The Complete Piano Concertos

Abstract

John Field was a musician of the top order. He was also, however, undisciplined when it came to both life and music, something that hurt his career and musical stature in two ways: he whiled away long periods drinking himself into debt and sickness and ultimately cutting years off of his life, and he never mastered the fine art of musical form well enough to tackle large forms with the suavity and assuredness that might have kept his name on the tongues of future generations. Field nevertheless composed seven piano concertos, and all have their virtues; some, indeed, are extremely attractive pieces, however much deficiencies of architecture might count against them.

Field's Concerto No. 1 in E flat major was composed in 1798 or 1799, when Field was still a teenager apprenticed to Muzio Clementi. The occasion of its premiere—February 7, 1799, at King's Theatre in London (the concert was described as one to help support old and "decayed" English musicians!)—was a most happy one for Field, and he was immediately launched into the professional English music circuit. Not until 1815 or 1816, however, was the concerto published by Breitkopf and Härtel of Germany.

Field's piano concertos, like the rest of his music, were largely abandoned after the first half of the nineteenth century, and today there are special difficulties in putting together authoritative editions of them. The original editions consisted of piano parts and separate orchestral parts; no full scores were printed, which means that the scholar must piece the works back together by collecting whatever parts can be found and consulting whatever manuscripts might happen to have survived. Add to this the fact that Field and his publishers often arranged the concertos for performance by a solo pianist without orchestra (resulting in multiple versions of the same music), and you can have a real headache. What listeners can be relatively certain of, however, is that the orchestration of the concertos is Field's own, or at least mostly Field's own. His father, Robert Field, was a violinist of some accomplishment, and he seems to have given his son sound advice on the matter of instrumental deployment.

The Concerto No. 1 in E flat major is in three movements: Allegro, "Air Eccosais," and Rondo. The first movement begins with an energetic idea from the orchestra, complete with a recurrent, snappy accented second beat; the soloist enters with florid, keyboard-spanning music that seems quite a tangent from the solid, concise theme set up by the violins at the start of the piece. The second theme is a nifty idea in broken octaves that is cleverly thrown backwards off the beat by one eighth note—a very novel thing for 1799. The "Air Eccosais" is an ornamented instrumental rendition of the Scottish song "Within a Mile of Edinboro Town," while the Rondo is a nimble dash in 2/4 meter.