The score was incomplete at its first performance. Beethoven's friend, Ignaz von Seyfried, 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.