Funeral march

On 11 11 1918 at 11 am, Paris time, the Armistice treaty between the Allies and Germany came into effect. The tectonic plates of history had moved. And at that moment in the day on the nearest Sunday in all subsequent years there has been a two-minute silence in a ceremony at Lutyens’s Cenotaph in Whitehall.

And there, afterwards, a mysterious march is played.

The silence is marked by a field gun on Horse Guards Parade at the beginning, as Big Ben strikes eleven, and at the end. The wind thuds against BBC microphones. Then Royal Marines buglers sound the Last Post. The royal family lays wreaths in silence. When the time comes for politicians and Commonwealth representatives and others to lay theirs, something called “Beethoven’s funeral march” is announced.

Here is part of the 2009 ceremony last Sunday. The march starts at 3:00. It’s played a little faster than usual.

Anyone who grew up in England in the ’60s, when there were only two channels and few live events, will have seen or heard this moving broadcast. Many veterans of the Great War took part. That war’s last survivor living in the UK died this year.

It was presented as a public, a state, occasion. I think it still is. There are still no cuts to grieving mothers.

What is the march?

I was struck by much of the music as a boy, but especially by “Beethoven’s funeral march”. But for as long as I’ve had a sense of what Beethoven wrote, I’ve asked myself “what Beethoven funeral march, for heaven’s sake?”. If this is by Beethoven, why do we never hear about it on any other occasion? Why was it not included in the Deutsche Grammophon edition in 1970? Why is it never recorded? It’s a remarkable piece of music, a sort of funereal fantasia, with its commanding opening upbeat and haunting refrain. But Beethoven wrote only two funeral marches that anyone has heard of. The famous one is in the Eroica. The other is in the twelfth piano sonata, from a year or two earlier, which is a kind of dry run for the tune, before he split its atom in the symphony.

You can hear sketches for the Eroica march here at a site (you can’t spend less than an hour there) called The Unheard Beethoven. (This is the march, if it wasn’t an orchestration of Chopin’s, which used to interrupt normal radio broadcasts in totalitarian countries when a leader died, before the nervous apparatchiks had steeled themselves to make the formal announcement.)

There is a third march, but it is never called one. It is a fragment of a funeral march, which Beethoven throws in, with hair-raising effect, in the coda of the first movement of the ninth symphony. It appears in the woodwind, and is overwhelmed by falling and rising chromatic cellos and basses and then full strings before the conclusion.

In the BBC broadcast this year, the Cenotaph march was still being announced as “Beethoven’s funeral march”. I googled this a few years ago, before the Internet was up to much, and couldn’t solve the problem. Now I can. It isn’t Beethoven, though it used to be attributed to him as WoO Anhang 13. Even then, it was never recorded. It was sometimes called “Beethoven’s funeral march no 1”. (What was no 2?) It was played as such at the funeral of Edward VII.

The march is actually by Johann Heinrich Walch. Walch wrote many marches. The allies marched into Paris in 1814 to the tune of his Pariser Einzugsmarsch and the Germans used it in their victory parade there in 1940. It’s a rather trivial piece. You can find it on iTunes, but you can’t find the funeral march which is worthy of Beethoven. Nobody knows who wrote the Last Post, but that could be Beethoven too.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Jeff Melton Arrangements
• March and Mock Funeral, Sunday April 27th