On Tour at Carnegie Hall: Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and Ein Heldenleben

About the Work

Beethoven wrote this concerto in 1803 and 1804, the years of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony and the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, and it is the odd one out among his concertos: the only one for more than a single soloist, and the only one in which he gave a solo part to the cello. The three soloists make up a piano trio, and putting that ensemble in front of an orchestra seems to have had no precedent. There were plenty of earlier concertos for several instruments, but not for this combination.

Why he chose it is not certain. His early biographer Anton Schindler claimed that the piano part was meant for Archduke Rudolph of Austria, who was then in his mid-teens and became Beethoven’s pupil and one of his most loyal patrons. That would explain why the piano part is the least demanding of the three, with two professional string players to carry the weight. There is no record that Rudolph ever played it, however, and scholars have doubted the story. What is clear is that the cello part was written for a virtuoso, a member of the Kraft family (the sources disagree on whether it was Anton or his son Nikolaus). It leads off almost every theme, and cellists still count it among the hardest things in their repertoire.

The parts were published in 1807 with a dedication to another patron, Prince Lobkowitz, and the first known public performance took place in May 1808 at the summer concerts in Vienna’s Augarten. The concerto has never had the standing of Beethoven’s others. Three soloists each need their turn with every theme, which makes for length and a certain amount of repetition, and the piece is genial where its neighbours are dramatic. Heard on its own terms, as chamber music on a grand scale, it has a great deal of charm, and its breadth looks ahead to the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto.

What to Listen For

Allegro. The concerto begins very quietly, with cellos and basses alone muttering the main theme, and builds from there. When the soloists enter it is the cello that goes first, as it will in the other two movements. The movement is spacious and unhurried, and much of its pleasure lies in the way the three soloists pass ideas among themselves, in the manner of chamber music.

Largo. The slow movement is short, more an introduction than a movement in its own right. The cello sings a long melody in A flat major, the violin joins it, and the piano does little more than decorate. The music does not come to an end: it leads straight into the finale.

Rondo alla polacca. The cello slips into the main theme of the finale, a polonaise, the courtly Polish dance in triple time that was fashionable across Europe at the time. The mood is festive and good-humoured to the end.

About the Work

Ein Heldenleben (‘A Hero’s Life’) is the largest of the tone poems Richard Strauss wrote in the 1890s, and he was 34 when he finished it. In July 1898 he wrote from a Bavarian mountain resort that, since Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ was so unpopular with conductors and so rarely played, he was filling the gap with a long tone poem on a similar subject: ‘It is entitled A Hero’s Life, and while it has no funeral march, it does have lots of horns, horns being quite the thing to express heroism.’ The joke tells you a good deal about the tone of what followed. He completed the score at the end of December and conducted the first performance himself in Frankfurt on 3 March 1899. The dedication went to the young Willem Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.

Strauss worked on the piece alongside Don Quixote and thought of the two as companions: one a comic study of a deluded knight, the other a portrait of a hero taken, at least on the surface, at his own valuation. Who that hero is has been argued over ever since. Strauss gave no programme beyond titles for the six sections, and he was evasive when asked whether he had painted himself. The music is less discreet. The hero’s companion is a portrait of the composer’s wife, Pauline; his adversaries are plainly the critics; and when the hero looks back on his ‘works of peace’, what we hear are themes from Strauss’s own earlier scores. Early reviewers took the point and some were furious, one calling the piece ‘as revolting a picture of this revolting man as one might ever encounter’. Later writers have been more inclined to hear irony in it, and to notice that this hero ends by turning away from the world towards private life.

It asks for an enormous orchestra, with eight horns, five trumpets, two tubas and two harps, and it plays without a break for about three quarters of an hour.

What to Listen For

The six sections run into one another, but each has a clear character.

The Hero. The piece opens with its main theme, a long, striding melody for horns and cellos that climbs through nearly three octaves in E flat major, the key of the ‘Eroica’. Other ideas pile up around it until the whole orchestra stops on an expectant, unresolved chord, followed by silence.

The Hero’s Adversaries. Into the silence come the critics: thin, chattering woodwind, each instrument carping in its own register, with two tubas grumbling in the parallel fifths that students of harmony are taught to avoid. The hero’s theme sinks into the minor before he shakes them off.

The Hero’s Companion. A solo violin, played by the orchestra’s leader, enters with a long sequence of cadenzas, by turns flirtatious, tender, sulky and scolding. The hero answers in the low strings and horns. Eventually the two come together in a broad love scene, the most richly scored music in the work, with the critics briefly audible in the distance.

The Hero’s Deeds of War. Trumpets sound from offstage and the battle begins. Percussion drives the music on, and the hero’s theme fights its way through against the adversaries’ music, with the companion’s at his side. It ends with the opening theme returning in triumph.

The Hero’s Works of Peace. Here Strauss quotes himself. Fragments of Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, Don Quixote and Till Eulenspiegel, among others, drift past, woven together so smoothly that they can be hard to pick out one by one.

The Hero’s Retreat from the World and Fulfilment. After a last outburst of anger the music settles. The hero’s rising theme is reshaped into a slow, falling melody for the strings, the most touching passage in the score, and the work closes quietly in E flat major, a long way from the swagger with which it began.