Mit Schlagg

Mozart, Salieri, and Beethoven in Vienna

Oh, to have been in Vienna on today's date in 1785!

Wolfgang Mozart had just finished a new piano concerto a week earlier, and quite likely performed it as an intermission feature at a performance of the oratorio "Ester" by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. That performance was conducted by Antonio Salieri, and, although it possible that Mozart conducted his Piano Concerto No. 22 in Eb from the keyboard, it's also possible Salieri conducted both the Dittersdorf and the Mozart.
Now wouldn't that have made for a good scene in the movie "Amadeus" . . .
Fast forward 11 years for another memorable concert at the Theater an der Wien, a Viennese performing venue that Mozart's librettist for "The Magic Flute," Emanuel Schikaneder, had opened a few years after Mozart's death.
On today's date in 1806, it was Beethoven's turn to premiere one of his new concertos in Schikaneder's theater. Alongside works of Mozart, Méhul, Cherubini, and Handel, Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D was introduced to the world, with Franz Clement as the soloist.
Beethoven's friend Czerny recalled Clement's performance was greeted with "noisy bravos," but a contemporary Viennese music critic wrote "while there are beautiful things in the concerto, the sequence of events often seems incoherent, the endless repetition of some commonplace passages could prove fatiguing."

The reviewer's final assessment was "if Beethoven pursues his present path, it will go ill with him and the public alike."