Composed 1795/1800; Duration: 37 minutes
First BPO Performance: November 12 & 14, 1961 (Abbey Simon, piano; Josef Krips, conductor)
Last BPO Performance: February 10-11, 1996 (Awadagin Pratt, piano; Maximiano Valdés, conductor)
Beethoven’s hometown of Bonn, Germany, provided the intellectual stimulus of a bustling academic town, but lacked the professional opportunities for a promising young pianist. He instead found this in Vienna, where, with the support of a Bonn-based benefactor, he was implicitly expected to fulfill the promise of the recently deceased Mozart.
Beethoven stunned Vienna as a skilled pianist with formidable improvisatory chops, but was green as a composer. To remedy this, he studied with the famous Joseph Haydn and was expected to return to Bonn as a well-rounded musician. However, as war was spilling over from France, he had no hopes of returning home and no more income to support his studies.
Beethoven would instead work for Vienna’s aristocracy to earn a living, and finally made his first public debut at the Burgtheater in 1795, where he performed his new Piano Concerto in C major. Although he had endeavored to compose a concerto in E-flat major while in Bonn, and had recently completed another in B-flat major, when he finally released this third attempt in C major, he published it in 1800 as Piano Concerto No. 1.
Unsurprisingly, Haydn’s formal temperament and characteristic wit permeate Beethoven’s works of the period, but the young composer can be seen groping for his own personality. The extensive orchestral exposition opens on the first stately theme, but the second appears in the distant E-flat major to surprising effect, and through circuitous changing, returns home. Just as Beethoven had to wait patiently for his opportunity, so too does the soloist, who finally enters alone with a sly melody. Beethoven wrote several cadenzas for the movement over the years, each longer than the last, especially the famously loquacious Cadenza 3 that is followed by only a brief orchestral tag.
The concerto as a whole is unusual for its length, and the Largo is no different, lasting about ten elegant minutes in a distant A-flat major. The extensive use of the clarinet is also unusual, as the flutes and oboes are absent from the movement, creating a generally dark but warm tone. By contrast, the finale marks a return to the bright C major with a vibrant theme stated by the piano and echoed by the orchestra. The contrasting sections of the Rondo are in a tasteful G major and A minor, and the movement features two brief cadenzas. The conclusion features a delightful surprise: first the soloist presents a quiet music-box melody, and the orchestra erupts in a final moment of excitement.