PERSONAL TOUCH
High five Beethoven’s piano concertos are a bridge between the Classical and Romantic eras that also traces the composer’s battle with deafness, writes Howard Shelley
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LONDON MOZART PLAYERS
o a d he ey find it ve y i e atin to di ect these o s om the ey oa d
hen the London Mozart Players (LMP) asked me to suggest a way we might celebrate the dubious milestone of my 70th birthday together, I found myself drawn to some sort of specially themed event. With the Beethoven 250th anniversary in the same year, it soon occurred to me that directing his five piano concertos from the piano in one extended event would be the perfect answer. We could present these fabulous works, which the LMP and I have performed together many times over the years, chronologically in one afternoon in three linked concerts. I had already agreed a version of this with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra for later in the year. These five concertos have always seemed to me to be a perfect embodiment of the transition from the Classical to the Romantic era, a sort of Giant’s Causeway between the styles, bringing the piano into its adulthood and establishing the paradigm of the heroic individual versus a larger force, which underpins all the great Romantic piano concertos that were to follow. These works confirm Wagner’s contention that ‘From Haydn and Mozart it was possible and necessary for a Beethoven to arrive: the genius of music demanded it, and without delay he was there’.
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January 2020 International Piano
I think it is no accident that the first mature piano concerto Beethoven wrote, now confusingly known as the second, is in the same key as Mozart’s last, K595. The opening of Beethoven’s concerto is not only very Mozartian, but also appears to quote the notes of the opening theme from Mozart’s work. One could write this off as coincidental or serendipitous, but I am convinced it is not. Apart from anything else, Beethoven employs the exact same process with his First Symphony. This is in the key of C major and Mozart’s final Jupiter Symphony is in C; what’s more, the start of the Allegro is extraordinarily similar to Mozart’s opening motif. As a further indicator that Beethoven felt himself taking up Mozart’s baton, he starts his second movement with the same series of notes and rhythm as the slow movement of Mozart’s penultimate and muchloved Symphony in G minor. Thus, Beethoven seems to be picking up the threads of Mozart’s last works, adding some of Haydn’s more daring and mischievous characteristics into the mix, and weaving it all together with his own huge and fastdeveloping musical personality and intellect. I personally feel that his first three concertos, while quite different in character from each other, all maintain a dialogue with specific Mozart piano concertos, coming to a peak in the Third Concerto, where Beethoven becomes obsessed by Mozart’s Concerto in C minor K491, which we know he rated highly and performed, along with Mozart’s only other minor key concerto, the D minor K466. I will explain at St John’s Smith Square, as I did on a spoken track in my recording, why I believe this to be the case, and how the third note of Mozart’s concerto, an A-flat, seems to have roused, emboldened and inspired Beethoven, both in his melodies and key relationships, throughout all three movements of his C minor Concerto. In addition to the bridge from the Classical to the Romantic style, the five concertos also reflect the progress of Beethoven’s battle with deafness and the associated psychological and isolating influences it forced on him. They were written when the composer was between the ages of 23 and 39, and the only one he did not premiere in public, because of the advanced state of his deafness, was the Emperor. His first two concertos establish him as a young man with boundless energy and strength to bring to both his composing and playing – sforzandos become commonplace, for example. And whereas Mozart’s concertos need to sound like there is air under every note,
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