Beethoven is usually credited with five piano concertos, but, in fact, may have written as many as seven, two of them in early youth. The composer also wrote a piano arrangement of the solo part of his Violin Concerto. Of the standard five concertos, the one in C Major was published first but was actually the second in order of composition. The B-Flat Concerto, now known as No. 2, was written earlier. The C Major Concerto was sketched in 1795 and 1796, completed in 1798 and published in 1801. Like the Piano Sonata, Op. 7, the piece is dedicated to Princess Innocenz Odescalchi who had been Beethoven's pupil when a young girl. Throughout his lifetime, Beethoven was acknowledged to be the greatest of pianists. Perhaps a few others could almost match his technical virtuosity, the mechanical skills with which he made music at the keyboard, but none even approached the drama, the sentiment, or the nobility of musical expression in his playing. Early in his career, when he needed concertos to play at his concerts, Beethoven took Mozart's as his models and expanded their form somewhat. Later, in the Fourth and Fifth Concertos, he made important alterations in the classical structures, but after the age of forty he wrote no more concertos. The later innovations of his piano sonatas, string quartets and symphonies therefore have no parallels in the concertos. Beethoven once wrote of the C Major Concerto, "It is one of my first, and therefore not one of the best of my compositions." Nevertheless, the great artistic powers that he then already possessed were reported by Johann Wenzel Tomaschek, a composer four years younger than Beethoven, who wrote in a memoir published in 1845, "In the year 1798, Beethoven, that giant among pianists, came to Prague. At a crowded concert in the Convict Hall, he played his Concerto in C Major. His magnificent playing and particularly the daring flights in his improvisation stirred me to the depths of my soul; indeed, I found myself so profoundly shaken that for several days I could not bring myself to touch the piano." [Abridged] The Concerto in C Major is one of young Beethoven's most lyrical works. The ideas that he has chosen to work with are not the kind of musical building-blocks, no matter how solid and stirring, that he will often use later, but memorable melodies which are firmly organized in ways his contemporaries found to be quite original. The Concerto opens Allegro con brio, with a movement that is sturdy in character and subtle in the way that themes and their development move back and forth between orchestra and soloist. The middle movement is a poetically ornamented nocturne, Largo, and the finale, a witty, robust rondo, Allegro scherzando. The orchestra consists of a flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. [Back] [Composer] [Fragments] [Portraits] [Download] [Quiz] [Magnum Opus] [Vote] [Links] [About] [Mail]
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