Ravinia Festival

Some composers are known for having achieved a particular style relatively early on in their careers, spending the rest of their lives refining it but not radically changing it-Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are two good examples. Others, particularly those whose lives straddle two different musical epochs, are noteworthy for the evolution and dramatic developments in their style. Perhaps the most archetypal example of such a composer is Ludwig van Beethoven, who is seen as bridging the Classical and Romantic eras, and whose works are even frequently classified into "periods" of his compositional career.

As with other genres in which Beethoven worked for an extended period of time, such as the symphony, the sonata and string quartet, Beethoven's concertos display not only his own personal growth, but also the new directions in which music was beginning to move. The role of the composer in society was rapidly changing; where Haydn wore the livery of a servant for his aristocratic employers at Ersterhazy and Mozart spent his brief life attempting to secure steady patronage from ecclesiastical or secular princes of his time, Beethoven saw himself as a free agent, performing his own concertos, conducting his own symphonies and deriving income from the publication of music written for consumption by the newly emerging middle class.

Beethoven composed one concerto for violin and one for three instruments (piano, violin and cello, the so-called "Triple Concerto"), but it is especially in the five concertos he wrote for piano that we can observe the evolution of his style. The course of his concertos began sometime before 1793, when he began composing his first piano concerto (which today is numbered 2), and extends until 1811, when the fifth and last concerto ("Emperor") was premiered. During those years, a new era of virtuosity was launched with the first public performances of violinist Nicolò Paganini, and the new demands for greater and greater virtuosity are reflected not only in the music Beethoven wrote for the piano, but even in the evolution of the piano itself.

The new technological advances in piano construction barely kept pace with the demands Beethoven placed upon the instrument. Like most composers of his era, he wrote his piano concertos as vehicles for his own performance; only the last one ("Emperor") was not performed at its premiere by the composer, who by that time had become too deaf to perform any longer. Where concertos in the Baroque and Classical eras had emphasized a delicate balance, a subtle give-and-take in which soloist and orchestra would alternate and occasionally join forces, the new Romantic model of the concerto became more adversarial, a contest in which the soloist struggles for-and ultimately achieves-dominance over the orchestra.

By the time of the "Emperor" Concerto's premiere in 1811, Beethoven had not yet composed his seventh, eighth and ninth symphonies, nor had he finished revising his only opera, Fidelio; Franz Schubert had not yet written his first masterpiece of the Lied genre, "Gretchen am Spinnrade." Joseph Haydn had died, and many of the major figures of the Romantic era were born, including Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Fryderyk Chopin, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt. All of them extended the boundaries of music in the 19th century, and all of them faced the same problem enunciated by Schubert upon Beethoven's death in 1827: "Who would dare to do anything after Beethoven?"

Ravinia Festival 2003 has created a compelling mix of time-honored classics with provocative, exciting new work! Click here for special Season Highlights!