We discover the Beethoven who, in his thirties, completed the two works on this program in 1807. A Beethoven who no longer glanced askance at Haydn and Mozart, no longer felt the need to please any great figure of the past; he owed it only to himself. His Piano Concerto No. 4 is the first in which he employs a genuinely Beethovenian musical language. And with the first mass he composed that year—a commission from Prince Nikolaus Esterházy—he demonstrated that he was not intimidated by Haydn’s shadow and created a restrained and simple mass. Instead of the epic scale of Mozart’s and Haydn’s masses, Beethoven focused his gaze on the human scale.