Any visitor to Vienna in the winter of 1808 would have found it a bitter cold, crowded and uncomfortable place. In search of an evening's entertainment, he might have glanced at a copy of the Wiener Zeitung, and in the issue of December 17, have seen the following announcement: On Thursday, December 22, Ludwig van Beethoven will have the honor to give a musical concert in the Royal Imperial Theater-an-der-Wien. All the pieces are of his own composition, are entirely new, and have not yet been heard in public. There followed a list of the compositions to be played, a list, that, as we read through it today, boggles the imagination: the Pastoral Symphony, the Choral Fantasy, Opus 80, and the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G. Beethoven both played and conducted. What an incredible concert! Or was it?

Any visitor to Vienna with an ounce of music in his bones would have made it his business to be at that concert. Such a visitor, and distinguished to boot, was the Prussian composer and critic, Johann Reichardt, who sat in a box with Prince Lobkowitz, in full view of Beethoven. "We endured," wrote Reichardt, "the bitterest cold from half past six to half past ten, and had the experience that it is easy to get too much of a good thing, and still mote of a loud one." Reichardt was far from being anti-Beethoven; rather it was merely that the combination of an unrehearsed orchestra, near freezing temperature, and a four-hour dollop of new music was too much to digest.

The reviews had some unkind things to say about the symphonies, and Beethoven wrote to one of his publishers not to believe a word he read, but that the public had enjoyed itself immensely, all things considered. Few took any notice of the new piano concerto . except for Reichardt, who, ruffled or not, managed to keep his ears open. "A new forte-piano concerto," he wrote, "of prodigious difficulty, which Beethoven played with astounding cleverness in the fastest possible tempi. The Adagio, a masterly movement of beautifully developed song, he positively made to sing on the instrument, with a deep melancholy that thrilled me."

That the majority of critics did not share Reichardt's enthusiasm is really not surprising. In its formal aspects, harmonic construction, and sheer sound, The Fourth Concerto is one of the subtlest pieces of music ever written. Instead of abounding in relatively easy passages contrived to sound difficult (the essence of bravura writing), the music is loaded with passages of the greatest difficulty which sound deceptively easy. And while it is possible for a pianist to carry off a virtuoso concerto with nothing more than a big technique, in Beethoven's Concerto musical comprehension is essential.

The real difficulties of the G Major Concerto lie in the areas of temperament, balance, and control, tempo and rubato. One can play the concerto straight and sound either Mozartian or clumsily pedantic. One can play it with romantic flamboyance and sound merely ridiculous. Or one can approach it with suppleness and flexibility, conscious of the extreme importance of the orchestra and the necessity of a real give-and-take, and see the work as a gigantic, masterful, and supremely beautiful piece of chamber music.

It is common knowledge that Beethoven broke with precedent by beginning with piano solo rather than with the long orchestral exposition (actually Mozart preceded him in this, but for different reasons and with different results). But the significance of those five quiet measures is only rarely appreciated. They state not only the basic mood of the movement, but the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic germ of a good half of what is to follow. The first rhythmic figure is picked up almost immediately by the orchestra and fashioned into themes. The second, a syncopation, is not insisted upon, but reappears strikingly some 117 bars later as the point of dramatic emphasis of a completely new theme played by the orchestra. Throughout the movement, the rhythmically accentuated interval of a minor second is used as a major building block.

The reason for beginning the Concerto with a piano solo, as Sir Donald Tovey points our, is the simple necessity, in a work on a large time scale, of identifying it as a piano concerto before it is too late. If the Concerto began with the traditional orchestral exposition, lasting several minutes and complete in itself, the piano entry might seem superfluous - the work might as well be a symphony. Instead, the piano's five solo measures, coupled with the strings' following seven, form an organic prelude to the main Allegro section of the movement.

The second movement, in the key of E minor, was described once by Franz Liszt as Orpheus taming the wild beasts. It is an apt analogy, if one needs an analogy. The orchestra, reduced to strings alone, states a theme in the barest octaves, a theme both harsh and forbidding. The piano answers, almost in a whisper, with a lovely cantabile passage. The dialogue goes back and forth, each in character, until finally the orchestra becomes gradually subdued, and the piano rises for the first and only time in the movement to a fortissimo; it then sinks back, while the strings, now hushed, repeat fragments of their opening theme. The protagonists never share a theme, and the movement is somehow a profundity beyond words.

Before the final E Minor chord of the second movement has ceased to sound, the third movement (Rondo, vivace) begins with a pianissimo orchestral figure, like a distant fanfare. The movement is in the tonic key of 0 Major, but Beethoven begins it in C, and the change in harmonic coloration from the slow movement, while keeping the same melody note and dynamic level, marks another of the subtleties of the music. The piano answers with its own varied version of the theme, and the movement follows the course of a typical and brilliant Beethoven rondo-sonata leading to a greatly expanded coda, and a final Presto. A note on the cadenzas: Listeners familiar with other performances of the Fourth Concerto may be surprised to learn that both cadenzas played by Mr. Moravec are generally accepted as composed by Beethoven himself, though the first is rarely heard. Although the opening of the first-movement cadenza has been thought by some to be out of character, its continuation is both intrinsically interesting and a perfect transition to the coda of the movement.

It is quite probable in view of Beethoven's explicit performing instructions in his native German rather than the usual Italian, that the Sonata in E minor, Op. 90 was to be taken as a spiritual predecessor of the later, fiendishly difficult "Hammerklavier" Sonata, Op. 106. Mr. Moravec follows Beethoven's tempo indications for a fast first movement, but with sensitivity and deep feeling. What results is an intense reading closely resembling the mood of the first movement of the Op. 106. The longer, singing second movement with which the Sonata ends is played, again as Beethoven requests, "not too fast," which changes what could be an almost sentimental melody into a simple statement of mysticism and lyric beauty.

The 32 Variations in C minor, written two years after the "Appasionata" Sonata (Op. 57), is on the order of an heroic virtuoso display piece, perhaps reminiscent of some of Beethoven's famed improvisations at the keyboard. The extraordinary difficulty of the left-hand figurations in some of the variations was probably calculated to impress the observing audience, and tightly so. Unlike some other of Beethoven's piano works which survive nobly in the hands of technically ill-equipped, but inspired pianists, the 32 Variations demands, and here receives, a performance of transcendental virtuosity which welds its varying moods and colors into an organic whole and gives to its conclusion that necessary sense of inevitability and finality.