Shortly after completing his breathtaking Fifth Symphony, Beethoven composed incidental music for Goethe’s drama, Egmont. While the Overture is well known, the remaining movements deserve no less attention as they chart the tragic course of Count Egmont’s rebellion against the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands and his ill-fated love for Clara, whose suicide Beethoven movingly portrays. Two Marches, composed at around the same time, and his concert aria Ah! perfido, written a decade earlier, complement one of Beethoven’s most effective theatrical scores.