"Then, in spring 1804, as he was finishing the symphony, news came to Vienna that Napoleon had declared himself emperor of France. Beethoven’s response, according to his protégé Ferdinand Ries, was a furious diatribe against his former hero: “Now he, too, will tread underfoot all the rights of man [to] indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men [and] become a tyrant!” A page in the preserved score shows where the word Bonaparte has been heavily struck through with a pen."
