Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 7

Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 7

Everyone knows that Beethoven wrote five piano concertos. Okay, not everyone. But if you are a Ludwig Von Beethoven junkie, you know that. Well, and everyone is wrong, kind of. Though officially Beethoven wrote five piano concertos, he attempted to write a sixth but didn’t finish it – he abandoned it around 1815 (12 years before his death). Here is one performance of this unfinished concerto.

But it is not the 6th concerto that piques my interest and that I’d like to share with you today, it is the 7th – Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, which the composer transcribed to piano. (I am sure I am driving Beethoven purists insane at this point.) But Beethoven did not just rewrite the score for another solo instrument, oh no, he wrote brand new cadenzas (solo virtuoso parts). So I, the music non-authority, choose to call this concerto his 7th (record labels call it number 6).

Though I love Violin Concerto in D major (which you can listen to here), this piano concerto has its own special tenderness.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.