One of the many diplomats who attended the Congress of Vienna was Johann Friedrich Leopold Duncker, Secretary to the Privy Council of Prussia. He met Beethoven through a mutual friend and engaged Beethoven to write some music for his play “Leonore Prohaska.”
Beethoven’s Incidental Music to “Leonore Prohaska” might at first seem like it has something to do with his opera “Leonore,” but the name of “Leonore” is only a coincidence and the two works are completely independent. The only similarity is that they both involve female heroes.
Duncker’s play “Leonore Prohaska” was about the real-life Marie Christiane Eleonore Prohaska, born 1785 in Potsdam. As a daughter of a military musician, she learned the flute at an early age, and appeared on stage as a flutist with her father between 1810 and 1813. In 1813, Leonore Prohaska disguised herself as a man to enlist in a Volunteer Rifles corps in the war against Napoleon. She seems to have had great success with the rifle (“I hit the target 150 times!”) but also did some cooking and sewing for the other soldiers.
On 16 September 1813, Leonore Prohaska took up the signal drum after the regular drummer was injured. She herself was wounded in battle and died 19 days later.
Much of the information here about Lenore Prohaska and Beethoven’s music for Duncker’s play comes from the article “Beethoven Heroine: A Female Allegory of Music and Authorship in Egmont” by Matthew Head, 19th Century Music, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 97–132, and particularly pp. 107–109.
It is not known if Friedrich Duncker finished writing “Leonore Prohaska.” Whatever he wrote has been lost. Beethoven’s incidental music is considered to be incomplete. The project was abandoned when it appeared that Vienna was about to be oversaturated with Prohaska tributes.
Beethoven’s Incidental Music for “Leonore Prohaska” consists of four numbers. The first is a rousing three-stanza strophic Soldier’s Chorus for unaccompanied men’s voices, finishing with a premonition of death. The last of the three stanzas is:
Joyfully we look death in his pallid face,
The Righteous One’s judgement calls us to fight,
To fight for freedom and love.
The second part of the “Leonore Prohaska” incidental music is a gentle four-stanza strophic “Romanze” — the only Beethoven work for voice and harp. It speaks of a garden and flowers metaphorically with another premonition of death in the final stanza:
You to whom I consecrated it, remember me,
Keep faith with me, still love me,
Then that flower will one day be your own;
Else it will fade on my gravestone,
And Time will bring you no other.
The third part of the incidental music to “Leonore Prohaska” is a Melodrama for spoken voice accompanied by glass harmonica — Beethoven’s only use of this instrument. This is believed to be Leonore Porhaska’s death monologue:
You for whom my flowers were entwined,
Were two for love and loyalty.
Now I can dedicate only funeral flowers to you,
But on my tombstone
Lilies and roses bloom.
The glass harmonica called for in “Leonore Prohaska” consists of a series of glass disks arranged in descending size like a keyboard and mounted on a horizontal spindle. As the disks rotate under control of a foot pedal, they sound when touched with a moistened finger.
The invention of the glass harmonica is credited to Benjamin Franklin as a replacement for the more awkward and fragile array of water glasses previously used for creating similar ethereal sounds.
As Heather Hadlock discusses in a fascinating article “Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica” (Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 53, No. 3, Autumn, 2000, pp. 507–42), the glass harmonica was almost immediately identified as a suitable instrument for young women, much like the harp. Later the instrument became associated with mesmerism, charlatanism, and nervous disorders, such as its use in the mad scene of Donizetti’s Lucia (1835).
The finale of the “Leonore Prohaska” music is a Funeral March orchestrated from the 3rd movement of the Piano Sonata No. 12 (Day 138). That movement — the “Funeral March on the Death of a Hero” — is Beethoven’s only title use of the word “hero” (as distinct from “heroic”).
#Beethoven250 Day 280
Leonore Prohaska Incidental Music (WoO 96), 1815
A studio recording with soprano Sylvia McNair and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abbado.
#Beethoven250 Day 280
Leonore Prohaska Incidental Music (WoO 96), 1815
This video is rather noisy, but it’s a rare live performance of the Funeral March, courtesy of the Bloemfontein City Orchestra in South Africa.
In his article “Beethoven Heroine” (cited earlier), Matthew Head observes:
Beethoven’s representations of heroism are frequently subject to female embodiment and are characterized by an androgynous mixture of masculine and feminine signs.
After analyzing how the real-life Leonore Prohaska presented as androgynous, he writes:
This mixture of masculine and feminine signs recalls Beethoven’s music for Leonore Prohaska: the androgynous wholeness of its mixture of military and lyrical topics, the somber funeral march following Leonore’s sacred and feminine monologue with glass harmonica, her strophic Romance following the Soldiers’ Chorus, and the libretto’s references to battle and flowers, love and war. (Ibid, pp. 102. 108)