Beethoven himself was the soloist, and his page turner, the young assistant conductor Ignaz von Seyfried, said the experience of turning pages for Beethoven was rather unsettling:<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026heaven help me! \u2013 that was easier said than done. I saw almost nothing but empty leaves; at the most, on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly\u00a0unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played\u00a0nearly all of the solo part from memory since, as was so often the case, he had not\u00a0had the time to set it all down on paper. He gave me a secret glance whenever he\u00a0was at the end of one of the invisible passages, and my scarcely concealable anxiety\u00a0not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly, and he laughed heartily at the\u00a0jovial supper we had afterwards .\u201d<\/p>\n
Beethoven finally got the solo part on paper and the Concerto was published in 1804 as\u00a0opus 37, a date of publication which belies its status as a work of his pre-Heiligenstadt\u00a0youthful heyday. But it\u2019s important in looking at Beethoven\u2019s creative arc not to overstate\u00a0the importance of his three compositional periods, and it is particularly important not to\u00a0understate the importance of his early music, which cedes nothing to his middle and late\u00a0periods in inspiration, craft, temperament or spirituality.<\/p>\n
And, so we can see that , already in this relatively early work, the key of C minor had taken\u00a0root in Beethoven\u2019s mind as very much the same key of drama, violence and foreboding\u00a0that it is in the Fifth Symphony and the last Piano Sonata, opus 111. In fact, C minor\u00a0seems to have had special significance for Beethoven from his first published works, the\u00a0three Piano Trios, opus 1, the last of which is also in C minor and very much in the same\u00a0mood.<\/p>\n
Mozart wrote only two piano concertos in minor keys, those in D minor and C minor. Both were favourites of Beethoven, who wrote his own cadenzas for them. If Mozart\u2019s C minor Concerto provided inspiration, young Beethoven still forged his own path. The\u00a0first movement of the Third Piano Concerto is nearly seventeen minutes long, far longer\u00a0than any movement in the concertante works of Mozart or Haydn, and yet it still feels\u00a0extremely taut , most of it built out of the very simple yet menacing theme which opens\u00a0the piece.<\/p>\n
The second movement is a Largo in the very distant key of E major. Beethoven seems determined to highlight the strangeness of this exotic harmonic landscape by telling the pianist to keep the pedal down almost continuously in the open bars, blurring the harmonies in a way that remains shocking to many modern ears (and is made more shocking on a modern piano). This is the youthful Beethoven at his most spiritual and\u00a0profound, not far at all from the mood of the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony.<\/p>\n
The third movement, Rondo: Allegro, is in a musical form in which a simple, memorable tune keeps returning between ever-more-complex and far-ranging musical \u201cepisodes.\u201d\u00a0Most rondo themes in Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart\u2019s music are rather cheerful – not\u00a0this one. This is a decidedly grumpy rondo, built on an obsessive, gruff theme. The first\u00a0episode is heralded by a fierce minor key fanfare in trumpets and timpani. For a moment we begin to question whether this movement will have any of the playful wit we associate\u00a0with a good rondo, but Beethoven quickly parts the clouds and , even in the first episode,\u00a0there is much that is playful. However, the clouds soon re-darken the skies, the Rondo\u00a0theme returns and all again seems grim. Beethoven cycles back and forth between\u00a0darkness and light several more times before unveiling his master stroke, an absolutely magical transformation of the Rondo theme itself into the major, once and for all sending\u00a0the shadows away and allowing the work to end in pure affirmation.<\/p>\n
– Note by Kenneth Woods<\/p>\n
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