Composer: born December 16, 1770, Bonn; died March 26, 1827, Vienna
Work composed: 1795-1800. Dedicated to Beethoven’s piano student, Princess Barbara Odescalchi
World premiere: Beethoven played the solo part in a private concert for his new patron, Prince Lobkowitz, in March 1795 in Vienna. He made a number of revisions to it over the next few years and published it in 1801.

Instrumentation: solo piano, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings

Estimated duration: 37 minutes

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 is a musical portrait of the composer in his 20s: a self-confident young man on his way to becoming the most sought-after musician in Vienna. As the 19th century dawned, Beethoven’s reputation rested on his skill as an excellent pianist who played for the most select audiences. Beethoven’s virtuosity also brought him many pupils, and his connections among the aristocracy and other important leaders in Vienna assured him entry into the most desirable strata of society. At this point in his life, Beethoven had had yet to make an indelible name for himself as a composer, and this youthful Beethoven bore little resemblance to the Romantic persona – deaf, iconoclastic, temperamental, and disheveled – most familiar to today’s audiences.

Despite its numeric designation, Beethoven’s C major piano concerto is not the first concerto he wrote, but the third, and was composed after the Piano Concerto in B-flat, known as No. 2; Beethoven caused this discrepancy in the numbering by publishing the B-flat concerto before the C major. Nonetheless, the C major concerto is clearly the more mature work; its overall substance and the rhythmic energy of its final movement reveal Beethoven’s emerging musical personality. Biographer Lewis Lockwood described the C major concerto as “shot through with dramatic opposition of ideas, themes and sonorities of piano and orchestra in short-range and long-range dialogue that bear witness to the new Beethovenian style now finding its way for the first time into the concerto.”

The Allegro con brio is confidently assertive, buoyed by trumpets and timpani. Of particular note are the two completed cadenzas Beethoven wrote for this movement, as well as an unfinished third. When performing the concerto himself, Beethoven improvised the cadenzas; the written versions were committed to paper some years after the concerto’s premiere. Musicologist Donald Francis Tovey called the C major concerto a “comedy of manners,” and humor is particularly evident in the Rondo, whose rhythmic energy borders on rowdiness.

Beethoven’s 1798 performance of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in Prague moved a fellow composer, Johann Tomášek, who remarked, “Beethoven’s grand style of playing, and especially his bold improvisation, stirred me strangely to the depths of my soul; indeed, I found myself so profoundly shaken that I did not touch my piano for several days.” However, Tomášek’s admiration for Beethoven’s playing did not extend to the concerto itself. For a 21st century listener, Tomášek’s comments are hard to fathom, as they criticize the very essence of what music lovers today revere about Beethoven: “His frequent daring deviations from one theme to another, which destroyed the continuity and gradual development of his ideas, did not escape me. Evils of this nature, springing from a too exuberant fancy, often mar his greatest compositions … the singular and original seem to be his chief aim in composition.”