Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770 – 1827): Piano Concerto no 3 in C Minor op 37
Ludwig Van Beethoven has often been portrayed as the most dysfunctional of geniuses. Abrasive in manner, careless of appearance and deeply eccentric with his habits, it’s sometimes a wonder that he managed to get anything done at all, never mind write such wonderful music.
He seemed to exist in a state of near permanent squalor. Countless visitors attest to the near anarchy of his living quarters, with plates of half-eaten dinners, upturned inkwells and unemptied chamber pots lurking beneath a sea of scattered manuscript paper.
He was no better at managing his own appearance. Friends would become so appalled by his dirty, tattered clothes that during the night they would sneak in and discreetly replace them with new ones. Beethoven would get up the next morning, put on the replacement outfit and not so much as bat an eyelid.
Although more fastidious about personal hygiene, Beethoven’s morning toilette could still create its own vortex of chaos. A common morning ritual was to walk naked around his living room, pouring large jugs of cold water over himself while singing at the top of his voice. This would cause frequent conflict with both his servants (who laughed at the spectacle) and the owners of the apartment below, as puddles of water would leak through the ceiling. One of Beethoven’s friends eventually suggested that he should have his floors covered with asphalt.
To an extent, Beethoven felt that he should be allowed to be a law onto himself. One of his recent biographers, Jan Swafford, has suggested that the composer “did not truly comprehend the independent existence of other people.” He could be staggeringly rude and self-entitled. Once, in an otherwise mundane, business-like letter to a publisher, he added as an aside, “If your daughters are now grown up, do fashion one to be my bride”, before explaining that it was not proper for him be expected to live as a bachelor.
Whether it was cuffing an assistant across the head for misunderstanding an important horn entry in his Eroica Symphony, walking out of his own performance if he sensed someone chatting in the audience or throwing hard-boiled eggs at waiters when dissatisfied by the level of service in a restaurant, Beethoven was never the most average type in social settings.
Yet he also had an extraordinary gift for inspiring loyalty and friendship from those around him (including several wealthy backers), with most of them recognizing an essentially good-hearted, talented and hard-working artist underneath all the drama. Aside from showing himself well capable of generosity and kindness, Beethoven also seems to have possessed a measure of self-awareness, and not least the ability to realise when he had gone too far. Heartfelt apologies are a surprisingly common feature in his letters to friends or colleagues, usually for some argument or misunderstanding that had been created by his own irascibility.
Beethoven’s relative lack of refinement can surely be linked to a childhood where money was tight, luxuries in short supply, and where his feisty parents Johann and Maria constantly fought tooth and nail.
Born a week before Christmas at the end of 1770, the infant Ludwig was named after his grandfather, Ludwig Van Beethoven, a Flemish musician who had settled in Bonn as a young man and eventually worked his way up to become Kapellmeister in the local court of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. His son Johann, also a musician, would attain a salaried position as a singer in the same court, although he lacked something of his father’s industry and would not rise to the same level.
Johann would also upset his family by marrying a 20-year-old widow named Maria Magdalena Keverich in 1767, whom his family thought was beneath him (Maria’s own family thought the same of Johann). The marriage would be no fairy-tale, with Maria developing a stoical approach to the various hardships they suffered. She would tell her eldest son Ludwig that “without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown” – words that the latter appeared to adopt as a personal credo in all his future creative work.
Maria’s husband Johann was well-liked in Bonn, if not always fully respected. Sociable, hot-tempered and perennially frustrated with his career, he was also something of an opportunist. After his father’s death, he tried to bribe his way to a higher position in the town by presenting several of his father’s most expensive possessions as gifts to the authorities. After that, he was always on the look out for some scheme that could transform his family’s economic fortunes.
Having noticed some musical ability in Ludwig, Johann was determined to turn him into a piano virtuoso, a child prodigy in the mold of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Johann had little inclination for being delicate over the matter, and from the age of four, young Ludwig was bullied into long hours or practice and often beaten or locked in the basement when his playing failed to come up to scratch.
It was probably just as well that Ludwig genuinely loved music. He would often find a measure of respite from his exhausting practice regime by creating his own melodies on the violin and then the piano. His ideas gradually grew in sophistication and in time he had started to write them down.
Although Beethoven would later take lessons in composition, he always felt that he had a very natural instinct for understanding harmonic rules. “I never had to learn how to avoid mistakes”, he recalled. “From my childhood I had so keen a sensibility that I wrote correctly without knowing it had to be that way, or could be otherwise.”
After a few years, Johann had the good sense to organize some outside tuition for his son, even if he did not always choose the most suitable teachers. One was a piano-playing insomniac who liked his beer and would offer lessons at bizarre hours of the day. Sometimes he and Johann might spend the evening carousing in the local pub, get back after midnight and then drag young Ludwig from his bed to practice some scales.
As he reached his teens, Ludwig began to take more and more of an active part in Bonn’s musical life, playing violin in the court orchestra, while also taking organ, piano and compositions lessons with court organist, Charles Gottlob Neefe. Soon he would be regularly deputizing for Neefe in the organ loft.
His unusual talent was by now evident around Bonn and at the age of twelve he published his first three piano sonatas. He also began to be paid a small salary for his work at the Bonn court, which gradually increased in his later teens. Several of Bonn’s richest families were taking an interest and offering support and even employment.
All of this would provide something of a refuge from an increasingly strained home life as Ludwig’s volatile father was by now on a downward spiral. With his voice no longer deemed good enough for the Bonn court, his salary was reduced accordingly, with some of it even going to Ludwig. But Johann’s increasingly heavy drinking was also a major factor in his fall from grace, as he was now frequently embarrassing himself in public or having to be dragged home at night after being found lying in a ditch.
His son meanwhile began to spread his wings. During a brief trip to Vienna in 1787, Ludwig momentously met Mozart, impressing the older man after improvising on one of his themes. “Keep your eye on him”, Mozart is supposed to have told some other guests after the young man’s departure. “Someday he’ll give the world something to talk about.”
Beethoven would eventually move to Vienna more permanently in 1792. By then Mozart was dead and the young man would instead become the protégé of the city’s other great composer – Joseph Haydn. It was to be a fraught relationship between a genial maestro old enough to be Beethoven’s grandfather, and an intense young man who already had a slight superiority complex about his own abilities.
Noticing Beethoven’s imperious manner, Haydn would nickname him “der große Mogul” – the Great Mogul – but he was also happy to teach him counterpoint and composition for the next couple of years. Not wanting to give his teacher too much credit, Beethoven would later play down Haydn’s influence while criticizing his lack of rigour when it came to correcting harmony exercises.
An instinctive, self-taught composer, Haydn found it hard to be pedantic in pointing out arbitrary mistakes in his student’s work. He once explained “art is free, and is not to be diminished by any chains of craftsmanship.” Yet the impressive forward strides that Beethoven’s music made during his time with Haydn strongly suggests that he found the lessons productive.
The hard-to-impress Beethoven was equally unmoved when introduced into the most glamorous salons of Vienna, making it quickly apparent that he was going to dress and comport himself exactly as he pleased. A fellow attendee of soirées given by the wealthy and influential Lichnowsky family once described Beethoven’s behaviour as “unmannerly in both gesture and demeanour.” Another noted, “I still remember clearly both Haydn and [Antonio] Salieri sitting on a sofa on one side of the small music-room, both carefully dressed in the old-fashioned way with peruque shoes and silk hose, whereas even here Beethoven would come dressed in the informal fashion of the other side of the Rhine, almost ill-dressed.”
The irony was that even as the bulk of Beethoven’s future income would come from the patronage of aristocratic supporters, he always refused to kowtow to any of their curtsies and ceremonies. One of his later patrons, Archduke Rudolph of Austria, would eventually give up trying to house-train his gifted but wayward composer, instructing his staff that Beethoven was to be excused of all normal court etiquette.
The only chink of humility that Beethoven showed during these years was his willingness to continue his musical studies until such a relatively advanced age. Aside from Haydn, he learned violin from Ignaz Schuppanzigha plus counterpoint from composer and theorist Johann Albrechtsberger. He also used Salieri as a regular sounding board on issues relating to opera.
By the time he was ready to publish his first mature compositions (to which he affixed an opus number) he was already 25 – an age at which Mozart had already written many of his major works. But holding back for so long allowed Beethoven’s debut offerings – a set of three string trios in 1795, followed by a set of three piano sonatas a year later – to emerge already fully (and impressively) developed to the wider world.
At this stage, Beethoven was best known in Viennese circles as a virtuoso pianist (and improviser extraordinaire) and he would perform on innumerable occasions. But he was also quietly building up an impressive portfolio of compositions on the side. By 1800 he had added six string quartets, along with two piano concertos and a recently completed symphony to his various instrumental sonatas.
The Third Piano Concerto, also from 1800, would however show him ready to break new ground. Its tonic key of C Minor is one that Beethoven always associated with dramatic struggle, not least when that same struggle could be resolved victoriously into C Major (as he would do in the years ahead with some of his most famous compositions).
But even a ground-breaking work can take inspiration from an existing model, and in Beethoven’s case his concerto bears some resemblance to Mozart’s 24th Piano Concerto, also in the same key and written about fifteen years earlier. A dark and moody work, it is one of Mozart’s masterpieces in the genre, exquisitely crafted and just as often creating its tension through soft, mysterious passages as through rousing melodrama.
There are several moments where the two C Minor concertos sound uncannily similar, and yet inevitably the differences are more interesting still. Both pieces start with a robust orchestral introduction, but the respective entries of the piano soloist (eye-catching and startling in the Beethoven, soft and subtle in the Mozart) reveal much about the two composers. In Beethoven’s case, we get a distinct sense of the pianist challenging the orchestra for the first time rather than simply working in co-operation with it – as if symbolizing the new Romantic artist taking on the established order of things.
At seventeen minutes in duration, the first movement of the Beethoven is one of the longest yet written in a concerto, something that allows its principal ideas plenty of room for exploration and development. There is a good deal of minor-key tension, but a secondary theme in E Flat Major (the relative major of C Minor) provides some welcome respite.
The slow movement, in the distant key of E Major, is both heartfelt and tender, while imbued with an almost otherworldly quality. In between warm diatonic passages are moments of real ambiguity and uncertainty, such as a mysterious middle section where restive piano arpeggios mix with slow, haunting motifs on the flute and bassoon.
The finale, by contrast, much more readily evokes the spirt of Mozart, its tense mood now graced with a little virtuosic lightness. It is also here that Beethoven slowly moves the dramatic C Minor tonality towards the redeeming light of C Major, as if symbolizing victory after a long, titanic struggle. The music ends in appropriately high spirits.
Despite playing the solo part at the concerto’s premiere, Beethoven appears to have left the piano part relatively unfixed – either he didn’t have time to properly write it out or, as is more likely, he wanted to leave himself some room for extemporization. This however created a logistical nightmare for his page-turner on the night, who complained afterwards: “heaven help me!… I saw almost nothing but empty leaves; at the most, on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all of the solo part from memory… He gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages, and my scarcely concealable anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly, and he laughed heartily at the jovial supper we had afterwards.” Beethoven was never a man to worry unduly about making lesser mortals suffer for his talent.
Still only thirty years old, Beethoven was rapidly establishing himself as one of the most striking and original composers of his age. With few genuine rivals from his own generation, he had the world at his feet, or so it seemed.
The only lurking shadow was the growing problem he was having his hearing, a malady that had so far nonplussed all of his doctors.
It would soon come to define his whole creative identity.
Suggestions for further listening:
Mozart: Piano Concerto no 24 in C Minor K491 (1786) – a piece which may have served as a model.
Beethoven would write two more piano concertos, further developing the ground-breaking innovations of the third: the Fourth Concerto in G Major op 58 (1804) and the Fifth in E Flat Major op 73 “Emperor” (1809).