Fantasia in C Minor

The concert Beethoven mounted on 22 December 1808 was possibly the most momentous of his career. As well as giving the first performances of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, he performed the Piano Concerto No. 4 and conducted some shorter vocal and choral works. The climax was to be a “Fantasy on the piano, which gradually includes the orchestra, and ultimately ends with the entry of the chorus as a finale”. It was so cold in the Viennese winter, however, that much of the audience had drifted away by the time Beethoven embarked upon the Choral Fantasy’s opening. He would have improvised the piano introduction in performance but the work appeared in print in 1811 with a newly written-out solo. Then follows a series of piano-orchestral variations, ultimately joined by soloists and choir (singing a text by an unknown poet), on a march-like melody that strikingly foreshadows the “Ode to Joy” that was to close the Ninth Symphony a decade and a half later.