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In the letter, which has become known as the "Heligenstadt Testament," Beethoven wrote that life had become so intolerable as to lead him to consider suicide, but he stayed his hand for, in his own words, "it seemed as if I could not quit this earth until I had produced all I felt within me, and so I continued this wretched life." Here was a man who chose to live solely for the sake of his art, for as long as his inspiration might last and no longer. It lasted to the day of his death twenty-five years later. In that last half of his life, Beethoven produced his greatest compositions, including piano sonatas of epic scope and monumental symphonies which defined what symphonies would become in future years. Yet of all those works, none is more truly heroic than the Second Symphony, which though completed during this traumatic year, shows none of its creator's torment. Rather, it is filled with sunshine and high-spirits, as if it had been written by a man without a care in the world. Only a composer of single-minded devotion to his art, who could set aside his own most pressing concerns in favor of artistic goals, could have produced such a symphony at such a time. In that aspect, this charming composition is the essence of heroism.
The Second Symphony premiered in Vienna April 5, 1803. Beethoven himself conducted the program, which also featured the premieres of the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and the Third Piano Concerto. Public reaction to the work was mixed, and even later performances found little critical consensus. A Leipzig critic went so far as to describe the finale as "a repulsive monster, a wounded tail-lashing serpent, dealing wild and furious blows as it stiffens into its death agony," yet the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung praised the piece as "a work full of new and original ideas." That very novelty may have been the source of the differing opinions, for here are early hints of Beethoven's artistic innovations. It is a composition of greater scope than symphonies by Mozart or Haydn. Its introductions are more lengthy, its concluding codas more extensive, and it anticipates the grandeur of Romantic symphonies yet to come. In addition, in this new work, for the first time, Beethoven dispenses with the formerly standard third movement Minuet, which had been an elegant holdover from the Classical era. He replaces it with a Scherzo ("joke"), a vibrant movement with more verve and energy than some conservative critics might have found quite comfortable. Here was a radical new way to write an established genre, yet for Beethoven, it was merely the beginning.