[CLASSICAL MUSIC] On Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto 🎹

Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770-1827

Piano Concerto No. 3, 1803

I. Allegro con brio
II. Largo
III. Rondo – Allegro

The first sketches to the third piano concerto are dated 1796. Beethoven was on tour, and had with him the first two concertos in the luggage. But they began to feel worn out and he needed a new one. Still, the sketches remained tucked away until a concert at Theater an der Wien in 1803 was approaching when the work took off again. As the first rehearsals commenced the score wasn’t completely finished. One of Beethoven's pupils, Ignaz von Seyfried who was the page turner, testified that several pages in the score were still empty except for "something that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics."

     

It’s the first of Beethoven's piano concertos that is written in a minor key. The music is also more muscular and have a more personal nature than in the earlier piano concertos. There are also a few obvious similarities with the two Mozart concertos for piano in minor - No. 20 in D minor, and in particular No. 24 in C minor, the same key as the Beethoven concert.

A famous anecdote further reinforces the connection to Mozart. In an episode where Beethoven is out for a walk with his favorite pianist Johann Baptist Cramer in a castle park in Vienna, they hear Mozart's C minor concerto at a distance and Beethoven is to have said: "Cramer, Cramer! We will never be able to accomplish something like that."

But his worries were in vain; the third piano concerto is one of the truly great masterpiece in the piano literature - fully comparable in greatness to Mozart’s Nos. 20 to 27. Just listen to the threatening austerity in the first movement that is contrasted against the sublimely dreamy atmosphere in the beautiful Largo, before the concert ends with a dancing and lively rondo. Personally I probably place this concerto higher, or at least closer to heart, than Beethoven’s fifth and last Emperor Concerto. Below, a legendary live recording (also available on CD) with Krystian Zimmerman, accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic and none other than Leonard Bernstein.

 @SteemSwede