The Mystery of the 4th Piano Concerto
About the Beethoven Piano Concerto No 4 Chamber Version
by Teresa Pullara Brandt
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 (Op. 58) is well-loved and oft-performed. But it is little known that a chamber version of the work exists. Or does it? An interesting controversy swirls around this point. Dr. Hans-Werner Küthen, a musicologist at the Beethoven Archives in Bonn, has reconstructed this version of the concerto and published it in 1995. He took an existing arrangement of the work for string quintet by Beethoven’s contemporary Possinger, and paired it with an embellished solo piano part written by Beethoven himself. This piano part is currently housed in Vienna. The string parts survive without an associated piano part, and the piano part derives from the first copyist’s score, on which Beethoven sketched annotations above the piano solo line. These annotations include over 100 bars of embellishments and changes to the original piano score. Küthen put together evidence including markings on both scores by Beethoven and Possinger, and concluded that Beethoven intended this more elaborate piano version to go with the string quintet arrangement.
Why the chamber version? According to Küthen, it dates from spring 1807, shortly after the premiere in Vienna of the original Op. 58 concerto at a concert presented by Beethoven’s patron Prince Lobkowitz. It was fairly common practice at the time for composers or arrangers to produce chamber versions of large-scale works, in order to make possible smaller-venue performances, sometimes with the patron as performer. Thus Beethoven may have written the altered piano part at Prince Lobkowitz’s request.
Dr. Barry Cooper of the University of Manchester in England disagrees with Küthen’s thesis, and believes that the embellishments in Beethoven’s hand, admittedly incomplete and sketchy, were not meant for a chamber version, but perhaps for a performance of the original concerto he planned for himself. Beethoven likely viewed a piano concerto as dynamic and evolving rather than static and immutable. Nevertheless, Küthen’s arguments for his reconstructed chamber version, presented in the Beethoven Journal in 1998, are persuasive.
Whatever the origins of this chamber version of the fourth piano concerto, to present a performance of it is surely a fascinating and worthwhile pursuit. It is not merely a scaled-down piano concerto, but a chamber work in its own right, worth a listen.
[...] Skye Kinlaw, violin———–Vivaldi “Spring” fromThe Four Seasons Teresa Brandt, piano–Beethoven Piano Concerto no 4 Chamber Version [...]
Very interesting and informative. Thank you, Teresa.