Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 2

Just how did Beethoven find his way from the Rhine to the Danube? The young Ludwig van Beethoven was just over a week past his 20th birthday, when he first met the renowned Joseph Haydn on December 26, 1790, in Bonn. Haydn and the impresario Johann Peter Salomon stopped off on their way to London where Haydn was to perform his own music.

Beethoven met Haydn again on Haydn’s return journey in July, 1792, when Beethoven showed him scores of his recent compositions. Haydn was sufficiently impressed to tell Beethoven that if he could travel to Vienna, he would gladly take him on as a pupil.

Beethoven began lessons with Haydn soon after his arrival in Vienna in November, 1792, but quickly became dissatisfied. Haydn was enormously busy with his own compositions and commissions and in January, 1794, he left for a second trip to London, returning more than a year and a half later. In the meantime Beethoven took lessons with other teachers, often in secret so as not to offend Haydn.

By the time he was in his late twenties, Beethoven was already gaining a wide reputation among cognoscenti as a virtuoso pianist and improviser. Music historians tell us that Beethoven was sketching musical ideas for his concertos while he was still in his teens, and that the first version of his Piano Concerto No. 2 dates from 1795, when he was 25 years of age.

In 1787 Beethoven had visited Vienna, where it seems certain that he met Mozart and may have taken piano lessons from him. In November 1792 he finally moved to Vienna, which would be his home for the rest of his life. In his baggage was the preliminary work he had done on his Piano Concerto in Bflat major.

A high-profile event came Beethoven’s way on March 29, 1795, when he was featured as both composer and pianist in a charity concert at Vienna’s Burgtheater. It was a concert held for the benefit of the Vienna Composers Society, which looked after the welfare of musicians’ widows and orphans. It is widely assumed that he seized this occasion to premiere his Bflat major Concerto.  Franz Gerhard Wegeler, a friend from Beethoven’s years in Bonn, happened to be visiting Vienna at the time, and related that not until the afternoon of the second day before the concert did he write the rondo finale, and then while suffering from a pretty severe colic. In the anteroom sat four copyists to whom he handed sheet after sheet as soon as they were finished.

In the whole of the Bflat concerto the music has a habit of veering off into startling keys: in the first movement, the second theme includes a leap into D-flat major. In the recapitulation that idea will return in an even more striking G-flat major, a distinctively spiced key in those years when pianos were not always tuned in equal temperament.

The Adagio, in E-flat major, sounds Mozartian in style but more nearly Beethovenian in expression, with an elegantly nocturnal atmosphere.

For this finale Beethoven plays the sort of joking game with rhythm and meter that Haydn was given to. One section jumps into a Turkish or gypsy-flavored minor and the soloist ends the story with a blaze of double trills in the right hand, a specialty of Beethoven the young virtuoso.