Composer: born December 16, 1770, Bonn; died March 26, 1827, Vienna

Work composed: 1796 – 1803. Dedicated to Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia.

World premiere: April 5, 1803. Beethoven conducted from the piano at the Theater an der Wien.

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

Estimated duration: 34 minutes

Ludwig van Beethoven began working on his third piano concerto in 1796, composed most of it in 1800, and continued tinkering with it until the day of its premiere at one of his subscription concerts. The over-ambitious program actually featured three premieres: the Piano Concerto No. 3, the Symphony No. 2 and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. Perhaps fearing this program would not prove substantial enough, Beethoven also included his First Symphony. 

Time constraints prevented Beethoven from writing down the solo part in time for the first performance. When Beethoven asked his friend Ignaz von Seyfried to turn pages for him during the concert, Seyfried had no idea how difficult this seemingly simple task would be. Seyfried recalled: 

“I saw almost nothing but empty leaves; at the most on one page or the other a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all of the solo part from memory, since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to put it all down on paper. He gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages, and my scarcely concealed anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly and he laughed heartily at the jovial supper which we ate afterwards.” 

With the third piano concerto, Beethoven created a new stylistic framework for the genre as a whole. The Allegro con brio is structured around a short, unadorned rhythmic motif and a contrasting lyrical countermelody, which become the basis for a stormy musical dialogue between orchestra and soloist. In the Largo, Beethoven made a significant – and radical – decision regarding tonality. The key, E major, is harmonically very distant from that of C minor, an unheard-of choice in concerto writing for the time. In another departure from convention, it is the soloist who unveils the slow theme and its accompanying melody, before the orchestra. Later the soloist becomes the orchestra’s accompanist, with a stream of flowing arpeggios rippling quietly underneath the primary melody. The refrain of the Rondo: Allegro has a bouncy energy, which neatly offsets several contrasting interludes that range from tautly edgy to lyrically expansive. The two outer movements perfectly capture both the Sturm und Drang and the heroic qualities that Beethoven perceived in the key of C minor, a key he chose for many of his most significant works, including the Symphony No. 5.

Beethoven had another motivation for employing C minor in a piano concerto; by doing so, he paid homage to Mozart, specifically Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24, K. 491, also in C minor. During a rehearsal of K. 491, Beethoven remarked to the English composer J. B. Cramer, “Ah, Cramer, we shall never be able to do anything like that.” In his biography of Beethoven, Lewis Lockwood respectfully disagrees. “The Third breaks new ground in regions where Mozart had never traveled – in its dramatization of musical ideas, its juxtapositions of intensity with lyricism, [and] its decisive contrasts.”

© Elizabeth Schwartz