Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven )1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 37 (1803)
Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: Allegro
With his Third Piano Concerto, it used to be said, Beethoven greeted the birth of the nineteenth century. Among other things, his handwritten “1800” on the manuscript supplied proof of the work’s date of composition. This basic evidence was accepted as ample for a masterpiece which, compared with the two preceding piano concertos, in C major and B flat major, seemed nothing if not epoch-making. As we now know, however, the impressive Piano Concerto No 3 in Beethoven’s famously dramatic key of C minor was not written in 1800 at all, but three years later. The music with which he hailed the new century was his vivacious but rather less vanguard Symphony No 1 in C major.
In his meticulous study of Beethoven’s concertos, published in time for the millennium in 2000, the American scholar Leon Plantinga convincingly endorsed the later date, explaining how Beethoven’s written “1800” was actually “1803” and saying why the concerto fits the later date far better than the earlier one. Although, to the casual reader, three years in Beethoven’s seething career may not seem a long time, it is upon small details of this sort that our understanding of classical music is often founded. In this case, it seems clear that the C minor Piano Concerto came after, and not before, the dynamic idiosyncracy of the Second Symphony, the sweep of the "Tempest" Piano Sonata in D minor, the 'Eroica' Variations and the heart-rending confession, in his Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, that he was going deaf.
But he was not yet so deaf that he was unable to play his own music in public, or was in danger of losing his status as the greatest pianist-composer in Europe. This was a work definitely written for himself to play, which he first did in April 1803 as part of the famous Viennese concert in which, after a seven-hour rehearsal, his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and his Second Symphony also had their premieres. The music was no mere “comedy of manners”, as Edinburgh University’s distinguished musical authority Donald Francis Tovey once described the C major concerto. Here, as a more recent Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon has proclaimed, was the composer’s first concerto to move away from exterior wit and refinement into a world of dramatic oratory.
The starkly stalking theme which launches the first movement unmistakably makes this point, as do the three explosive scales with which the soloist enters. Not even the warmth of the secondary theme in E flat major can dispel the prevailing tension of the music for long, but there is balm in the slow movement, whose opening theme, said Beethoven’s pupil Czerny, should sound like a “holy, distant, and celestial harmony.” The music remains radiantly suspended in the unrelated key of E major until its restless middle section brings fresh drama. If the closing rondo does contain comedy, it is comedy of a sardonic sort, resolved when, in the coda, the pace quickens, the metre changes, and C minor swings gleefully into C major.
© Conrad Wilson
