Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5, "Emperor"

Born: Bonn, Germany, December 15, 1770.
Died: Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827.

To this day, for many listeners, the so-called “heroic style” reveals the essence of Beethoven, even though the central documents of that style—works like Fidelio, the Third through Eighth Symphonies, the Coriolan and Egmont overtures, the Violin Concerto, the “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” Sonatas—fell within a period of less than a decade, from 1803 to 1812. Beethoven’s last piano concerto is among the most representative of these works. It was composed in early 1809, in part while the French army under Napoleon was laying siege to Vienna. (From this campaign came the sad story of the near-deaf composer fleeing to the basement of his brother’s house and using pillows to shield what remained of his hearing.) It is unlikely that he intended to celebrate musically the man who was invading his city, but it is perhaps not absurd to hear an allusion to contemporary events in the often militaristic bearing of this concerto, particularly the first movement. The nickname familiar to English-speaking audiences, however, was not Beethoven’s idea; we do not know with certainty who first dubbed this the “Emperor” Concerto, or when. Through the first decade of the 1800s, as his hearing waned, Beethoven gradually stopped playing the piano in public, and he would never play the “Emperor” himself. At the première, with the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, in late November of 1811, the soloist was Friedrich Schneider; at the Viennese première, three months later, the soloist was Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny.

The “Emperor” begins, famously, and in defiance of a basic rule of the Classical concerto, with a brilliant cadenza for the piano, punctuated only by orchestral chords that powerfully establish the home key, E-flat major. Beethoven had introduced the soloist at the very beginning of his previous piano concerto, three years earlier, and even Mozart, as early as 1777, had written a piano concerto (No. 9, in E-flat major, K. 271) in which the soloist appeared in the opening bars. In those cases the effect is (respectively) poetic and witty, but in the “Emperor” the cadenza prepares the listener to hear a concerto unusually grand in scale and elevated in rhetoric. (In early 1815, incidentally, Beethoven began sketching, but never finished, a sixth piano concerto, in D major, also “heroic” in style, in which the soloist was once again to have entered early in a cadenza.) Moreover, the cadenza aptly introduces a concerto whose unprecedented solo virtuosity was accessible only to professional pianists and the very best amateurs of Beethoven’s day. His technical and tonal demands far exceed those of the pianistic models he grew up with, and anticipate those of the early Romantic concerto: bravura devices like massive chords, interlocking octaves, stormy arpeggios, and cascading scales, as well as textures of uncommon delicacy and colour, and much glittering ornamental figuration in the highest register of the keyboard.

Beethoven does not abandon Classical form in the first movement, however, for once the opening cadenza is past a long orchestral passage follows in which the subject-matter of the movement is introduced, just as in a concerto by Mozart. There are only two main themes, though as the movement unfolds they give rise to new motifs in the process of being varied and extended. The first theme, as Leon Plantinga writes in his recent book Beethoven’s Concertos, is “an assertive, swashbuckling march” (violins), and includes a turn-figure that will pervade the movement; the second theme, introduced pianissimo, is a gentler march that appears in both major and minor keys (violins and horns, respectively). The piano re-enters with a gentle variant of the first theme, in the high register, and throughout the solo exposition that follows, and the long development section, with its stampeding octaves in the piano part, Beethoven recasts his themes in ever-new, often Romantic-sounding forms. The recapitulation is introduced by another cadenza, though later, at just the point where one would actually expect a cadenza, Beethoven writes, in the score: “Non si fa una Cadenza, ma s’attacca subito il seguente” [“Do not play a cadenza, but instead proceed immediately to the following”]. “The following” is (briefly) cadenza-like in character, but is more in the nature of further development of the main themes.

The second movement is really an extended introduction to the finale; it is a lyrical, deeply Romantic meditation devoid of drama or development. Harmonically it is almost static: the touching main theme is presented three times in the home key, B major; only a brief, rhapsodic digression into distant D major, in the middle of the movement, offers some harmonic relief. (B major is an unconventional key for the slow movement of a Classical piece in E-flat major, but Beethoven prepares this move by making much use of the relationship of E-flat to B (sometimes spelled as C-flat) in the first movement.) When Beethoven wrote this movement, Czerny recalled, “the religious songs of devout pilgrims were present to his mind,” and the main theme is certainly hymn like. (It is strikingly introduced, by muted violins in a low tessitura.) The piano plays the theme only once; otherwise, it offers dreamy decorative figuration of sometimes heartbreaking beauty.

As in all of Beethoven’s later concertos, the second and third movements are linked without a pause. The slow movement comes to a close on a sustained low B in the bassoons, and by a simple slip down a semitone to B-flat we are taken to the doorstep of the original home key, E-flat major. Over a sustained B-flat (now in the horns), the pianist, in what Plantinga calls “a stage whisper,” muses over a chordal motif that proves to be an embryo of the main theme of the finale. It is a classic Beethoven transition—at once strange and organic. The joyous finale, in a 6/8 “hunting” rhythm, offers a lightened version of the militarism of the first movement. (The opening notes of the main theme sound like a horn call.) The movement is a rondo, yet little time is given over to contrasting themes. The core of the movement is a long quasi-development in which only the main theme appears, in four versions (in E-flat, C, A-flat, and E major) each more rarified and more ornately decorated than the last. In one more delectably Romantic touch, Beethoven spends several minutes musing over his theme, as if in a reverie. After a recapitulation so literal that he did not bother to write it out in his manuscript, we are left with the piano accompanied only by the “hunting” rhythm tapped out quietly, martially by the timpani; then, whirling piano scales and the orchestra’s last reference to the main theme bring the concerto rousingly to a close.