Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No.3 in C minor, Op. 37

The young LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN earned his reputation as a virtuoso pianist, improviser and composer. In addition to his solo piano opuses, the five piano concertos, the Fantasia for piano, chorus and orchestra, and the Triple Concerto, he also left the less popular scores of the unfinished Concerto in E flat major WoO 4, the Rondo for piano and orchestra WoO 6, and the piano version after his Violin Concerto. The Piano Concerto No. 3 was composed over six years between 1797 and 1803 during a psychological struggle with the first signs of deafness. Almost up to its premiere on 5 April 1803, and even during the first performance in the programme of his second benefit at Emanuel Schikaneder's new Vienna Theatre, Beethoven was still improvising the piano part. The cadenza was written later, in 1809. The first edition was published a year later with a dedication to Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia , an amateur musician. There are documented recollections of Ferdinand Ries, a student of Beethoven's who attended the composer's first performance of the concerto and performed at its second premiere a year later. Ries claimed that there was only one rehearsal, starting at 8am in a "complete mess". The orchestrators had been selected by competition and were supposed to be the best in Vienna. Ries recalls, "It was terrible. At 2:30 everyone was exhausted and disgruntled. Prince Karl Lichnowsky (Beethoven's patron), who had been at the rehearsal from the start, sent large baskets of buttered bread, cold meats and wine. He invited all the musicians to help themselves and the collegial atmosphere was restored." Ignaz von Seyfried, also a student of the composer, who flipped through his sheet music at the premiere, reported, "There were blank pages with something scribbled here and there resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics. He played mostly from memory, as apparently little of the music was on paper. So when he got to the end of some invisible passage, he would nod to me and I would turn the page. I was worried about missing such a nod, which amused him greatly, and the memory of it at our celebratory dinner after the concert sent him into gales of laughter." The Concerto No. 3, being close in time to the composer's Heiligenstadt Testament (1803), undoubtedly reflects his inner sense of drama. The tonality is appropriately C minor, a favourite for him in expressing tragedy in other opuses: the Fifth Symphony, the Eighth Piano Sonata, the Coriolan Overture, and the mournful march of the Symphony No. 3. In the late 18th and early 19th century minor tonalities were avoided in concert practice. Of his 24 concertos, Mozart produced only two minor ones, and in 1815 Carl Maria von Weber even said that the minor tonality did not inspire the audience. The music of the Concerto No.3 concentrates Beethoven's typical readiness for defiance, pathos, powerful energy, struggle to overcome fate. It attempts to disregard external effects in favour of greater depth and drama, to change the concept of the concerto form as well as the keyboard technique. The eighteenth-century piano, for which Beethoven composed this concerto, is different from the modern one. It had a softer sound and fewer technical possibilities. But visions of the richness of sound of the so-called 'grand piano' came alive in his imagination and began to be realised in this concerto. And it was not until 1818 that he received the 'great piano' from Broadwood - and consequently the sound prototype he was looking for. The first movement of the Concerto No. 3 is a field of conflict - of passion and repose, of dynamism and contemplation. The second movement comes as an enlightenment with its 'poetry' and is in some ways a way into the music of Chopin and Schumann. The third movement is traditionally a rondo with repeated and varied thematic changes. The concerto has been acclaimed as a success: the Universal Musical Gazette wrote that 'the work is undoubtedly among Beethoven's best', and Gerber's famous Musical Dictionary of 1812 said that 'it is the highest creation of those produced in the genre'.