Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto was composed three years after No 1 and thirteen years after No. 2 (explained in previous posts)! Here the transition from Classicism to what we now identify as Romanticism is pronounced: I have underlined the characteristics of Romanticism, as chronicled in my Music of the Gods article, that are especially conspicuous in this concerto:
Composers and performers pushed the boundaries of every musical element, primary and secondary, achieving an unprecedented emotional expressiveness while avoiding the descent into the atonal anarchy that followed. New instruments, bigger orchestras; new forms, and the expansion of old forms; the coming of age of opera and ballet; virtuoso stars, like our modern-day “celebs” (only with talent); the cult of the conductor; more inventive melodies using bigger intervals between notes; greater dynamic range—fff (fortississimo: very, very loud) to ppp (pianississimo: very, very soft); more daring harmonies (chromatic and dissonant, without recourse to the sabotage or assassination that became de rigueur later) modulating more frequently into other keys; more rhythmic variety, including greater use of syncopation, rubato (bending of the rhythm), accelerando (speeding up) and ritardando (slowing down), changing of the time signature within movements, etc. They honored but were not straitjacketed by the formalism of classicism, stretching but not eschewing the rules that make music cohere. They knew with their predecessors that coherence was integral to integration, and integration to harmoniousness, and harmoniousness to beauty. They exercised freedom within the rule of law—the perfect mirror of what was going on politically.
Thus did they bring individualism to music—they were each distinguishable from the other; each imposed his distinctive stamp upon the form without going out of it (at least not to the point of disintegration). They united the idiomatic with the idiosyncratic, reason with emotion, Apollo with Dionysus (albeit with a leaning towards the latter, via, it must be admitted, that villain Rousseau). They transformed the “universal language” into an individual language.
While there are echoes of Mozart in the first movement, this is the first concerto in which Beethoven could not be mistaken for Mozart; he has found his own distinctive voice.
Freddy Kempf, in my interview with him promoting his forthcoming playing/conducting of all the Beethoven concerti in New Zealand, says:
For a long time the Emperor was my unequivocal favourite—mostly because of its breath-taking 2nd movement. However, recently I really start to adore the 3rd concerto—and especially without conductor. Beethoven had written it for himself and I'm sure he’d have performed it conducting it from the keyboard—he frees up one of the hands whenever other players need to be cued in—and the slow movement really feels like he would have improvised it and made it up each time he played it.
Beethoven did indeed play the concerto himself at its premiere in 1803.
Here it is played by Krystian Zimerman, with Leonard Bernstein conducting: