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At the beginning of the third movement, the soloist appears to experiment aimlessly with material for a rondo. Suddenly, as though having found the solution, the pianist lights out in the theme of the third movement as the stuff of bejeweled noblesse at play in the drawing rooms of old Vienna. The persistence of the dotted rhythmic figure propels the movement ever forward, through an expansive episode at the center. It begins to conclude by a winding down in the timpani and piano; then the fancy rolling passagework in the solo part, heard once before, introduces a last exclamation by the orchestra.
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What is most striking about the Emperor is its size. Longer than the Fifth Symphony, it is similar to the Eroica in breadth of impact and proportion. It should be placed alongside that symphony and the Fifth as one of the triumvirate that virtually defines this period in Beethoven's composition. Like the Fourth Concerto, the work begins with the soloist, but here with far more exuberance and flamboyance, a tactic repeated at the recapitulation and to which Beethoven makes reference again at the point of his own cadenza.
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After the explosive Napoleonic siege summer, Beethoven managed to remove himself from the city and return to composing, producing back-to-back masterpieces in the "heroic" key of E-flat, the present Piano Concerto and the "Harp" Quartet, Op. 74. The brutal experiences of the preceding months had not diminished his creative powers.
With many of his circle back in Vienna at the beginning of 1810, when an armistice had been signed, life was returning to normalcy, despite the French uniforms and the sound of French in the Viennese streets. But for Beethoven, there was no opportunity to present the new concerto, which had to wait until the following year, and then not in Vienna but in Leipzig, with Friedrich Schneider as soloist. Beethoven, who had written his four previous piano concertos for his own performance, was by this time far too deaf to perform with orchestra.
For the occasion of the Vienna premiere in February 1812, the soloist was Beethoven's prize pupil, Carl Czerny. The concerto failed to make much of an impression because of the nature of the audience, the Society of Noble Ladies of Charity, who had little capacity to recognize its stunning levels of genius.
The one press review that has survived, from the periodical Thalia, presciently noted: "Beethoven, full of confidence in himself, never writes for the multitude. He demands understanding and feeling, and because of the international difficulties, he can receive these only at the hands of the connoisseurs, who are not to be found at such functions."
Here, Beethoven is no longer writing up to his own lofty standards as a performer, but for the super virtuoso of the following generation -- personified by Czerny. With not one solo cadenza per se in sight, with the "Emperor" Beethoven created a symphonic concerto.
The first movement opens with a huge E-flat chord for the full orchestra, interrupted by a series of equally commanding arpeggios for the solo, suggesting an early cadenza, with alternating mighty pronouncements for the orchestra and the piano. The concerto's opening seems already to have arrived at a great height, announcing itself through repeated, solemn chords with the golden quality of an almost royal fanfare.
After an introduction, the splendid opening theme has a sense of firmness, strongly rooted in the concerto's key of E flat, which is balanced by a second theme no less noble but softer, whispering its presence until the two themes reconcile. The introduction ended, the piano then offers a swaggering theme of which Donald Francis Tovey, in his analysis of the Concerto, wrote: "The orchestra is not only symphonic, but is enabled by the very necessity of accompanying the solo lightly to produce orchestral effects in a different category from anything in the symphonies.
At one point in the first movement, Beethoven prevents the introduction of any subsequent pianist's cadenza by writing his own, a procedure so unusual that he added a footnote to the score: "Non si fa una Cadenza, ma s'attacca subito il seguente" ("Don't play a cadenza, but attack the following immediately"). What follows is a short but well considered working out of the principal idea with the orchestra joining in before long in the horn melody. (From this time on, Beethoven began to write cadenzas for his earlier concerti. Since he was no longer going to play them himself, he wanted to be sure that the cadenza offered was not a capricious intrusion into the musical fabric).
The second movement is one of the composer's sublime inspirations. The muted strings play a theme of beauty and tenderness, the piano responding in hushed, descending triplets, creating a subtle tension until the theme is exposed. The nocturne-like character of the movement is furthered by a delicate balance of soft woodwinds, strings, and the solo, as the music mysteriously fades away.
The second-movement adagio ascends heavenward, stopping time with a melancholy meditation. 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, now a grandly exuberant allegro.
From J.Y. Chen's Doctoral Thesis at the University of Houston School of Music: Then follows one of Beethoven's most mysterious musical moments, the hushed transition leading without pause into the exuberant Rondo. Beethoven builds up immense tension by subtle changes in key and tempo with hints of the rondo refrain to come, until the Finale bursts out in its jubilant mood.
In the final movement, the main theme is really just an arpeggio reassembled. But with each of the dazzling statements, Beethoven disassembles them still further, requiring the listener to take part in the performance through active listening -- just as variations on a theme may require listeners to bushwhack their way back to the original theme. As in the concerto's opening, the main theme of the final movement has the structure and imposing character of a fanfare.
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