According to the accounts of his contemporaries, Beethoven was as great a pianist as he was a composer, and there are many tales of famous pianists of the time who avoided competition and comparison with him. Carl Czerny (1791-18S7), Beethoven's pupil and Liszt's teacher, who is remembered now only as the composer of a great quantity of piano study material, wrote that "Beethoven's playing was notable for its tremendous power, unheard of bravura and facility. He had practised day and night during his youth and worked so hard that his health suffered. Beethoven's playing of slow and sustained music made an almost magic impression on the listener and, so far as I know, has never been surpassed." Early in his career, Beethoven took Mozart's Piano Concertos as his model, expanded and adapted their form and idiom to his own style of execution and to the imporved piano of his time. Mozart had been the greatest pianist of his generation, but his playing had been weakened - Beethoven told Czerny - by his having started on the harpsichord, in his youth, before pianos were widely available. Beethoven's first three Piano Concertos are amplifications and, to a degree, modernizations of Mozart's. When young Beethoven made his first public appearance in Vienna, on March 29, 1795, at a concert for the benefit of the Widows and Orphans Fund of the Society of Musicians, he played this Piano Concerto. He had probably begun to work on it in 1793 or earlier, but two days before the concert, according to an account of the event by one of his friends, he had still not written out all the musical revisions. He worked on the last movement "while suffering from a severe colic, which frequently afflicted him. I relieved him with simple remedies as best I could, while in the next room sat four copyists to whom we handed page after page o£ music" from which they prepared the parts for the accompanying orchestra. After the hurried preparation of this premiere, Beethoven revised the Concerto and put into its final form for his visit to Prague in 1798. It was first published in 1801. Beethoven often played it in later years, too, and around 1809 he wrote out a long, first-movement solo cadenza, which until then had usually been improvised at each performance. The three movements of this Concerto are a long and symphonically developed Allegro con brio , a serious and expressive Adagio that is a dialogue of soloist and orchestra on a single subject, and a highly rhythmic final rondo, Molto allegro . The accompaniment is scored for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings. [Back] [Composer] [Fragments] [Portraits] [Download] [Quiz] [Magnum Opus] [Vote] [Links] [About] [Mail]
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