Ries on the Run? The Genesis of the Piano Concerto in C# minor, Op.55

Allan Badley

Ferdinand Ries is largely remembered today as a pupil and lifelong friend of Beethoven and co-author, with Franz Wegeler, of the important Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven published in the year of his death. During his lifetime, much of which he spent dodging Napoleon’s army as it swept through Europe, Ries enjoyed a highly successful career as a pianist and composer. His works were issued in numerous editions by British and continental publishers and interest in his music remained strong for several decades after his death.

Like most virtuosi of his generation, Ries composed concertos and smaller-scale works for piano and orchestra which formed the centrepieces of his major concerts. The eight piano concertos – which he numbers Concertos 2-9 - span virtually his entire career: the earliest work, the Concerto in C major, Op.123 was composed in Bonn in 1806 although it was not published until the 1820s; the last work, the G minor Concerto, Op. 177, was composed in 1834 when Ries was semi-retired and living back in his native Rhineland. Judging from the number of later nineteenth-century reprints and new editions, the most popular of Ries’s piano concertos was the Concerto in C# minor, Op.55 composed in 1812. It is the genesis of this work and the unusual circumstances in which it was composed that forms the basis of my paper today.

After completing his studies in Vienna with Beethoven – and making his highly successful début as soloist in Beethoven’s c minor Concerto – Ries received his conscription notice from the French authorities occupying his native Bonn. On reporting for duty, however, he was immediately rejected because he was blind in one eye, a result of his childhood encounter with smallpox. Given his likely fate had he served in the French Army, Ries’s rejection was a stroke of luck. He travelled to Paris in 1806 where for the next two years he struggled to establish himself as a pianist and composer. After the brilliant musical scene in Vienna he found Parisian concert life, dominated as it was by a new kind of audience thrown up by the Revolution, not greatly to his liking. He returned to Vienna in 1808 but when the French occupied the city the following year he slipped off to Bonn.

The next few years of Ries’s life were spent touring: Cassel and Dresden in 1810, Russia in 1811-1812 and Stockholm in 1813 where he was made a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music. Ries’s tours weren’t without their dramatic moments. In a memoir published in The Harmonicon in 1824, on the eve of his departure from England, Ries recalled the trip to Russia in 1811:

Our knowledge of Ries’s time in Russia comes from two principal sources: The Harmonicon memoir and five letters written to his friend, the Stockholm publisher Ulric Emmanuel Mannerhjerta, three of which were written while Ries was on tour, the other two after he had settled in London. The information contained in these sources gives only the sketchiest outline of Ries’s professional activities. According to The Harmonicon,

In his second letter to Mannerhjerter, dated St Petersburg, 22 September 1812, Ries mentions piano concertos in connection with his desire to become a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music. Under the terms of admission applicants were required to submit a work for full orchestra. Ries, who was made aware of this condition by Mannerhjerter, expresses disappointment that his concertos would not be deemed acceptable. It isn’t clear to which concertos Ries was referring since by 1812 he had composed several works. One of these, the Concerto in E-flat, Op.42, can probably be discounted on the grounds that he was currently negotiating its publication with Ambrosius Kühnel in Leipzig. It strikes me as far more likely that Ries would have sent a new work if this were possible, one which would serve the dual purpose of securing his admission to the Royal Academy and providing a suitable vehicle with which to dazzle his audiences in Stockholm. As it turns out, there is really only one candidate to be considered - the Concerto in C# minor, Op.55 – although a case might also be made that ‘concertos’ includes the brilliant ‘Variations on Swedish National Airs’, Op.52 which received its premiere at the same concert in Stockholm along with an Overture and the Sorgmarsch and Finale. A new symphony (Op.23), which Ries presented in his first concert on 4 March, secured his election as an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music. Hill notes that the nomination process, which normally took two months, was condensed into a matter of days as Ries planned to travel to London in the middle of March. His eight days imprisoned on the rock had clearly not turned him against the idea of giving concerts in London.

Ries’s autograph score of the C# minor Concerto is obligingly dated ‘Petersburg 1812’ [Slide 1]. This in itself might be considered irrefutable proof of the date and place of composition if it were not for the fact that in many instances Ries added composition dates to his scores many years after their completion. The majority of these dates were added after Ries compiled his Catalogue Thematique in the winter of 1826-27. His memory was often unreliable and indeed Cecil Hill considered Ries’s catalogue to be too untrustworthy a guide to be used as a primary means of establishing composition dates in his own thematic catalogue of the composer’s complete works. In this instance, however, there are no reasonable grounds to question Ries’s dating of the work. The handwriting and ink colour matches that of the main body of the autograph; furthermore, we know that Ries travelled from Russia to Sweden in early 1813 and gave the premiere of the work in Stockholm on 14 March. As he was only in Sweden for six weeks it’s likely that the concerto was conceived during his tour of Russia. One other factor needs to be taken into consideration when considering the reliability of Ries’s dating of this particular work. It would take an unusually treacherous memory, I suspect, to forget being in Russia in 1812 particularly if one were intending to visit Moscow to give concerts to the rich and famous. Ries’s circumstances, like those of many foreign artists, was extremely precarious and his flight to Sweden was anything but routine. To be imprisoned on the way to Russia and nearly drowned crossing the Gulf of Finland on the way back smacks of a ‘life crowded with incident’ and doubtless would have met with the disapproval of Lady Bracknell. Nonetheless, these events would certainly help fix minor details such as composition dates firmly in the composer’s mind.

The dramatic circumstances of Ries’s life in 1812-1813 is reflected to a surprising extent in the autograph score of the C# minor Concerto. The autograph deteriorates sharply in quality from the second movement in which the solo part becomes more and more sketchy. The left hand is excluded much of the time and much of the right hand consists of note heads and stems without specified durations. As these passages often involve elaborate ornamentation Ries’s intentions are difficult to unravel. Towards the end of the Finale, the autograph breaks off without warning and the orchestral accompaniment only is written into the score in the hand of an unknown copyist. The following examples illustrate this general process of deterioration.

Slide 2: II, 15-18

Slides 3,4: III, 131-149

Slides 5,6: III, 318-

Even in the first movement we are presented with an unusually confused text. Ries was meticulous in the way he managed his professional and personal affairs and his manuscripts are characteristically neat and tidy. There are few major ambiguities in the texts beyond the inconsistencies one typically encounters in manuscript sources: misplaced or missing dynamics, inconsistent markings between parallel passages, unclear phrasing and the like. The autograph of the C# minor Concerto presents are very different picture. In addition to the incomplete and slipshod notation found in the latter stages of the score, there are also a large number of cancellations, corrections and re-writings which lead one to the inevitable conclusions that this autograph represents either a first draft of the concerto or a working score or that it was produced under exceptional conditions. The physical appearance of the score suggests that Ries began composing the concerto in St Petersburg in 1812 – and perhaps even dated the head of the manuscript at this time – and had reached the early part of the second movement around the time that the dramatic events of 1812 forced him to rethink his plans. It’s possible that he broke off work entirely at this point and did not return to the concerto until he reached Sweden in the early part of 1813. Given the brevity of his stay there he had little time to complete the work and even less time at his disposal if he were engaged in the composition of other works for his concert. Circumstances such as these would certainly account for the unusually poor quality of the autograph score. A more dramatic scenario would have Ries working on the concerto as he fled Napoleon’s forces and sought safety in Sweden. This would also account for the sketchy nature of the autograph and allow Ries a little more time to work on the other compositions which were premiered in Stockholm in March.

Although the autograph is problematic, the complete state of the orchestral accompaniment and the inclusion of rehearsal numbers in the score [Slide 7] suggest that it served as the basis for the premiere of the concerto in Stockholm. Although there are passages which are difficult to decipher [Slide 8], copyists working under Ries’s personal supervision wouldn’t have experienced undue difficulty in preparing a set of orchestral parts for the performance. The incomplete state of the solo part would not have worried a pianist-composer of Ries’s calibre.

Ries’s rapid election to the ranks of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music – an honour bestowed some years previously on Haydn – reflects the success he enjoyed during his six weeks in Sweden.

Carl Czerny’s sly but unsubstantiated claim that Beethoven once remarked to him that ‘he [Ries] imitates me too much’ is oft quoted and indeed signs of Beethoven’s influence can be seen in some aspects of Ries’s work although nowhere near to the extent implied by Czerny. It is interesting that both the reviews of the premiere and of the first edition, both of which appeared in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, were at pains to emphasize the lack of similarity with Beethoven. The concert review states that ‘in his most recent works, similarities with Beethoven’s compositions are not to be found’ and the review of the first edition notes that ‘there is absolutely no similarity between [the first movement of Ries’s concerto] and the first movement of Beethoven’s C minor Concerto’. Although Ries’s concertos share a common structural language with Beethoven’s concertos, they are very different in so many stylistic respects particularly in their writing for the solo instrument. It was perhaps this aspect that most intrigued Ries’s critics. Here was a man who had studied piano – not composition – with the most famous pianist-composer of the age yet whose concertos were so unlike those of his master. Of course the sneak Czerny wrote that

Czerny, to his credit, also expressed favourable opinions of Ries from time to time and in his School of Practical Composition, Op.100, he includes Ries alongside Mozart, Beethoven and Moscheles in a list of composers of ‘excellent’ concertos, and quotes excerpts from Ries’s Op.42 Concerto in the chapter ‘On the Instrumentation of Concertos’.

Two interesting descriptions of Ries’s playing can be also found in the letters of Camille Pleyel, son of the composer and publisher Ignaz Pleyel and himself an outstandlingly-gifted musician. In a letter to his parents concerning his recent experiences in London he writes:

Pleyel modified his opinion slightly in a letter written the following month observing that ‘as a pianist he [Ries] plays very difficult things but he lacks the clarity of Kalkbrenner and the style of Cramer.’

Mr Ries is justly celebrated as one of the finest piano performers of the present day. His hand is powerful, and his execution is certain – often surprising. But his playing is most distinguished from that of all others by its romantic wildness. By means of strong contrasts of loud and soft, and a liberal use of open pedals, together with much novelty and great boldness in his modulations, he produces an effect upon those who enter into his style, which can only be compared to that arising from the Aeolian harp. It is purely German, and shows him to be , - as we once before remarked, - a true-born native of that country to which, according to Richter, belongs "the empire of the air".

These qualities are much in evidence in the C# minor Concerto which, like Ries’s other concertos, displays a certain rugged Beethovenian grandeur in its orchestral writing but a style of pianism which is far closer in spirit to that of Moscheles, Hummel and Field than to that of his illustrious teacher.

Example: Piano Concerto, Op.55: I

The example that I have just played is taken from the first edit of a new recording of the work, based on my edition, made in Sweden by the Austrian pianist Christopher Hinterhuber with the Gävele Synfoniorkester conducted by Uwe Grodd. Those of you who are still awake and who have a photographic memory will have noted that the instrumentation in the recording differs from that of the autograph: it has been expanded to include a pair of trumpets. This expanded orchestration derives from the first edition of the concerto published in Bonn in 1815 by Simrock, Ries’s principal publisher, with a dedication to the pianist-composer Muzio Clementi. There are numerous minor points of difference between Simrock’s orchestral parts and the 1812 autograph, too many, I believe, to allow for the original parts to have served as the engraver’s copy along with the addition of the trumpet parts. Given the fragmentary state of the solo part, Ries must have prepared a fair copy of the score with the piano part in its finished form complete with the revised and expanded orchestration. This copy, which unfortunately has not survived, ultimately provided the text engraved by Simrock.

Simrock’s edition not only provides us with the solo passages missing from the autograph but it also shows that Ries revised the solo part for the entire concerto. There are a number of interesting variants between the two versions. These don’t dramatically alter the substance of the concerto but they represent the kind of subtle refinements that occur to a composer after the performance of a work. An interesting example of this can be seen in the Finale [Slides 9 & 10] where Ries adjusts the figuration in the right hand of the solo part.

It has been claimed that Ries performed the C# minor Concerto at his début concert in London on 21 May 1813. The announcement in the Morning Chronicle on 20 May, however, advises that the concerto’s Finale is based on a ‘Russian Air’ which suggests that Ries played the Op.42 Concerto whose Finale is subtitled ‘Air Russe’. Ries’s only recorded performance of the concerto in London prior to its publication took place on 5 June 1813 under the direction of Sir George Smart at the Drury Lane Theatre. It’s uncertain whether Ries played the original ‘Stockholm’ version of the work or a revised version with trumpets. He must have brought the orchestra parts with him to London – the concerto belonged very definitely to Ries and nobody else at this stage – and it is tempting although perhaps a little risky to assume that he repeated the work in its original form and only revised it later for publication. We shall never know.

Ries performed the C# minor Concerto at the Royal Philharmonic Society on 5 June 1820 shortly after the Society had at long last decided to allow concertos in their concert programmes. Until 1820 they had allowed only the performance of overtures, symphonies and quartets. After his departure from London in 1824, Ries’s music began to decline in popularity, partly because of its reduced presence in the Philharmonic programmes. In a letter written to his brother Joseph in 1828, Ries wryly reported:

After Ries retired from concert life in London after ten remarkably successful years, he returned to Bad Godesberg and later moved to Frankfurt. He wrote two new concertos between 1826 and 1834 and oversaw the publication of some of the earlier works, including the marvellous C major Concerto of 1806. New editions of his works continued to appear and the C# minor Concerto established itself relatively early as the most popular of his concertos. Clementi, its dedicatee, was one of a number of publishers to issue the work during the composer’s lifetime and Breitkopf & Härtel published two separate editions of the concerto in the 19^th century.

No nickname has ever attached itself to the C# minor Concerto but if ever one were required then ‘The 1812 Concerto’ might suffice.

Notes