Ferdinand Ries (1784 – 1838): Piano Concerto no 3 in C Sharp Minor
Despite his varied and successful career as a composer, pianist, concert administrator and one-time amanuensis to Ludwig van Beethoven, Ferdinand Ries seems to have spent a surprising amount of his time trying to avoid conscription into an invading army, usually a French one. It was a misfortune noted by one of his contemporaries, writing for the London Harmonicon in 1824: “The French armies, indeed, whether under the earlier revolutionary generals, or under Napoleon, seem to have made him [Ries] the peculiar object of their pursuit.” Sometimes Ries managed to flee town in time. On other occasions, he would be called up but then immediately rejected on account of a childhood illness leaving him blind in one eye. Even when the less fitness-orientated Austrian army demanded his services in 1809 (Ries was by then living in Vienna), this time to fight against the French, he still managed to get away without firing a shot in anger – the invading army proving to be so efficient that the Austrian capital fell before it could properly organize its new recruits. It’s not that Ries couldn’t handle conflict – he worked closely with Beethoven for several years after all – but he clearly wasn’t the soldierly type.
It’s also true that his whole life might have panned out differently had a post-Revolutionary French battalion not turned up in Bonn, his childhood home, in 1794, and closed down all the musical courts. It was through one of these courts (for the Elector of Cologne) that Ferdinand’s father and his father before him had enjoyed distinguished careers. While his family struggled with the loss of their old profession in French-occupied Rhineland, Ries senior decided that his son should finish his education elsewhere – Ferdinand was firstly sent to Munich in around 1800, where he spent a long winter copying music for a minor opera composer named Peter Von Winter. Somewhat more auspiciously he then travelled to Vienna, turning up at the Austrian capital with a letter of introduction for one LV Beethoven. The latter, as it happens, already knew Ferdinand’s family quite well – Ries senior had played in the same court orchestra as Beethoven in the 1780s and provided much emotional and practical support for the young man after the death of his mother.
Beethoven would repay the debt handsomely by looking after Ferdinand for the next few years, helping him out financially, finding him pupils, and offering him free piano tuition. Ries reciprocated by becoming something of a secretary to the great man, his duties ranging from copying music, dealing with practicalities and even negotiating with publishers. Towards the end of his life, Ries would publish an affectionate and highly readable memoir of his time with Beethoven – an account generally thought to provide a much more honest, warts and all portrayal of the composer than the later myth-making of Anton Schindler*.
*Ries wrote Beethoven Remembered in collaboration with Beethoven’s lifelong friend, Franz Wegeler, with both offering up a separate reminiscence of the man they had known. Beethoven As I knew Him, written some time later by Anton Schindler, a friend of Beethoven’s at the end of his life, has been widely questioned for the selectivity of its material and its overall accuracy. As musicologist Norman Lebrecht recently observed while researching his own biography of Beethoven, “Ries, so far as I can tell, never made up stories about Beethoven or made him out to be anything other than he was — a towering genius with a terrible temper!”
By 1805, feeling that he must soon spread his wings, the 21-year-old Ries left for Paris, offering himself up as a composer, performer and teacher, but failing to make much headway. After a return to Vienna (and his brief, ill-fated episode with the Austrian army), he headed east in 1811 to St Petersburg (via Hamburg, Copenhagen and Stockholm) where he would enjoy his first real taste of professional success. He joined forces with the cellist Bernhard Romberg (a former teacher of Ries), and the two embarked on a lucrative series of concerts. Still his progress could be threatened by military-related escapades – while crossing the Baltic Sea en route to Russia, the English navy (now engaged in a war with Napoleon) seized his vessel and stranded its crew and passengers on a small island for over a week. Then a year or so into his Russian stay he found his old friends, the French army, fast advancing on the country and leaving him unable to make a planned trip to Moscow. As the Harmonicon later put it, “[Ries] now resolved to come to England – perhaps in the belief that it was the only country where he was likely to be free from the interruptions of French armies”.
Ries was indeed to find a belated terra firma in London, spending the next decade of his life there. His prowess on the piano drew rave reviews, with one commenting: “Mr Ries is justly celebrated as one of the finest piano-performers of the present day. His hand is powerful, and his action is certain, often surprising. But his playing is most distinguished from that of all others by its romantic wildness…” His compositions went down similarly well for a time: “his productions shew an originality… and a vigour of execution, that rank him with the great masters of the age” wrote the same review. He found himself a wife (a wealthy socialite), and also became one of the leading lights of the newly-formed Philharmonic society. Ries would compose some of his best music for the organisation’s superb orchestra over the next decade, including several symphonies. He was also instrumental in commissioning Beethoven to write his famous ninth symphony for the society in 1824.
Now a man of some means, Ries eventually returned to Germany in 1824, taking his wife and two daughters. He initially hoped to live in semi-retirement in Godesberg, a village just outside Bonn, but ended up as busy as ever. Over the next 14 years, his activities (which included stints as an opera composer, festival director and orchestral conductor) would take him all over Europe once more, holding positions in both Frankfurt and Aachen, while making extended stays in Italy, London, Paris and Dublin. Ries had just been offered a further musical directorship in Frankfurt, when he died from a sudden illness at the age of just 53, having shown no signs of ill health beforehand.
Although Ries’ stock as a composer had started to fall by the time of his death, he still left behind an accomplished oeuvre of music, including seven symphonies, nine piano concerti (usually written with himself to play the solo part) and a large body of chamber music. His Third Piano Concerto, composed in 1812 while in St Petersburg, was one of two concertos Ries wrote to showcase his talents while in Russia and it appears to have been a success at its first performance.
The first movement of the Concerto combines a driving minor tonality with gentler, more reflective passages, with Ries evidently comfortable at varying the pace of the music and creating interesting contrasts. Although the more dramatic passages allude to Beethoven, much of the movement suggests other influences. At one point, Ries has the piano playing a simple, lyrical melody across tremolo strings, a strikingly romantic effect for the time. Much of the second movement is really a piano nocturne with a gentle and silky orchestral accompaniment. The piano’s ornate, arabesque-like melodies bring composer John Field to mind, a man who happened to be living in St Petersburg at the same time as Ries. Field had just written his own his second and third piano concertos, which Ries might well have heard performed. Stylistically the two composers’ concertos have much in common, particularly with their well-developed first movements.
The last movement might be the most attractive of the three. The piano leads with an exuberant, skittish theme, set in C Sharp Major and then E Major (the tonic and relative majors of C Sharp Minor) and recurring three times, with the orchestra on each occasion appearing to restore order with a more serious C Sharp Minor tutti. The effect of this (and much of the rest of the movement) is distinctly playful and full of unexpected twists and turns, perhaps a reflection of its creator’s temperament. One other quality which is readily apparent from Ries’ memoir on his old teacher is its author’s sense of humour. Here is possibly the musical equivalent of that.