Piano Concerto No. 3 in c minor, Op. 37

• Beethoven composed this concerto around the period of 1800-1803. The work premiered on April 5, 1803 at the Theater an der Wien, and it was published the following year in Vienna.¹
• The premiere concert was one of the first Beethoven gave in Vienna after he accepted an appointment as opera composer for the Theater an der Wien. The position came with an apartment in the theater for him to live in.²
• This concerto premiered along with Beethoven’s oratorio Christus am Oelberge and his Second Symphony. The First Symphony was on the program too – it was the only work that evening that the audience had heard before. ³
• Beethoven had not finished copying the solo part of this concerto by the time the premiere rolled around. His page-turner for the evening was Ignaz von Seyfried, a conductor for the Theater an der Wien, and he recounted the harrowing experience of turning pages for Beethoven: 

“Heaven help me! – that was easier said than done. I saw almost nothing but empty pages; at the most, on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all the solo part from memory since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to set it all down on paper. He gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages, and my scarcely concealable anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly and he laughed heartily at the jovial supper which we had afterwards.” 

Ignaz von Seyfried, on turning pages for Beethoven at the premiere of the Third Piano Concerto⁴

• For musicologist George Grove (of Dictionary of Music and Musicians fame) and other 19th-century scholars, Beethoven in c-minor was A Mood. Literally: they began the discussion of the stormy similarities within several of Beethoven’s works in the key of c minor. Contemporary musicologists’ feelings are mixed regarding the concept of Beethoven’s “C minor mood,” but it is true that many of the composer’s most famous agitated, dramatic works are in that key. Decent summary of the concept here. 

1. Douglas Johnson et al, “Beethoven, Ludwig van,” Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2001), accessed July 16, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Michael Steinberg, The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 60.