Piano Concerto 5

The following snapshot of Beethoven's life will, I hope, set the scene for the performance of one of his greatest works. What a stroke of genius to follow the heroics of the first movement with one of the most sublime slow movements ever written, all the more telling for the shift of tonality from the main key of the music, E flat major, to the warmth of E major. The Finale, leading directly from the second movement, affirms Beethoven's spirit in the face of adversity, a particularly felicitous touch is the winding down of the music - timpani and piano - before launching the triumphant last few bars. Those who heard Elizaveta Kopelman's masterly interpretation of the Rachmaninov Second Concerto with the NSO last year will know that they will certainly be in for another unforgettable experience.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a colossus, a genius, widely regarded as the greatest of all composers. By adopting the new spirit of humanism expounded by Goethe and Schiller and the principles of the French Revolution with its concern for the freedom and dignity of the individual, he was responsible for a revolution in the position of the creative being in the social scale, be it composer, writer or artist. His predecessor, Joseph Haydn, achieved fame throughout Europe yet was still an employee admitted only through the servants' door. The sublime Mozart struggled with uncongenial employment for most of his brief life. Beethoven, although relying on court patronage in his early years, eventually liberated the artist to an independent position where creativity itself was enough to establish his place. His music, although rooted in the "classical" tradition, clearly pointed the way ahead for the later "romantic" movement, particularly in his use of purely instrumental music which showed the power of music to express a philosophy of life without the aid of spoken or sung text. This talent, this divine gift was rewarded with the utmost disaster for a musician. He struggled with encroaching deafness from his middle years on, until, by the end of his life, he was completely deaf - surely, the ultimate irony to be bestowed on a composer! Beethoven was born on December 17th 1770, in Bonn, into a musical family. Indeed, most musicians of that time and before had a similar background. There is nothing significantly genetic about this, just that the family environment set the scene for future life. Would children, such as Beethoven, have become the figures they were had they been born in a peasant's hovel in an obscure country village? Or would he, born into a shoemaker's family, have been just a virtuoso cobbler? Who knows? Nowadays the opportunities for education and advancement give us, at least in the arts, a totally different social hierarchy. Having said that, Beethoven's early years were marred by the fall of the family from relative prosperity to almost penury - an alcoholic father was to blame. One obvious solution to the brokers' men was to follow the course of the young Mozart's father, turn the young Beethoven's talent for the piano into a means of income and tout him around Europe as a prodigy. That did not work out but, at the age of eleven, Beethoven had to leave school and by the age of eighteen he was the family breadwinner becoming an assistant-organist at court, continuo-player at the Bonn opera and viola player in the theatre orchestra. He was, however, making valuable contacts, some of whom, Count von Waldstein of the Sonata fame for instance, were to help him throughout his career.

The most dramatic incident in his life was engendered by the realisation that his deafness was both permanent and progressive. During the summer of 1802, whilst staying in Heiligenstadt, he wrote a remarkable "Testament". "O ye men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the cause of my seeming so. From childhood my heart and mind was disposed to the gentle feeling of goodwill……but reflect now that for six years I have been in a hopeless case made worse by ignorant doctors, yearly betrayed in the hope of getting better, finally forced to face the prospect of a permanent malady whose cure will take years or prove impossible. As the leaves of autumn wither and fall, so has my own life become barren: almost as I came, so I go hence. Even that high courage that inspired me in the fair days of summer has now vanished" - the words of a deeply troubled man. Yet Beethoven was a fighter. In a letter to a friend he wrote "I will seize fate by the throat……if only I were rid of my affliction I would embrace the whole world". Surely, whilst having the deepest sympathy for his malady, we can rejoice that this is just what he did.