regains the tonic key (on a dominant pedal) with a new theme derived from bars 3, 4, and 5. The final cadence is delayed for several bars before the material from the opening bar resurfaces as the movement's closing theme, accompanied by a tonic pedal over forte dominant chords. Felix Salzer says the following about this opening, "[It is] one of the most fascinating substitutions of the entire literature...The whole passage appears as a most imaginative prolongation of interruption, the post-interruption phrase starting with a B-Major chord boldly substituting for the tonic. In addition, this post-interruption phrase introduces a very interesting melodic parallelism in form of an augmentation of the end of the pre-interruption phrase one step higher." The piano's entrance resembles an Eingang, an improvisatory passage from Mozart's day that would have occurred after the orchestra's last unresolved dominant chord, but before the piano played the main theme. Beethoven captures this improvisatory style by accelerating the rhythm in the piano part, from eighth notes, to triplets, to sixteenth notes, and finally in a scale that rushes downward in sixteenth-note sextuplets. A long preparation is then made before a tonic cadence duly arrives, and the orchestra once again takes up the main theme. II. Andante con moto The second movement has been associated with the imagery of Orpheus taming the Furies (represented, respectively, by the piano and unison strings) at the gates to Hades, a suggestion of Beethoven's 1859 biographer Adolf Bernhard Marx. The movement's quiet E minor ending leads without pause into the C major chords that open the finale. III. Rondo (Vivace) In contrast to the preceding movements, the third movement, in traditional rondo form, is simpler, characterized by a very rhythmic theme. The main theme begins, introduced quietly by the orchestra, in the subdominant key of C major before correcting itself to reach a cadence with the piano in the tonic key of G major. Cadenzas Cadenzas for the Fourth Piano Concerto have been written by a number of pianists and composers throughout its history; these include Beethoven himself (two separate sets of cadenzas), Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Ferruccio Busoni, Hans von Bülow, Ignaz Moscheles, Camille Saint-Saëns, Anton Rubinstein, Wilhelm Kempff, Nikolai Medtner, Eugen d'Albert, Leopold Godowsky, Wilhelm Backhaus, Samuil Feinberg, Manuel M. Ponce, etc. Reception , it was the second-most performed piano concerto at Carnegie Hall, with 192 performances. References Notes Citations External links Freed, Richard.