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Currently in
I'm a lot more enthusiastic about this piece than the first time I heard it. Like a good stew, it improves on reheating; I was probably slightly put off at first by the overly long first movement.
After seeing a disastrous performance of it on Immortal Beloved (which turns out to have been fiction, like much else of the show), I've gone back to it. Appreciation has been helped by listening to its episode on the BBC's Discovering Music program, since this is one of the few areas of my life where theory lags behind practice:
"The real first chord of this piece, oddly, misses out the B-flat... It's not called the dominant for nothing. It's one of the most important notes in classical harmony. By leaving it out here, the composer is making a statement...
A standard composer, I nearly said hack, but I don't mean to descend to that level, a standard composer would've scored that chord with all the notes of the E-flat triad, dominant and all. This ineffably great one doesn't. Why? When you hear that chord, the ear says 'Okay, that's E-flat major. I know where I am.' But if your ear thinks that, there's been an aural illusion. It actually has no right to think that at all... Beethoven has defined a dramatic space: a point of tension where things might start to happen...
It suits his expressive purposes. This is not a concerto about conflict. This music tends to muse rather than argue. It may be in E-flat but it's no heroic struggle like the Eroica symphony. It sounds grand, but it has a relaxed, expansive grandeur. If this is an Emperor... it's an Emperor having a day off at home, relaxing in his luxurious surroundings...
It may sound as if I've spent far too long talking about just the first section of Beethoven's first movement, but that's what he does. When we finally reach the dominant, it feels like a huge achievement...
The second movement is one of his most miraculously beautiful inventions, and like so many, it sounds naively simple. A hymn-like Adagio is announced on the strings, muted, with the unearthly paced measured out in steady beats. It does sound as if it comes from a distant planet... When the piano comes in, it ruminates for bars at a time over just one or two chords... Here that expansiveness is stretched even further into a wonderfully poised space, a moment where time almost seems to stop...
It's preparing us for a moment of real genius... It's a moment of high drama. A semi-tonal drop by the horns from B to B-flat and we're on the dominant of E-flat major, the key of the concerto. B-flat was the note that was so singularly missing from the first chord of the first movement, and B-flat was the key so constantly avoided all through that movement. And maybe that's why its effect here is so strong. It's not the missing note now but the only one. At the cardinal point between the second and third movements. The whole concerto has been moving towards this one crutch point."
Addendum:
Frankly, the missing note in the chord doesn't do anything for me, and MFM, whose ear and theory far surpass mine, couldn't detect it either. I wonder if this is like literature.
MFM: otoh beethoven clearly left it out intentionally
he was deaf at that time
maybe he didn't realise it couldn't be heard
seriously, some musicologists have suggested that his last works were so dissonant because he was deaf. could be the same thing with the emperor.
in any case, it's not like literature, because for lit it's harder to tell if something is intentional
it doesn't have the strictures of music theory
that crutch point between teh 2nd and 3rd movements is as strong as the bbc makes it out to be, but I think it's only because it's the dominant, really. there are tonnes of complete tonic chords in the first movement that should have wiped out any 'memory' of the incomplete chord
for one, it definitely ends with a complete chord.
