According to the accounts of his contemporaries, Beethoven was as great a pianist as he was a composer, and many tales are told of famous pianists of the time who avoided competition and comparison with him. Carl Czerny (1791-1857), 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 practiced day and night during his youth, and worked so hard that his health had 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." The Czech composer-pianist V.J. Tomásek, a major figure of the time, wrote, "In l798, Beethoven, the giant among pianists, came to Prague. He gave a well-attended concert at which he played his Concerto in C Major, Op. l5. Beethoven's magnificent playing, and especially the daring flights of his improvisation, stirred me to the depths of my soul. In fact I was so profoundly moved that I did not touch my piano for several days." A few others could perhaps match Beethoven's technical virtuosity, the mechanical skills with which he made music at the keyboard, but none even approached the powerful drama, the profound sentiment and the noble expression with which he played. From his early childhood until the last years of his greatest mastery, Beethoven composed a whole literature of piano music that has never been equaled. 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 piano of his time. Mozart had been the greatest pianist of his generation, but his playing was 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 concerto work. The last two are entirely different, constructed with great freedom and originality. They look far ahead into the nineteenth century, not back to the eighteenth, yet his last one was completed in l809, before he turned forty years of age. Beethoven completed his Third Piano Concerto in l800, when he was thirty years old, using material that he had been gathering in his sketchbooks for several years. There is still much Mozart to be heard in it, but also much of the mature Beethoven, and it marks the beginning of the second of the three creative periods into which his life is usually divided. The writing is bolder than that of the first two concertos. The handling of the interrelationship of piano and orchestra explores new paths. Even the timpani are given a chance, in the first movement, to play a bit of the principal theme. At a concert given in Vienna on April 5, l803, this Concerto, the Second Symphony and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives all had their first performances. In the rush of preparation, Beethoven sat up in his bed through the night before the first rehearsal, writing down on paper all the music that was already complete in his mind. He did not bother to note all the details of the piano part since he was to play it himself. He asked a musician friend to turn pages for him at the concert, but many were blank or had only a few hastily scribbled notes on them. Nevertheless, Beethoven nodded his head periodically as a signal and was greatly amused by his friend's anxiety about when to make the almost unnecessary page turns. In the first movement of the Concerto, Allegro con brio, there is a long and full orchestral exposition of its themes, and then the soloist announces with a series of powerful rushing scales that it is his turn to take over. Some years later, Beethoven wrote out a solo cadenza for this movement, but experts doubt its likeness to what he improvised when he was himself the soloist, for it was probably written for the Emperor's youngest son, Archduke Rudolf, his gifted pupil and generous, faithful friend, but hardly his equal as a pianist. After the cadenza, the themes are not repeated again, but the music jumps ahead to the brilliant closing section. In the slow movement, Largo, a solemn theme in a remote key is richly developed in a dialog for piano and orchestra. The finale is a rondo, Allegro, in which the main theme recurs in alternation with contrasting episodes. At one point, Beethoven reminds us of the slow movement by wrenching the main theme back into its distant key, and in the final episode he turns to a sprightly new rhythm and the bright key of C Major. The score requires two flutes, 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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