if the orchestra keeps enough in reserve to make those stages audible and recover the character of the Adagio assai afterwards.

What the document containsScale of the movement: 248 bars spread across 40 A4 pages. Every section appears in the full score, with a MIDI for following the exchanges.OpenScore Orchestra released this score to the public domain under CC0 1.0, and the Hauptstimme collection preserves the engraving. LesPartitions.info read through its changes of texture, tested the playback and added its backlink to all forty pages.