Glenn Gould (piano)
Leningrad Conservatoire Orchestra
Vladimir Slovák (conductor)
1. Allegro con brio
2. Adagio
3. Rondo: Molto allegro
This is the earliest of Beethoven’s five numbered piano concertos: it follows the so-called ‘No. 0’ in E flat major, of which only the solo part has survived, but precedes the official No. 1 in C major, which was the first to be published. Beethoven began writing the piece during his youth in Bonn, perhaps as early as 1788, and then continued to work on it after moving to Vienna in 1792 to study with Haydn. In the process, he replaced the work’s original finale (which is probably the piece published after his death as a separate Rondo in B flat major), and apparently its original slow movement as well. There may well have been performances of an interim version in Vienna in 1795 or 1796, with the composer as soloist; and in 1798 Beethoven wrote out a new orchestral score before performing the Concerto (together with No. 1) in Prague. But it was not until 1801 that he fair-copied the piano part (which he must have been playing from memory or from sketches), so that the piece could be published.
Even this does not end the work’s long and complex history, because the musicologist Barry Cooper has discovered a batch of revisions which Beethoven wrote into the autograph score of the first movement, but which were not sent to the publisher in time to be printed; the Concerto has been recorded with these revisions, but they are not yet included in standard editions. Finally, in 1808, around the time that he stopped playing his own concertos in public with improvised cadenzas, Beethoven wrote out a cadenza for the first movement, presumably for the use of his pupils. It is in his mature middle-period manner, and so hardly a stylistic match for a movement which he had begun some 20 years earlier; but it is such a fine piece of writing that it would be a brave pianist who decided to replace it with something of his own.
The extended gestation of the Concerto makes it difficult to assess quite what the influences on it were. For example, it is scored for the same modest orchestra as Mozart’s last piano concerto (K595), in the same key, that is flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings; and both its finale and its probable original finale are, like that of K595, in rondo form and in 6/8 time. But if the starting-date for the Beethoven of 1788 is anywhere near right, its inception actually pre-dated the completion and first performance of the Mozart. Moreover, very few of Mozart’s other late piano concertos were published in his lifetime. However, the young Beethoven might have known a group of Mozart concertos from the early 1780s which was published in Vienna in 1785; and, once in Vienna himself and working on the revisions of his own concerto, he would probably have had access to some of Mozart’s later ones. Certainly, while it is harder to find specific Mozartian models for this Concerto than for Nos. 1 and 3, its piano writing does show the influence of Mozart’s piano style. And in more general terms, its simple themes and the way they are treated suggest the influence of Beethoven’s teacher Haydn: Roger Fiske, in his Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Music Guide to Beethoven’s concertos and overtures, even calls it ‘arguably the most Haydnesque work he ever wrote’.
At the same time, the Concerto is not without its Beethovenian fingerprints. The brusque opening phrase of the first movement is, in his usual manner, both a call to attention and the source of a good deal of developmental writing later on. The sudden side-step into D flat major in the course of the orchestral exposition, to introduce a new melodic idea, is the kind of adventurous tonal move which he made throughout his career. His concomitant long-range planning is typified by the fact that the second exposition, with the soloist, also shifts to D flat, but in a different way, while in the development section the side-step gesture recurs in a different tonal context. And the solo part includes passages of great power and brilliance which remind us that, in his early years in Vienna, Beethoven was principally famous not as a composer but as a young lion of the keyboard.
The slow movement is an Adagio in E flat major, with a serene main theme which, as in many of Beethoven’s early works with piano, is encrusted with increasing amounts of virtuoso decoration on its later reappearances. Unexpectedly, though, at the point towards the end of the movement where the orchestra pauses for a cadenza, what follows is not more decorative glitter, but a simple unsupported melodic line, marked ‘with great expression’, which continues in recitative-like dialogue with the strings.
The final rondo has Beethoven’s standard concerto-finale ground-plan, with the statements of the main theme separated by three episodes, the first recapitulated as the third, the second striking out in different directions. The main theme itself has a distinctive rhythmic pattern, short–long–short–long, with disruptive sforzando markings on the off-beat long notes. Beethoven’s sketch-books reveal that this rhythm emerged during the process of revision, and that the short notes were originally unstressed upbeats. There is a momentary glimpse of this otherwise suppressed version in a brief digression (a tonal digression, too, into G major) towards the end of the third episode, before the rondo theme makes its final fortissimo return.
© Anthony Burton
