Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 19

Program notes

About the Work

The numbering is misleading. The concerto in B-flat is the earliest of Beethoven’s five mature piano concertos, older than the one in C major that we call No. 1. The C major concerto simply reached the printer first. The B-flat was published in 1801 as Op. 19, and so has been “No. 2” ever since.

Its origins go back to Bonn, where Beethoven began it in his late teens, in the late 1780s or around 1790, before he moved to Vienna. He kept it by him for more than a decade and used it as his own calling card, revising it again and again as his playing and his ambitions changed. It is probably the concerto he played at the Burgtheater on 29 March 1795, the concert that marked his public debut in Vienna, where until then he had been heard only in aristocratic salons. He took it to Prague in 1798 and touched it up once more before publication. At some point he also replaced the finale. The movement he discarded survives separately, as the Rondo in B-flat, WoO 6.

What he ended up with is a concerto in the manner of Mozart, whose piano concertos were the model for any young pianist-composer in Vienna in the 1790s. The orchestra is the smallest Beethoven used in a concerto: one flute, pairs of oboes, bassoons and horns, and strings. There are no clarinets, no trumpets and no drums, so the piece has nothing of the military brilliance of the C major concerto or the “Emperor”.

Inside that polite frame the young Beethoven is already recognisable. The first movement keeps slipping into unexpected keys, the slow movement has a depth of feeling beyond anything its origins would lead one to expect, and the finale is built on a rhythmic joke. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s note on the work puts it well: the first movement never quite leaves the Bonn apprenticeship behind, while the other two already sound Viennese.

In these concerts the concerto is the first half of an evening that ends with Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, two works in neighbouring keys and on utterly different scales.

What to Listen For

Allegro con brio. The orchestra opens with a brisk fanfare figure and answers it at once with a soft, curling phrase in the violins: two ideas, one public and one private, that the movement keeps setting against each other. Listen for the moment early in the orchestral introduction when the music drops without warning into a remote key. The piano, when it comes in, does not repeat the opening but begins with a new thought of its own.

Adagio. The heart of the concerto, in E-flat major. The melody is broad and hymn-like, the piano decorates it with ever finer figuration, and the mood is that of a nocturne. Just before the end the orchestra falls silent and the piano is left alone with a few halting single notes, like a singer’s recitative, which Beethoven marks to be played “with great expression”.

Rondo: Molto allegro. A romp in six-eight time. The joke in the main theme is that the accents fall in the wrong place, on the weak beats of the bar, so that the tune seems to hiccup. A central episode in the minor pushes the syncopation harder still. Shortly before the end the piano tries the theme in the wrong key and with the accents straightened out, before the orchestra puts things right.