Beethoven introduced his Concerto in C minor at one of his massive benefits—featuring exclusively his music and with Beethoven as beneficiary—which continue to boggle the mind more than two centuries after the fact. The date was April 5, 1803; the location, the Theater an der Wien; and the program, an offering of three premieres: the present work, the Second Symphony, and the oratorio Christus am Ölberge (Christ on the Mount of Olives), as well as a reprise of the First Symphony, first heard a year earlier.

According to Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries, the one and only rehearsal for the concert began at 8am and was a shambles. The orchestra was assembled from Vienna’s second string, the city’s best players having been hired for a performance of Haydn’s The Creation that same evening. “[It] was frightful,” Ries recalled. “At half past two everyone was exhausted and dissatisfied. Prince Karl Lichnowsky [one of Beethoven’s patrons], who was at the rehearsal from its beginning, sent out for large baskets of buttered bread, cold meats, and wine. He invited all the musicians to help themselves, and a collegial atmosphere was restored.”

The score was not finished by the time of the rehearsal, and it remained a work in progress during the performance, as was noted by another Beethoven pupil, Ignaz von Seyfried, who considered himself fortunate to turn pages for Beethoven. “I saw empty pages with here and there what looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs, unintelligible to me, scribbled to serve as clues for him. He played most of his part from memory, since, obviously, he had put so little on paper. So, whenever he reached the end of some invisible passage, he gave me a surreptitious nod and I turned the page. My anxiety not to miss such a nod amused him greatly and the recollection of it at our convivial dinner after the concert sent him into gales of laughter.”

The C-minor Concerto had a second “premiere” in Vienna a year later, from the finished manuscript with Ries as the soloist.

The concerto bridges the divide between Beethoven’s earlier, more clearly Mozart-derived concertos and a more personal style, while simultaneously showing a keen awareness of Mozart’s most Beethoven-like concerto, K. 491, also in  C minor. Both open with the strings softly playing an ascending figure, the winds joining in for the first climax. A thematic fragment—C–E-flat–A-flat, which appears in the first movement of Mozart’s K. 491—is stated by the low strings in the ninth measure of the Beethoven. Most strikingly, as pianist and music critic Charles Rosen noted, Beethoven’s solo arpeggios in the coda recall portions of Mozart’s in his work. But here, the ferocious C-minor runs with which the piano subsequently enters are purest, most Beethovenian drama.

The slow movement is an oasis of calm amid the agitated outer movements, with the songful expanse of piano melody accompanied by muted strings, after which the piano arpeggios curl around the theme, now stated by strings and woodwinds. There follows a magical passage where piano arpeggios accompany a duet for bassoon and flute.

The Rondo finale, C minor again, has plenty of spirit but also a good deal of tension and the full bag of Beethoven tricks: a second theme, announced by the clarinet, whereupon the principal theme is transformed into a fugue whose conclusion would seem to signal the return of C minor. But no, it ascends a semitone to A flat (an old Haydn trick), and then the piano wanders to E major, which may be far from A flat but not from the slow movement of this very concerto.

—Herbert Glass