Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor Op. 37 (Daniel Barenboim )

From the "Concert pour la paix" at Victoria Hall in Geneva, Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra perform Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor Op. 37. Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Opus 37 00:00 Entrance 00:21 I Allegro con brio 18:08 II Largo 27:58 III Rondo: Allegro Daniel Barenboim - conductor and piano West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

On This Day 5 April: Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 Was Premiered

By Georg Predota, Interlude

Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor on 5 April 1803 in Vienna. The origins of the work, however, date back to the summer of 1800. Escaping the stifling heat of the city, Beethoven habitually spent his summers in the countryside. And in 1800 he took quarters for himself and a servant in a farmhouse in the village of Unter-Döbling, about one hour walk from Vienna City Centre.

The Farmer’s Daughter

Beethoven in 1801

Beethoven’s landlord had a reputation for drunkenness, and for skirting the wrong side of the law. However, he also had a remarkably beautiful daughter, who had also managed to gain a bit of a reputation. A delightful anecdote reports that Beethoven was greatly captivated by her beauty, and made it a habit to stop his walk and gaze at her when she was working in the farmyard or the field. The farmer’s daughter, however, openly laughed at his clumsy advances.

However, the story isn’t quite finished, as the farmer was arrested and imprisoned for fighting in public. Hoping to impress the beautiful daughter, Beethoven went to the magistrate as an eyewitness to obtain his release. However, other witnesses came forward and refuted Beethoven’s telling of events, with the result that the farmer was forced to stay in jail. 

Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Theater an der Wien

Beethoven, it is said, became very angry and abusive and was in danger of being arrested himself. A number of friends came to Beethoven’s aid, and convinced the magistrate of Beethoven’s position in society, his influence, and the power of his aristocratic friends. Having thus escaped jail, Beethoven set to work and drafted parts of a concerto for piano and orchestra in C minor.

And while the inspiration might well have been Beethoven’s infatuation and ultimate rejection by a farmer’s daughter, the work was still unfinished when Beethoven presented it to the public almost three years later. Ignaz von Seyfried, the new conductor at the Theater an der Wien agreed to turn pages for Beethoven, and he reports, “I saw almost nothing but empty leaves,” he wrote, “at most on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me and scribbled down to serve as clues for him.”

As Seyfried reports, “Beethoven played nearly all of the solo part from memory since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to put it all down on paper. 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.” It took Beethoven another year to write out the piano part, and the work first appeared in print in 1804. 

First Concerto Maturity

Ignaz von Seyfried

It has been suggested that the C-minor concerto is the first of his five piano concertos that sound like mature Beethoven. But what is more, it also reflects an important advance in piano technology as the range of the instrument had been expanded beyond the standard five-octave span.

The opening “Allegro con brio” pays homage to Mozart’s famous C-minor concerto (K. 491) by imitating the intricate interplay between soloist and orchestra and by launching into a further sparkling development in the coda. Singing with quiet nobility, the piano initiates the “Largo” movement. Imaginative orchestration creates a hushed mood in the remote key of E major and after a magical dialogue between the piano and orchestra, the movements conclude with a typical Beethovenian fortissimo exclamation.

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 – original score

Less ornate and more muscular, the concluding “Rondo-Allegro” returns us to the minor key, with a pair of principal themes introduced by the soloist. Alternating passages of exuberant humour and blunt drama the movement irresistibly accelerates with the orchestra providing a high-spirited conclusion.

On This Day 5 April: Herbert von Karajan Was Born

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Herbert von Karajan is frequently hailed as the greatest living conductor of orchestral music. And while his conducting method is one of total authority and power, many critics have praised his emphasis on the perfection of sound, “note-perfect expressions of sheer, pure beauty.” For many music aficionados, colleagues, and critics, Karajan was “the greatest, the last great maestro. Karajan was the exception; no one can do it like he can. He is so egocentric, so clever, he uses all of his immense power to do the things he wants.”

Herbert von Karajan, 1938

And the music critic Martin Bernheimer called him “the last of the old-school European supermen of music… a genius on the podium.” He was a dedicated devotee of yoga and Zen Buddhism, and characteristically conducted scores completely from memory with his eyes tightly closed. For Karajan, this was not a pose of affection, but “it has to do with the gap between what you want and what you hear and how it becomes narrower.” Karajan explained, “when I was very young and started conducting, I had to train myself to listen to music as it came out because the orchestra of a provincial town was simply noncompetitive with what I had in my ear. This is the point where you begin, and then you take one step and then another, and the gap begins to narrow.” 

Heribert Ritter von Karajan, born on 5 April 1908 in Salzburg, has always been tight-lipped about his formative years. As a biographer wrote, “his public is curious to know about his family. But he is not in the least inclined to satisfy such curiosity. In all the conversations that he recorded as part of the present biography, what he had to say about his family would fit on a single piece of paper.”

Herbert and Wolfgang Karajan

In fact, Karajan has never given a detailed account of his childhood. This has led to various speculations and theories, with one researcher claiming, “He was not the sort of man to guard sentimental memories or to harbor feelings of resentment.” Karajan clearly had a great number of ghosts in his closet, foremost among them his maintaining silence about his Nazi Party membership. In fact, Karajan joined the Nazi Party twice, first in Salzburg in 1933, and two years later he rejoined the party in Aachen. He subsequently insisted that his interest was “career advancement and survival rather than political conviction,” with Adolf Hitler personally appointing Karajan “state conductor” in Berlin. His enemies called him “SS Colonel von Karajan,” but the de-Nazification board immediately cleared him of any illegal activities, merely banning him from the concert halls for two years. 

The Karajans were of Greek ancestry, with his great-great-grandfather Geórgios Karajánnis leaving for Vienna in 1768 and eventually settling in Saxony. He established a clothing business with his brother, and both “were ennobled for their services by Frederick Augustus III. The conductor’s father Ernst von Karajan was a chief medical officer and senior consultant, and his mother Marta née Martha Kosmač, came from a Slovene background. Apparently, Heribert inherited from his father “a seriousness of purpose,” and he once suggested that his mother wanted him to go into banking. That, however, was never going to happen.

Herbert von Karajan, 1941

Karajan’s earliest memory was “hiding behind the curtains, jealously auditioning his brother’s piano lessons.” Wolfgang Karajan was a gifted pianist, but Heribert was extraordinarily talented. It was quickly discovered that he was a child prodigy at the piano. As he later recalled, “I was naturally under a lot of stress from my piano studies alongside my school work. I wasn’t just plonking away. I played in public every year. On the one hand, it isolated you; on the other hand, it gives you a satisfaction it would be very difficult to get from any other source.” 

Karajan practiced the piano for four hours every day, and he started attending classes at the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1914. Within a couple of years, he was working with three eminent teachers, Franz Ledwinka (piano), Berhard Paumgartner (composition and chamber music), and Franz Sauer (harmony). And as the rising star of the Mozarteum, young Heribert made regular appearances in the yearly special Mozart Birthday Concerts. According to contemporary critics, Karajan played with great assurance both of manner and touch, “and a preoccupation with the beauty of sound born of an evidently precocious musical sensibility.”

Statue of Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg

Young Karajan also sang in various local church choirs in Salzburg, and he remembers “that choral singing has in fact accompanied me throughout my life.” Karajan claimed that Bernhard Paumgartner encouraged him to take up conduction, as he “detected his exceptional promise in that regard.” However, Karajan’s’ fascination with orchestral sound had already been identified by Ledwinka. In the event, Paumgartner took Heribert “along again and again to orchestral rehearsals and let him sit alongside him—‘So that you get an idea what conducting is like.’ And he also did his utmost to make sure that I eventually put it all to the test.” On the advice of Paumgartner, and on account of an inflamed tendon in one of his hands, Karajan turned to conducting, taking lessons with Alexander Wunderer and Franz Schalk at the Vienna Academy.

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