Leonore Overture No.1, op.138
Piano Concerto No.3 in C Minor, op.37
Egmont, op.87
performed May 5/6/7, 2007

Beethoven's time was one of revolutions and wars, terror and reform, poverty and extravagance and in many ways his music reflects the turbulence of the age in which he lived. Austria was at war with Ottoman Turkey, the French were in dispute with Austria, and England with France. The fall of the Bastille in 1789 was a sign of the end of the old order, extinguished forever. The period brought wide cultural changes, changes in political philosophy and in society, in literature, in painting and in music with the towering genius of Beethoven, later referred to by Liszt as "the pillar of smoke that led to the Promised Land." Beethoven is seen as the bridge from the restraint and preoccupation with form of the Classical era, to the wildly personalized and emotional Romantic era.

Beethoven had a remarkable musical output. Just to name a few: 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, 6 piano concerti plus a fragment (of which only 5 remain in the repertoire), 10 violin sonatas, 4 cello sonatas, 172 folk song arrangements, 60 canons and "musical jokes," at least 2 ballets, an opera ("Fidelio"), and a large number of other works for chamber ensembles, choir, voice ... and 9 great symphonies that still represent the highest consistent level of symphonic output by any composer in history. Regardless of the success that surrounded Beethoven during his life and the enduring admiration for his music, many works slipped through the cracks of time.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in the provincial court city of Bonn, Germany, probably on December 16, 1770. Beethoven's talent was such that, at the age of 12, he was already assistant to the organist Christian Gottlob Neefe, with whom he studied. Attempts to establish him as a prodigy in the mold of Mozart had little success, however.

In 1787 Beethoven was sent to Vienna, but his mother fell ill, and he had to return to Bonn almost immediately. She died a few months later, and in 1789 Beethoven himself requested that his alcoholic father be retired, a move that left him responsible for his two younger brothers. Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna a second time in November of 1792, in order to study with Haydn.

In 1794 French forces occupied the Rhineland; consequently, Beethoven's ties with and support from the Bonn court came to an end. His father had died a month after his departure from Bonn, and his brothers joined him in Vienna. He remained there the rest of his life, leaving only for holidays and concerts in nearby cities. His only extended journey was to Prague, Dresden, and Berlin in 1796. Beethoven never held an official position in Vienna. He supported himself by giving concerts, by teaching piano, and increasingly through the sale of his compositions. Members of the Viennese aristocracy were his steady patrons, and in 1809 three of them-Prince Kinsky, Prince Lobkowitz, and the Archduke Rudolph - even guaranteed him a yearly income with the sole condition that he remain in Vienna.

The last 30 years of Beethoven's life were shaped by a series of personal crises, the first of which was the onset of deafness. The early symptoms, noticeable to the composer already before 1800, affected him socially more than musically. His reaction was despair, resignation, and defiance. Resolving finally to "seize fate by the throat," he emerged from the crisis with a series of triumphant works that mark the beginning of a new period in his stylistic development.

A second crisis a decade later was the breaking off of a relationship with an unnamed lady (probably Antonie Brentano, the wife of a friend) known to us as the "Immortal Beloved," as Beethoven addressed her in a series of letters in July 1812. This was apparently the most serious of several such relationships with women who were in some way out of his reach, and its traumatic conclusion was followed by a lengthy period of resignation and reduced musical activity.

During this time Beethoven's deafness advanced to the stage that he could no longer perform publicly, and he required a slate or little notebooks (now known as "conversation books") to communicate with visitors. The death of his brother Caspar in 1815 led to a 5-year legal struggle for custody of Caspar's son Karl, then 9 years old, in whom Beethoven saw a last chance for the domestic life that had otherwise eluded him. His possessiveness of Karl provoked a final crisis in the summer of 1826, when the young man attempted suicide. Shortly thereafter, Beethoven's health began to fail, and he died on March 26, 1827 in Vienna.

It's hard to imagine Beethoven, notoriously confident in his compositions, writing an innovative, powerful opera like Fidelio and then struggling for ten years to settle upon an overture for it. Nonetheless, Beethoven wrote four overtures for Fidelio and only tepidly settled upon the last as his final choice. Early in 1840, Felix Mendelssohn became the first conductor to perform all four of the overtures in a single concert, perhaps to acknowledge all four the overtures as worthy of repeated performance and perhaps also to highlight this unusual period of doubt in Beethoven's life. The  Leonore Overture No.1, op.138, was Beethoven's first attempt at an overture for Fidelio. (The original title of the opera was Leonore, thus the name for the first three overture attempts.) Leonore Overture No.1 was summarily discarded and was only performed once during Beethoven's life, and then only as a separate work.

Beethoven's five piano concertos are more closely associated with his appearances as a pianist than another group of works. The immediate evidence for this is that he lost interest in piano concertos when he was compelled by advancing deafness to give up performing in public. He had to hand over his last and greatest concerto, the Fifth in E-flat, to his pupil Czerny to perform. A sixth, in D major, came to a halt as a sketch in 1815. The Concerto No.3 in C Minor, op.37, is Beethoven's only concerto in a minor key, and is closely linked to Mozart. Beethoven admired both of Mozart's minor-key concertos, performed them publicly, and composed his own cadenzas for the first and last movements of the D Minor concerto, K466. Beethoven's Symphony No.2 in D Major, op.36, was written during the same period and abounds with references to Mozart's Magic Flute. (In fact, the opus numbers of these two works might easily be reversed, as Beethoven composed much of the piano concerto before starting the symphony.) Beethoven's C Minor concerto was first performed on April 5, 1803 in the newly-built Theater an der Wien, on a program that included his Second Symphony.

One of the first things Josef Härtl did, after taking over the management of the Vienna Court Theaters in 1808, was to put into process a revival of plays by Goethe and Schiller with specially-composed music. Beethoven was a natural choice for such a project, and composed music for Goethe's Egmont, supplying an overture, four entr'actes, two songs for the heroine, Clärchen, the music for Clärchen's death, a "melodrama" and, for the finale, a "Triumph Symphony." The premier took place at the Hofburg Theater in Vienna on May 24, 1810. Egmont, op.84, was hardly a "sure thing," however. Beethoven and Goethe had been notoriously fond of each other's talents, even to the point of drawing jibes from critics as something of a mutual admiration society. Perhaps to distance himself, Beethoven originally requested to write music for Schiller's William Tell, but theater politics sent that project to Adalbert Gyrowetz, a Bohemian composer.

Behind the scenes, the real drama was that Beethoven and Goethe didn't have the mutual admiration society their critics alleged. Goethe sheds light on the situation in a personal letter: "I made the acquaintance of Beethoven at Teplitz. His talent astonished me prodigiously, but he is, unfortunately, a wholly untamed person. It is true that he is not utterly wrong when he finds the world detestable, but this will not make it more enjoyable for himself and for others. Yet he is to be excused and much pitied, for he has lost his hearing, which is, perhaps, of less injury to his art than to his social relations. Already laconic by nature, he will be doubly so by reason of the infirmity."

Beethoven, meanwhile, complained to Härtl: "Goethe is too fond of the atmosphere of the court; fonder than becomes a poet. There is little room for sport over the absurdities of the virtuosi when poets, who ought to be looked upon as the foremost teachers of the nation, can forget everything else in the enjoyment of court glitter."

The hero for Goethe's tragedy, Count Egmont (1522-1568), played a critical role in the early upheavals of the Low Countries, which later resulted in their liberation from the Spanish. He was first a captain under Charles V in the campaign against the French. His success in the campaign, however, earned him the envy and enmity of the Duke of Alba, while his countrymen chose to honor him as an emancipator who had rescued Flanders from the French. Charles V's successor, Philipp II, tried to turn Flanders into a Spanish dependency, but Egmont protested - a gesture seen as tantamount to open rebellion. As a result, when the Duke of Alba went to the Netherlands in 1567 to quell uprisings, Egmont was imprisoned and put to death at Brussels on June 4, 1568. His execution made Egmont a martyr to his cause.

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