Pianoforte playing, improvisation, and orchestral conducting were given up one after the other--not suddenly, for Beethoven was resolved to defy his fate as long as possible,--but henceforth it is with Beethoven the composer alone that we have to do. The autumn of 1802 saw him so far restored as to be able to commence his great work on Napoleon, which, however, on account of many interruptions, was not finished until the year 1804. In 1802 he writes thus to his publisher, Hofmeister, who had requested him to compose a sonata of a revolutionary tendency:--"Are you riding to the devil in a body, gentlemen, that you propose to me to write _such a sonata_? At the time of the revolutionary fever it might have done, but now, when everything is once more in the beaten track, when Bonaparte has signed the Concordat with the Pope--now such a sonata! If it had been a _missa pro Sancta Maria a tre voci_, or a _Vesper_, I would immediately have taken pen in hand and written in ponderous notes a _Credo in unum_,--but, good heavens! such a sonata in these fresh, dawning Christian times! Ho! ho! I'll have nothing to do with it!" and yet at this very time he must have been busy with a work destined to the honour of the great Disturber of the Peace of Europe. The idea for this emanated originally from General Bernadotte, the French Ambassador at Vienna--a great admirer of the composer,--and was in reality warmly entered into by Beethoven, who, with his red-hot Republicanism and love for Plato, was an enthusiastic supporter of the First Consul, and imagined nothing less than that it was Napoleon's intention to remodel France according to the Platonic method, and inaugurate a golden age of universal happiness. With the news of the empire came the destruction of this elysian prospect,--Beethoven in a fury tore to pieces the title-page of his symphony on which was written simply,-- "BONAPARTE. "LUIGI V. BEETHOVEN;" and stamping it under foot, showered a volley of imprecations on the head of the tyrant who had played so false a game. No persuasion could induce him at first to publish the work, but after the lapse of some years this masterpiece of ideal writing was given to the world under the title of "Sinfonia Eroica per festegiare il sovvenire d'un grand' uomo." Great man as Napoleon had been in Beethoven's estimation, he never could think of him otherwise than with detestation, till the sudden collapse of the Napoleonic idea in 1815, and the death of its promoter in 1821, changed his wrath into a kind of grim commiseration, which he showed by remarking that he had "seventeen years before composed the music suited to this catastrophe!" meaning the Funeral March in the Eroica.