Read below for program notes for the Classics Series concert “Jackson Conducts Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3” on May 10-11, 2025. Program notes are written by Jeremy Reynolds Copyright © 2024.
PIANO CONCERTO No. 4 in G MAJOR, Op. 58
The public premiere of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto almost literally burned the house down.
Composer Louis Spohr, largely forgotten, attended the premiere and recounted in his autobiography how Beethoven himself derailed the concert by conducting too vigorously during the orchestral introduction of the fourth concerto and knocking the candles off the piano at the first loud moment, cracking the audience up. Furious, he restarted the concerto but then smacked a chorus boy in the face at the same moment by accident.
No one could hear the introduction for several minutes as listeners burst a collective gut, and Beethoven reportedly snapped half a dozen strings on the piano with some truly rageful playing, at odds with the generally pleasant mood of the concerto.
Perhaps the audience’s inattention was for the best. First, the concerto breaks with tradition by having the soloist play before the orchestra. (Radicalism was not appreciated at the time.) When the orchestra does enter, it’s in the “wrong” key — the rest of the movement unfolds more conventionally, with the soloist and orchestra trading melodies in dialogue.
The second movement, for piano and strings only, begins severely, powerful string phrases alternating with beseeching piano lines. The movement transitions almost without pause to the finale movement, which begins in entirely the wrong key, like the first. Typically, the final movement begins in the same key as the opening, but here, the orchestra launches the gallop in C major instead of major, quickly resolving back to the appropriate tonality. This happens each time the tune repeats. Trumpets and timpani join for the first time in this final movement, distinguishing it even more completely from the slower middle movement and helping punctuate the finale’s sweeping sense of charisma and wit.
The disastrous premiere marked the composer’s last public performance of a piano concerto, but it wasn’t because of the flames and fury. By this time, Beethoven was nearly completely deaf. Public performance was no longer feasible.
Today, Beethoven’s fourth concerto is the most performed work in Carnegie Hall, with 192 performances over the years. The first is his fifth concerto, “Emperor,” which sits at 215 as of January 2022.
SYMPHONY No. 3 in E-FLAT MAJOR, (“EROICA”) Op. 55
Music history is a fickle thing.
At the premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, now regarded as one of the greatest symphonies ever written, critical reception was brutal. The critics actually preferred another symphony on the same concert by composer Anton Eberl, who nobody has heard of today. The reason is simple: Critics of the day, and often the public, favored the familiar over the innovative and refinement over boldness.
The “Eroica” was, at its time, a radical departure from tradition. For one thing, it was significantly longer than most symphonies of the day, expanding some of the movement’s forms beyond what listeners would have been used to. The symphony is tonally dense and builds to a “theme and variations” finale rather than the usual fast-paced finisher.
This symphony marks the beginning of a new era in music, the transition from Classical to Romantic.
Beethoven, that tortured, creative wizard, launches this new period begins with a pair of explosive chords that herald the first theme, a broken chord in the cellos in the home key of E-flat major. Strings hand the tune off to the winds to deconstruct and begin building to a rousing statement by the full orchestra. The second movement, the funeral march, continues the grandiose atmosphere, now somber and stately. A more traditional scherzo and trio follows, noteworthy for its glorious use of horns in the middle section, allegedly the first time they’d been used as such in a symphony.
This is all largely academic, though — what really makes this particular symphony so special? What keeps it popular?
Beethoven’s genius lies not only in his ability to manipulate and develop form but also in his capacity to capture something universal about the human condition. In the case of Symphony No. 3, there is something noble and virtuous that permeates the music, unsurprising given its inspiration: the conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte, who Beethoven believed would usher mankind into a new era of democratic idealism. When Bonaparte declared himself emperor, however, the composer violently scratched out the dedication to Napoleon, tearing a hole in the page, writing at the time: “So he is no more than a common mortal!”
(This is perhaps apocryphal, as it’s also rumored that the rededication was more about earning a fee from the new dedicatee, but the story of rage is better. A piece’s mythos can also contribute to its popularity.)
At any rate, the work’s final movement is a set of ten variations on a theme. There’s evidence suggesting he modeled the other movements on the same theme and even that he composed the finale first. The symphony finishes with references to each movement in turn and a final, blasting orchestral fanfare.