Composed: 1796
Premiered: 1798, Prague
Duration: 36 minutes

The piano concerto labelled No. 1 is actually Beethoven’s second in order of composition; it just happened to be published first. This concerto stems from the first years of Beethoven’s life in Vienna. He had come from Bonn in 1792 to study for a while with Haydn; oddly, the lessons were mostly elementary exercises in strict counterpoint, and Beethoven did not think he learned much.  

As it turned out, apart from occasional trips, Beethoven spent the rest of his life in Vienna. An acquaintance used the following words to describe the young man at about this time: “An amiable, light-hearted man… a virtuoso… an almost inexhaustible wealth of ideas… an altogether characteristic style of expression in his playing.” Beethoven’s stormy, turbulent style was a few years in the future.  

The obvious model for a young pianist-composer in the 1790s was Mozart, and Beethoven followed his model fairly closely in this concerto. The somewhat martial sound of the tunes of the first movement reflects a cheerful, pre-Napoleonic view of military life, similar to that alluded to in The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte, and the style of the finale is also reminiscent of opera buffa. Yet with the wisdom of hindsight, we can also hear features which are typical of Beethoven, even in this early work: the big orchestra with full winds and timpani, the expansive orchestral tuttis, and particularly the shifts to remote keys, at first surprising to the ear, but after a few bars, entirely logical. Beethoven was writing in an 18th-century idiom for an 18th-century audience, but the sense of an imminent change to the darker world of Fidelio was already present.

Program note by the late Dr. C.W. Helleiner.