But first things first: Ludwig van Beethoven made his first sketches in 1802 and composed his third symphony in 1803. He probably worked intensively on it, especially in the summer when he stayed in Döbling (today, the XIXth district of Vienna). The work was perhaps primarily completed by the end of the year.
As his pupil Ferdinand Ries noted in a letter in the fall of 1803, Beethoven planned to call the symphony “Bonaparte”. – Beethoven was undoubtedly a sympathizer of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. When the news reached Vienna in May 1804 that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor, Beethoven was so disappointed and angry that he scraped the words “intitolata Bonaparte” (titled Bonaparte) off the title page with a razor. – At the time this method of erasing mistakes was a common practice, which entailed the careful scraping of the ink from the tick paper with a razor. The page was usually only superficially damaged. However, the enraged Beethoven wielded the knife with such force that he created a hole on the title page.
