Ludwig van Beethoven
Concerto for Piano & Orchestra No. 3 in C-minor, Op. 37
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770 and died in Vienna in 1827. He finished the score to his Third Piano Concerto in 1800, but sketches for the work go back as far as 1796. The premiere was in 1803 at the Theater an der Wein ( Vienna) with Beethoven at the piano. The concerto calls for solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.
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On the day of this concerto’s premiere, Beethoven was—as usual—still frantically writing out the parts. There was, in fact, no real piano part at all. Ignaz von Seyfried, who was deputized to turn Beethoven’s pages for him, reported that “I saw almost nothing but empty leaves; at the most, on one page or another, a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as clues for him . . . he gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages, and my scarcely concealable anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly.” Though Seyfried was terrified throughout the performance, the two had a good laugh about it at the after-concert dinner.

Beethoven begins the concerto conventionally, with a spacious orchestral exposition. This movement is full of high drama, sublime respites, astonishing key relationships, and brilliant pianism.

The extremely distant key of E major makes the second movement Largo come as a mild shock, but a delicious one. This is a movement of sensuous beauty, where time seems to stand still.

The Rondo Finale is actually a melding of rondo and sonata forms. It begins in utter simplicity but delivers a wealth of surprises, including a fugato—soon dropped like a hot potato—an episode in the still shocking E major, and a brilliant coda that brings us to C major rather than C minor.

Much has been made of the similarities between this work and Mozart’s great C minor Piano Concerto, K.491. Beethoven loved Mozart’s concerto and knew it intimately—he performed it himself several times—and some suggest he used it as a model. That may be so for there are many parallels between the two, intentional or otherwise. But Beethoven never set out to emulate another piece of music, not even in a work that is, perhaps, an homage to another: he set out to out-do them, and in doing so he unleashed his own unmistakable voice.