Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 1

Beethoven wrote his early piano concertos as a way to showcase his virtuosity as a pianist. He premiered an early version of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1795 but continued to rework it until 1800. Because there were many pianists in Vienna at the time vying for recognition, Beethoven kept his concertos under wraps until they were ready for publication. The second was actually completed before the first. His first three piano concertos were all published 1801 and assigned numbers at that time.

Still in the classical mold of Haydn and Mozart, the Concerto No. 1 is nevertheless unmistakably “Beethovenian,” a term that denotes his significant impact on the development of music. Written in the key of C major, bold repeated chords from the orchestra lead to the kind of lyrical theme you might expect from Mozart, but Beethoven introduces that second theme it in the unexpected key of E-flat. He continues to move through different keys and to develop fragments of his thematic material, traits that would always mark his music. The second movement moves even further from C major, to A-flat major instead of to a closely related key as his audience would expect. The final movement begins with another feature that often employed by Beethoven: unequal or asymmetrical phrase lengths. The first phrase is 6 bars, the second is 4, and the third is 5. These are just a few of the ways Beethoven would stretch the musical vocabulary of the Classical Era.

A few short years later in 1804, he would take a big step forward with his Third Symphony (Eroica), which is often cited as the beginning of the Romantic era.