About this Piece

Beethoven’s last piano concerto dates from the beginning of May 1809, when Napoleon’s army besieged Vienna, causing the Austrian Imperial family and court, including Beethoven’s pupil, friend, and benefactor Archduke Rudolph, to flee the city. On May 11, the French artillery, which commanded the heights of the surrounding countryside, was activated. Beethoven’s house stood perilously close to the line of fire.

Those who could not—or, like Beethoven, would not—leave home, sought shelter underground. Beethoven found a temporary haven in the cellar of his brother’s house. Once the bombardment had ceased and the Austrian forces had surrendered, the occupiers imposed a “residence tax” on the Viennese. The composer described “a city filled with nothing but drums, cannon, marching men, and misery of all sorts.”

After the summer, Beethoven left the city and and produced back-to-back masterpieces in the “heroic” key of E-flat: the Fifth Piano Concerto and the “Harp” Quartet, Op. 74. The grim experiences of the preceding months had not diminished his creative powers.

With the Treaty of Vienna signed in October 1809, life in the city returned to a semblance of normalcy and many of Beethoven’s circle were back by the new year, the French uniforms and the sound of the French language in the streets notwithstanding. There was, however, no opportunity to present the new concerto. That had to wait until the following year, and not in Vienna but in Leipzig, with Friedrich Schneider as soloist. Beethoven, who had played the solo part in his four previous piano concertos, was now too deaf to perform with orchestra.

For the Vienna premiere in February 1812, the soloist was Beethoven’s prize pupil, Carl Czerny. Surprisingly, the concerto failed to make much of an impression on its audience, the Society of Noble Ladies of Charity, who were more receptive to the popular songs and tableaux vivants that shared the bill with Beethoven. At that same concert, a French army officer supposedly called this work “an emperor among concertos.” It is more likely that the “Emperor” moniker was the brainchild of an early publisher. Whatever its origin, the sobriquet seems apt for music of such grandeur.

In the concerto, Beethoven is no longer writing up to his own lofty standards as a performer but for the virtuoso of the following generation, personified by Czerny. Yet while the projection of power is among the composer’s aims, overt display is not, with nothing resembling a solo cadenza in sight. With the “Emperor,” Beethoven created a truly symphonic concerto.

The first movement opens with a grandiose E-flat chord for full orchestra, interrupted by a series of equally commanding arpeggios for the soloist, suggesting an early cadenza. Instead, Beethoven alternates mighty pronouncements for the orchestra and the piano. The introduction ended, the piano offers a broad, swaggering theme. The musicologist Donald Francis Tovey described this passage and the ensuing, more subdued second theme: “The orchestra is not only symphonic, but is enabled by the very necessity of accompanying the solo lightly to produce ethereal orchestral effects that are in quite a different category from anything in the symphonies. On the other hand, the solo part develops the technique of its instrument with a freedom and brilliance for which Beethoven has no leisure in sonatas and chamber music.”

The second movement is one of the composer’s sublime inspirations. The muted strings play a theme of incomparable beauty and tenderness; the piano responds in hushed, descending triplets, creating a subtle tension until the theme is fully exposed. The nocturne-like character of the movement is furthered by a delicate balance of soft woodwinds, strings, and the soloist, as the music mysteriously fades away. Then, over a sustained horn note, the piano introduces, softly and still andante, the theme of the rondo finale. Suddenly, dramatically, the piano lunges into the final theme, a grandly exuberant allegro. —Herbert Glass