The CORIOLAN OVERTURE is the second and one of the most performed of the eleven works in this genre that occupy a special place in the symphonic oeuvre of  LUDWIG  VAN  BEETHOVEN. He wrote the famous overture in early 1807 to the tragedy of the same name by the Austrian playwright and his close friend Heinrich Joseph von Collin (1771-1811), who had composed it in 1804, the year Napoleon declared himself Emperor. A similar story is that of the Roman patrician Gaius Martius Coriolanus (also described by Plutarch in the Contemporary Lives, and in Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus) who lived in 5^th  century BC, much celebrated after his great military victories as a general, but in his quest for high political power he had contempt for the plebeians, for which he was condemned by the Romans to exile. To avenge himself, Coriolanus besieged Rome with enemy troops. His fellow citizens sent his wife with their children and his mother to beg for mercy. Coriolanus lifted the siege, but in his pride could not accept defeat and he committed suicide.

The structure and themes of the overture follow the plot of the play in summary: the opening stark D minor theme is associated with the notion of the general Coriolanus rebelling against Rome, the soft lyrical second theme expresses his mother’s pleas to spare the city, and the sharp dynamic and timbral contrasts in the development that follows seem to epitomise the inner state of mind of the hero, with whose death the overture ends in a sombre lull.

The Coriolanus Overture was premiered in March 1807 at a concert given by the composer at the palace of Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz, one of Beethoven’s patrons; his Symphony No. 4 and Piano Concerto No. 4 were first performed on the same evening. The concert was also attended by another of his patrons, Prince Franz Lobkowitz, a member of the Viennese theatre directorate, who ordered that Colin’s tragedy be staged again at the Vienna Court Theatre with Beethoven’s overture (at the first premiere the play was accompanied by music from Mozart’s works).