According to the accounts of his contemporaries, Beethoven was as great a pianist as he was a composer, and many tales have been told about the famous pianists of his time who avoided competition and comparison with him. Carl Czerny (l79l-1857), Beethoven's pupil and Liszt's teacher, who is chiefly remembered now as the composer of a large 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. His very first published compositions were probably the three piano sonatas that appeared when he was only thirteen years old. Altogether , he wrote thirty-six sonatas for piano, twenty sets of variations and a large number of shorter pieces. He also wrote five works for piano duet and a great number of chamber-music compositions with piano. In addition to the five standard piano concertos, there is another that survives from his early youth as well as an interesting Triple Concerto for Piano, Violin and Cello, and a curious arrangement for piano of the solo part from the Violin Concerto. 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. 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 Fifth and last one was completed in l809, before he turned forty years of age. Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, like his Fourth, is dedicated to the son of the Austrian Emperor, Archduke Rudolph, his royal pupil and patron, but it is thought to have been given its nickname not for this association but for the imperial character of the music, which crowns the entire catalog of classical concertos. It was composed during the difficult time when the army of Napoleon bombarded and occupied Vienna. The noise of the cannon tortured the composer whose hearing was already poor. Food was scarce and expensive. His wealthy and noble friends had all fled to their country estates and the peaceful solace he sought in the beautiful parks, where he used to take long walks while pondering musical problems, were closed to the public, shutting him off from one of his principal pleasures. By this time Beethoven's hearing was so limited that he could not play the Concerto in public. Its première was probably in Leipzig late in l8l0 by a pianist named Johann Schneider. An influential critic who attended that performance wrote in a magazine article, "It is without doubt one of the most original, imaginative, effective and difficult of all concertos in existence," and he went on to report the excitement and enthusiasm of the audience. However when Beethoven's famous pupil, Carl Czerny, gave the first Vienna performance, early in l8l2, there was little if any enthusiasm -- not because of the music or the performance, but because of the distractions of the rest of the program: a series of living tableaux on Biblical subjects, presented by the Noble Ladies' Charitable Society. Although the soloist, rather than the orchestra, starts the Concerto's Allegro first movement this itself is not really a radical departure from common practice because, as soon becomes apparent, the piano beginning is only a huge introductory flourish, punctuated by smashing chords from the orchestra, not the subject matter of the movement, which is later played by the orchestra. The task of developing the themes is undertaken principally by the orchestra, with the difficult piano part an accompaniment, a musical mannerism that Brahms would later also use effectively in his piano concertos. In another structural and stylistic advance, there is no longer a complete halt for the insertion of a cadenza improvised by the soloist or written by the composer. The cadenzas for this Concerto are woven into the score as integral parts of the musical continuity. The slow movement, Adagio un poco mosso, opens with a solemn melody played by muted strings and answered by the piano. At the end of the movement, the piano quietly plays a figure that it suddenly and without pause transforms into the main theme of the stormy rondo finale, Allegro. The Emperor Concerto is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. 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