The first performance of the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor was given by the composer on 5 April 1803 – and if there’s a key in Beethoven associated with high drama, it is C minor. Only six months earlier, he had experienced a terrible crisis as he faced up in earnest to the onset of his hearing loss. At that point he wrote his so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, a document intended as a will and addressed to his two brothers, revealing that he had considered taking his own life, but felt a responsibility not to leave the world ‘until I have brought forth all that is within me’.

His answer to that episode was a decision to jettison his earlier methods and find a ‘new path’. In the Piano Concerto No. 3 he pushes the genre further and deeper than he had formerly attempted.

In the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Beethoven inhabits new worlds that are both brave and breathtaking. It was unprecedented, for one thing, to begin a concerto with the soloist playing alone, very quietly. The piano’s initial phrase – a soft G major chord that pulses, then expands towards an open-ended question – poses a challenge to the orchestra, which responds from faraway B major, adding to the impression that this music comes from a remote sphere with a touch of otherworldly magic to it. The mood is inward-looking, peculiarly visionary: a long way from the humour, dazzle and storms of the earlier works.

This concerto dates from 1805-6 and was first given a private performance at the palace of Beethoven’s patron, Prince Lobkowitz (whose mezzanine music room had also hosted the world premiere of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony). Its first public hearing was on 22 December 1808 in a now legendary concert that Beethoven staged at the Theater an der Wien, which also included the premieres of the symphonies nos. 5 and 6 plus the Choral Fantasia – an evening so long, demanding and freezing cold that much of the audience left before the end.

Unlike Beethoven’s earlier piano concertos, No. 5, the ‘Emperor’, was published before being performed; and it is the only one that did not serve as a vehicle for Beethoven himself. The composer, whose deafness had gradually worsened over the past decade, had long been aware that someday he would no longer be able to perform his own piano works; now that time had come. The Archduke Rudolph, to whom the concerto is dedicated, was soloist for the first private performance on 13 January 1811, at Prince Lobkowitz’s. Ten months later it was played at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, with Friedrich Schneider as soloist. The January 1812 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported: ‘It is without doubt one of the most original, imaginative and effective, but also one of the most difficult of all existing concertos.’

Carl Czerny, Beethoven’s protégé and later the teacher of Liszt, gave the official Viennese premiere early in 1812 – during a variety event staged by the Society of Noble Ladies for Charity, in which it immediately preceded a ‘tableau vivant’ (a popular trend at the time), entitled ‘Esther Fainting Before King Ahasuerus’.

From the magnificent opening flourishes, through the sublime slow movement to the irrepressible finale it is as if Beethoven’s last piano concerto sets out to prove its indomitable composer’s tireless capacity for reinventing himself. In the end, many of his works are odes to joy. ‘I shall seize fate by the throat,’ he once wrote to Franz Wegeler. ‘It shall not wholly overcome me. Oh, how beautiful it is to live – to live a thousand times.’

Jessica Duchen is a music critic, author and librettist whose work appears in The Sunday Times, the I News and BBC Music Magazine. Her recent novel Immortal explores Beethoven’s ‘Immortal Beloved’.

This blog is an abridged version of an article in the concert programme for Sir Andras Schiff Plays Beethoven’s Piano Concertos (6 – 9 June 2022)