Jonathan Biss on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.1

It’s rather amazing that anyone tried their hand at writing piano concertos when faced with the treasure trove that Mozart left behind; it’s completely amazing that Beethoven did so just a few years after Mozart’s death, and not only succeeded, but transformed the genre into something new and thrilling.

Mozart’s concerti are many things, but foremost, they are operas. Wordless operas, with the piano as protagonist, and each of the winds in a supporting but crucial role. These instruments are people, each with a unique personality and a unique set of motivations: they interact with one another, moving the action in unanticipated ways, influencing one another’s moods and deeds. Joy turns to jealousy, turns to regret, turns back to joy, sometimes all within one musical paragraph. Human beauty and human foolishness are on display; it is all totally illogical and absolutely convincing.

This is not how Beethoven’s piano concerti function. Nor is it how the piano concerto functioned after him; as with so many other genres, the changes he effected were so powerful they became permanent. Beethoven’s concerti are not conversations; fundamentally, they are confrontations, between an individual and an amassed force. The individual is not necessarily heroic: in the middle movement of the G Major Concerto, he is as far from it as one can be. But the tension between the one and the many is where the drama and the meaning of these works lie.

Beethoven did not arrive at this conception of the piano concerto immediately. First came a forgettable work in E flat Major (unpublished and thus unnumbered), then a great one in B flat Major. This is the “Second Piano Concerto,” so-called because it was published after the first. It has many of Beethoven’s signature qualities — the wit, the sharp elbows, and the spirituality – but it is essentially modest; modesty and confrontation are mutually exclusive qualities. By the time the C Minor Concerto (known as number three, if you haven’t been put off counting yet) comes around, Beethoven’s approach to the genre has crystalised: the seething tension between soloist and orchestra is the work’s core.

The work at hand, the exhilarating Piano Concerto in C Major, was written after the B flat Major and before the C Minor, and indeed, it forms a bridge between these two fundamentally different approaches. Each movement has moments where orchestra and soloist find themselves at odds: the piano urging, or imploring, or insisting, in all cases refusing to be bossed. But each movement also has moments of true dialogue, sparkling in the outer movements, deliriously beautiful in the central one, the piano and clarinet in conversation with one another and with the cosmos.

And the opening of the concerto is pure opera. The orchestra speaks in a whisper, setting the stage for both the comedy and the drama to come. It is the overture to The Marriage of Figaro, if Beethoven had written it.

But because Beethoven did indeed write this music, as it develops, it acquires a scope that Mozart would have considered outlandish. This opening tutti is massive — at nearly three minutes, significantly longer than any of Mozart’s tuttis, and wider-reaching. After the first climax — a happy clatter of dominant chords — comes a loaded silence. When this silence is broken, everything has changed: the mood is hushed, and certainty has turned to doubt. For two bars, the second violins play alone, searching for a tonality, for a motivic idea, for an anchor of any kind. This anchor arrives in the form of an E flat Major chord, and a theme with none of the confidence or brio that preceded the silence: the orchestra is a wanderer in a strange harmonic land. Mozart would never. Mozart’s opening tuttis are curtain-raising, stage-setting. This music has its own agenda; it is intense and daring. Above all, it is ambitious.

That is why this is the “Piano Concerto No. 1,” despite not being Beethoven’s first work in the genre by any definition. It is the work of a young man looking to be noticed. And the C Major Piano Concerto is, from start to finish, impossible not to notice; its ambition is everywhere. It is there when the pianist enters the scene, at first quizzical, moments later rollicking. It is there in the virtuosity, both instrumental and compositional (“look what I can do!”) that permeates the first movement. It is there in the strangeness of that movement’s development, which begins in a place of wonder, revisiting the E flat major that intruded on the opening tutti, and then darkens, living in the minor mode for an extended period, the writing growing ever more chromatic and ominous.

The ambition is there again in the slow movement: an expression of Beethoven’s spirituality different from, but no less profound than, those that came near the end of his life. This spirituality is felt immediately: coming out of the first movement’s C major — no flats, no sharps, no complications —the A flat Major chord that opens the movement is an event. Beethoven was prone to choosing keys for his second themes and second movements that wander far from home, jolting the ears of any listeners who may have grown too comfortable for his liking. But usually, these keys moved in the opposite direction — more sharps, more radiance. The appearance of A flat Major, with its four flats, creates a warmth which is a world away from the one the first movement inhabited and is totally disarming. The warmth itself is not the point — Beethoven always aims beyond the merely beautiful — but rather the foundation for a movement which will grow ever more moving. It asks unanswerable questions, but it also conveys a deep idealism — a belief in some alternate reality more beautiful than our own. (This again separates it from Mozart, who only dealt with the reality he could observe with his own eyes and ears.)

The ambition is there yet again in the finale, a movement of unbridled joy and a riotous energy. Its twists and turns are unapologetically unsubtle, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

The ambition might be most palpable of all in the gigantic first movement cadenza, written some years after the rest of the piece. Beethoven was renowned for his improvisations, and though written out, that is what this cadenza is. Wild and sprawling, its length — at least double what the proportions of the rest of the movement would lead the listener to expect — is itself a joke, the conductor and orchestra left waiting haplessly while the pianist refuses to quit without first exploring every tonality and every possible mood. While the extremity of this music, along with the pianist’s seeming inability to know when enough is bloody well enough, might make it seem like a parody, it is in fact gripping, because everything it expresses, it expresses with total earnestness.

And that is the point. Whether the C Major Piano Concerto is an 18th century opera or a 19th century struggle of the soul, it is 100% Beethoven: a work of unshakable conviction, and an expression of an immense personality, spiritual and human in equal measure and all at once.

Jonathan Biss

Sally Beamish on City Stanzas

I started planning this work, for Jonathan Biss, soon after completing my first two piano concertos, which refer to the natural world: to the Cairngorm mountains, and to a whirlpool off the West coast of Scotland. In this third concerto, I turned to the urban landscape, intending to build a tribute to human creativity, particularly with reference to Beethoven, and his first piano concerto.

However, when Jonathan and I first met to discuss the piece in 2015, we were both deeply troubled by the political situation both in the UK and in the USA. I had initially intended a celebration of inventiveness, but couldn’t shake off a sense of greed in the centres of power and commerce – the development of profit-making technology, of ever more efficient armaments; the widening of the gulf between those who have everything and those who starve. The music in all three movements is darkly sardonic.

The sidedrum is the soloist in the opening bars, building to the first solo piano entry. Octaves and runs set up an ironic, circus-like toccata. After a central more relaxed section, the opening music is heard in retrograde, so that the upward scales from the first part reappear heading downwards, and the sidedrum fades into the distance.

The central movement represents urban decay, and loneliness. It is a memorial for those who die alone in the midst of the city.

The last movement presents an unstable, chaotic structure: the mood is grotesque and hollow, with the different sections overlapping, and no attempt at integration. It follows the pattern of Beethoven’s Rondo, and takes some of its themes, but with a queasy irony. In the midst of a virtuosic cadenza, the piano introduces a lost, lyrical voice, which reappears several times but is finally extinguished by savage, slashing chords.

All the material derives in some way from the Beethoven concerto, taking a small group of notes or a rhythmic pattern from each corresponding movement as a starting point. All three movements are symmetrical in some sense – like ‘buildings’ – the first two framed by a mirror image of their opening bars, and the last a typical rondo, beginning and ending with its main theme.

The concerto is inspired by Jonathan’s individual, expressive and virtuosic playing, and the clarity of his soundworld. It is also affected by our shared anxiety about the future.

City Stanzas was commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Orchestre de Chambre de Paris with support from Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

The world premiere was given by Jonathan Biss, with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Mischa Santora, on Presidential Inauguration Day in the USA – 20th January 2017 – at Ordway Hall, St Paul, Minnesota.

Sally Beamish, 2017