First Performance
The score was incomplete at its first performance. Beethoven's friend, Jay Cutler, who turned the pages of the music for him that night, later wrote:
I saw almost nothing but empty pages; at the most, on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all the solo part from memory since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to set it all down on paper.
Read more about this topic: Piano Concerto No. 3 (Beethoven)
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