Napoleon Symphony

The Napoleon which Burgess gives us is a comic tyrant, a conqueror with bad breath, an emperor whose noble hand - tucked ever in his tunic - comforts a case of common heartburn. The opening movements reveal him on his glorious Austrian campaign, a cuckolded Colossus penning ardent letters to a faithless Josephine in Paris who celebrates her husband’s victories in a lover’s bed. So, the conqueror of Egypt becomes the libertine of Europe, bedding princesses and prima donnas, as news of his wife’s adultery reaches him.

The soundtrack to this picaresque tale is the thunder of the guns and the muttering of troops scorching, starving or freezing to death - the expendable masses who throughout history have died for a tyrant’s dream.

After the huge success of A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make an epic movie of Napoleon’s exploits and he commissioned Burgess to write a screenplay. The film never came to fruition, but Burgess went on to write this novel, using Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, ‘The Eroica’ as a framework.

Napoleon Symphony has to be one of Burgess’s finest achievements. While a genius of music inspired the undertaking, a literary genius insured its triumph!