Beethoven – Piano Concerto No.3 in C minor (1803)

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor 1st mvt (1803)

Premiered in 1803, Beethoven hadn’t finished the score, so had a series of what a friend called ‘Egyptian hieroglyphs’ in the piano score to help him remember what he’d composed.

The first movement of this piano concerto is one of those pieces that marks Beethoven as extending and developing the journey of music from the Classical Era from Mozart and Haydn.

The theme is simple – the rising C minor triad, and then a dotted scale back to the tonic – not dissimilar to what Mozart wrote in his C minor piano concerto back in 1786. However, it’s what Beethoven does – moving it through the parts, the bass, the interplay with the soloist, the modulations to the third rather than fifth or fourth, treating woodwind as a separate estate of the orchestra from strings rather than as an optional extra – it’s a very, very well put together movement, and maintains the drama throughout.