section_path: Life and career/1802–1812: The "heroic" period/Heroic style
section_name: Heroic style
paragraph_text: Heroic style
  
  Beethoven's return to Vienna from Heiligenstadt was marked by a change in musical style, and is now often designated as the start of his middle or "heroic" period, characterised by many original works composed on a grand scale. According to Czerny, Beethoven said: "I am not satisfied with the work I have done so far. From now on I intend to take a new way." An early major work employing this new style was the Third Symphony in E-flat, Op. 55, known as the Eroica, written in 1803–04. The idea of creating a symphony based on the career of Napoleon may have been suggested to Beethoven by General Bernadotte in 1798. Sympathetic to the ideal of the heroic revolutionary leader, Beethoven originally gave the symphony the title "Bonaparte", but disillusioned by Napoleon declaring himself Emperor in 1804, he scratched Napoleon's name from the manuscript's title page, and the symphony was published in 1806 with its present title and the subtitle "to celebrate the memory of a great man". The Eroica was longer and larger in scope than any previous symphony. When it premiered in early 1805 it received a mixed reception. Some listeners objected to its length or disliked its structure, while others viewed it as a masterpiece.
  
  Other middle-period works extend in the same dramatic manner the musical language Beethoven had inherited. The Rasumovsky string quartets and the Waldstein and Appassionata piano sonatas share the Third Symphony's heroic spirit. Other works of this period include the Fourth through Eighth Symphonies, the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, the opera Fidelio, and the Violin Concerto. Beethoven was hailed in 1810 by the writer and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann, in an influential review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, as the greatest of (what he considered) the three Romantic composers (that is, ahead of Haydn and Mozart); in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony his music, wrote Hoffmann, "sets in motion terror, fear, horror, pain, and awakens the infinite yearning that is the essence of romanticism".
  
  During this time, Beethoven's income came from publishing his works, from performances of them, and from his patrons, for whom he gave private performances and copies of works they commissioned for an exclusive period before their publication. Some of his early patrons, including Lobkowitz and Lichnowsky, gave him annual stipends in addition to commissioning works and purchasing published works. Perhaps his most important aristocratic patron was Archduke Rudolf of Austria, the youngest son of Emperor Leopold II, who in 1803 or 1804 began to study piano and composition with him. They became friends, and their meetings continued until 1824. Beethoven dedicated 14 compositions to Rudolf, including such major works as the Archduke Trio Op. 97 (1811) and Missa solemnis Op. 123 (1823).
  
  His position at the Theater an der Wien was terminated when the theatre changed management in early 1804, and he was forced to move temporarily to the suburbs of Vienna with his friend Stephan von Breuning. This slowed work on Leonore (his original title for his opera), his largest work to date, for a time. It was delayed again by the Austrian censor and finally premiered, under its present title of Fidelio, in November 1805 to houses that were nearly empty because of the French occupation of the city. In addition to being a financial failure, this version of Fidelio was also a critical failure, and Beethoven began revising it.
  
  Despite this failure, Beethoven continued to attract recognition. In 1807 the musician and publisher Muzio Clementi secured the rights to publish his works in England, and Haydn's former patron Prince Esterházy commissioned the Mass in C, Op. 86, for his wife's name-day. But he could not count on such recognition alone. A colossal benefit concert he organized in December 1808, widely advertised, included the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth (Pastoral) symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, extracts from the Mass in C, the scena and aria Ah! perfido Op. 65 and the Choral Fantasy op. 80. There was a large audience (including Czerny and the young Ignaz Moscheles), but it was under-rehearsed, involved many stops and starts, and during the Fantasia Beethoven was noted shouting at the musicians "badly played, wrong, again!" The financial outcome is unknown.
  
  In the autumn of 1808, after having been rejected for a position at the Royal Theatre, Beethoven received an offer from Napoleon's brother Jérôme Bonaparte, then king of Westphalia, for a well-paid position as Kapellmeister at the court in Cassel. To persuade him to stay in Vienna, Archduke Rudolf, Prince Kinsky and Prince Lobkowitz, after receiving representations from Beethoven's friends, pledged to pay him a pension of 4000 florins a year. In the event, Rudolf paid his share of the pension on the agreed date. Kinsky, immediately called to military duty, did not contribute and died in November 1812 after falling from his horse. The Austrian currency destabilized and Lobkowitz went bankrupt in 1811 so that to benefit from the agreement Beethoven eventually had recourse to the law, which in 1815 brought him some recompense.
  
  The imminence of war reaching Vienna itself was felt in early 1809. In April, Beethoven completed writing his Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, which the musicologist Alfred Einstein has called "the apotheosis of the military concept" in Beethoven's music. Rudolf left the capital with the Imperial family in early May, prompting Beethoven's piano sonata Les Adieux (Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a), actually titled by Beethoven in German Das Lebewohl (The Farewell), of which the final movement, Das Wiedersehen (The Return), is dated in the manuscript with the date of Rudolf's homecoming of 30 January 1810. During the French bombardment of Vienna in May, Beethoven took refuge in the cellar of his brother Kaspar's house. The subsequent occupation of Vienna and disruptions to cultural life and to Beethoven's publishers, together with Beethoven's poor health at the end of 1809, explain his significantly reduced output during this period, although other notable works of the year include his String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat major, Op. 74 (The Harp) and the Piano Sonata No. 24 in F-sharp major, Op. 78, dedicated to Josephine's sister Therese Brunsvik.