"Without the pianoforte he would not have been able to build a career for himself" - on Beethoven's Piano Concertos
With his words about Beethoven receiving "Mozart’s spirit from the hands of Haydn," Count Waldstein proved that he truly had a gift for finding the immortal turn of phrase. Indeed, few phrases have secured a more prominent place in music history than the one entered by Waldstein in Beethoven's "album amicorum." Just before his young protégé left on his long journey to Vienna in fall 1792, the court wrote: "With the help of assiduous labor you shall receive Mozart's spirit from the hands of Haydn."
Beethoven took lessons from Joseph Haydn for just over a year, and although it is hard to tell just what the 22-year-old actually obtained from his teacher, it was most probably not "Mozart's spirit." That such an original composer as Haydn should pass on the creative spirit of a much younger colleague to one of his pupils was more of a bold prophecy than a realistic expectation on the part of the count. For the reality was apparently quite different. When Haydn sent several of his pupil's compositions to "[His] Electoral Highness” in Bonn as evidence of the lessons financed by the Bonn administration, the Prince Elector replied laconically "I have received the young Beethoven's music which you sent me with your letter. But since he had already composed and performed such music - save for the fugue - here in Bonn before undertaking his second journey to Vienna, I
cannot regard this as proof of the progress he has made in Vienna."
At first glance, the Elector was not entirely off the mark. The first piano concerto that Beethoven played in Vienna, most likely in a private circle at first, had already been sketched in Bonn: the B flat major Concerto, later published as the Piano Concerto No. 2 Op. 19. A first version - most of which is lost today - was drafted around 1787/89. The composer-pianist later revised the concerto several times, always in the context of one of his public performances (the first closing movement, the Rondo WoO 6, was replaced by a new movement in 1794/95). Beethoven's tenacious clinging to this concerto suggests the profound interconnection of his creative vision and his own compositional achievements. For while this concerto is still obligated in many ways to the models laid down by Mozart with respect to form, structure and sound, it also explores new dimensions which, of course, fully disclose themselves only to the analytical eye. It is above all in the pensive, hymnic middle movement, Adagio (with a cadenza-like passage that bears the expressive marking "con gran espressione"), that one senses a new, “Beethovenian“ spirit.
The so-called "first" Piano Concerto in C major showcases the virtuoso talent of the pianist Beethoven. Here the young composer delved exemplarily into the pianistic resources available at the end of the 18th-century: bravura writing, figurative interludes and sparkling passagework are all wrought with perfection in the three movements. Beethoven, who had now chosen Vienna as his home, premiered the concerto during his first public concert there in 1795. He played it in the Hofburg Theater on the evening of 29 March, as a kind of “intermezzo” between the first and second part of the oratorio Gioas - Ré di Giuda by the now nearly forgotten Antonio Casimiro Cartellieri. The Wiener Zeitung noted succinctly: "On the first evening, the celebrated Ludwig van Beethoven reaped the unanimous acclaim of the public during the interlude with a new pianoforte concerto of his own invention." It is worth noting that Beethoven was already considered “celebrated” at the age of 25! A few days later, he played Mozart‘s Piano Concerto in D minor K. 466 in Vienna, and in December a new version of his B flat major Concerto under the direction of Haydn, who took this occasion to present the symphonic fruits of his London sojourn to the Viennese public.
Even if the disconcerting catchword about ”Mozart`s spirit from the hands of Haydn”, can hardly be understood as a vision of "Viennese Classicism," the names of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven are unquestionably linked in a singular manner in this series of concerts held in 1795. When Beethoven organized and held his own first benefit concert in Vienna in April 1800, it was obvious that the names of Mozart and Haydn could not be missing from the program. The broadsheet mentions "a large symphony by the late Herr Kapellmeister Mozart" as well as an aria and duet from Haydn's oratono The Creation. In addition to his own First Symphony, Beethoven presented a "grand concerto on the pianoforte" at this lengthy concert, whereby it remains unclear which of the two piano concertos he played.
On 15 December 1800 Beethoven wrote to the publisher Hoffmeister in Leipzig to offer him the B flat major Concerto Op. 19, "which I really do not consider one of my best, as well as another [in C major Op. 15], which will be published by Mollo [...], because I shall keep the better one for myself until I make a tour." This "better" concerto, which Beethoven reserved for his own use, was the C minor Concerto Op. 37. Even though one should not uncritically agree with Beethoven’s self-critical assessment of the earlier B flat major Concerto, his third concerto was already regarded as a genuine advancement of the genre by his contemporaries. Its "style and character [...] are much more earnest and grand than those of the two earlier pieces," opined Carl Czerny. Alone the orchestral introduction of the first movement, with its tragic-heroic inflections, already bursts all previous boundaries with its 111 measures. An idea that can be traced back to the sketchbook of 1796 and that he impressively realized here was that of using the timpani in the cadenza ("for the concerto in C minor, timpani at the cadenza"). Yet in spite of its great thematic, harmonic and formal richness, Beethoven's only minor-key concerto stands out above all for its special cyclical homogeneity; it is hardly by chance that it was, next to the E flat major Concerto, the most popular of Beethoven's concertos on 19th-century concert programs.
In his final two piano concertos (in G major Op. 58 and in E flat major Op. 73), Beethoven has the pianist enter with apparent spontaneity at the very beginning of the work instead of letting him wait for the end of the first orchestral ritornello. Even if Beethoven did not “invent” this (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach comes to mind, as well as Mozart's “Jeunehomme” concerto), this unusual opening gesture immediately casts its spell on the audience. The atmosphere of improvisatory freedom also clearly suffuses other parts of the G major Concerto Op. 58, and from this seemingly improvisatory feeling spring the work`s originality and rousing dramaturgy.
It was in his last piano concerto, in the "Eroica" key of E flat major, that Beethoven most impressively realized his ideal of a "symphonic concerto." Just how elegantly Beethoven brought out the cyclical structure of the movements can be seen above all at the close of the central movement, which has been “shifted” to B major. Here, after a harmonic shift (B or C flat is lowered to B flat, thus becoming the fifth of E flat major), the piano already anticipates the rondo theme of the finale. Details of this nature must have led the reviewers of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (1812) to proclaim that this work was "without a doubt one of the most original, effective, but also most difficult of all known concertos." In any event, the underlying concept of Beethoven's Plano Concerto No. 5 can be grasped as a synthesis of the experiences that Beethoven had made in his preceding concertos - both from the perspective of the genre itself as well as of his own public concertizing.
Beethoven used his own personally organized benefit concerts to further his career as a pianist and composer in Vienna. His reputation as an outstanding virtuoso had preceded him to the imperial city because of the close political affiliations between Bonn and Vienna. As a pianist, Beethoven quickly gained access to the aristocratic salons. But unlike the rather conventional, elegantly brilliant playing of a Hummel, Steibelt, Wölffl or Gelinek, his playing reflected new dimensions of expressiveness, especially in his free improvisations. Many years later, his pupil Carl Czerny described this particular style of playing as follows:

“Beethoven who arrived about 1790, enticed entirely new and daring passages from the pianoforte through the use of the pedal and an extraordinarily characteristic playing which shone particularly in the strict legato execution of chords, thus constituting a new kind of song - hitherto unimagined effects. His playing did not possess the pure and brilliant elegance found among many other pianists, but it was sparkling, grand and, especially in the Adagio, highly emotional and romantic. Just like his compositions, his playing was a tone painting of the highest order, calculated solely in view of the overall effect."

Beethoven himself was fully aware of his qualities as a composer and pianist. In a letter of April 1801 to the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, he wrote: “Musical politics demands that the best concertos should be withheld from the public for a time." Beethoven thus protected his author's rights by playing the concertos exclusively himself; only after a longer period of time were they published. Incidentally, a consequence of such “politics” was that the C major Concerto was published first. in 1801, and thus called Piano Concerto No. 1, even though it was actually the second chronologically. One has an idea of the extent to which Beethoven improvised or played from memory at his performances from a letter to the publisher Hoffmeister, in which Beethoven refers to the belated printing of the B flat major Concerto: "For instance, in the score of my concerto, the piano part, according to my custom, was not written out, and I have only just done so; hence, to avoid delay, you will receive it in my own, not very legible, handwriting."
Nowhere is the interplay between the pianist and the composer Beethoven as palpable as in his piano concertos. Significantly, he lost interest in this genre when his growing deafness forced htm to give up performing in public. He was thus obliged to entrust the performance of the last of his piano concertos - the one in E flat major - to his pupil Czerny; he himself never played it in public. (The cadenzas are no longer left to the soloist's discretion here: at the end of the first movement, the composer expressly instructs the pianist not to play his - the
pianist's - own cadenzas!). Nevertheless, sketches from 1815 show that Beethoven was working on a sixth concerto, which was destined to remain incomplete. The lofty standards laid down by the fifth concerto - in a sense the "ne plus ultra" of the genre - may well have contributed to Beethoven's failure to continue working on the D major opening movement. In any event, the piano concerto played a very important role in the life and works of Beethoven the composing pianist or - depending on the emphasis - concertizing composer. The music scholar Adolf Bernhard Marx astutely recognized this already in 1859 in his monumental work on Beethoven: "Without the pianoforte he would not have been able to build a career for himself." And without the genre of the
piano Concerio, an important part of its foundation would have been missing.