The Improvisations (3) were published—along with Andantes romantiques (3), Souvenirs (3), morceaux dans le genre pathétique, and Tre Scherzi (collectively knwon as Caprices ou Études (12))—by Richault in 1837, though their date of composition is conjectural. Alkan scholar Constance Himmelfarb has suggested, on no better evidence than a publisher's confusion of opus numbers, that they belong to 1833, though at that moment, Alkan was approaching his twentieth birthday and still seems to have taken seriously the superficial, politely elegant style brillant of his Variations and Rondo brillant "Orage," with which he wowed the salon intimates of such social luminaries as the Duchesse de Montebello and the Princesse de la Moskova. It is the style he explodes in the Improvisations (3)—also called Études (3) de bravoure (whose Op. 12 designation is confusingly shared with the Rondo chromatique)—that takes a gleefully truculent turn in the leaping octaves, chordal salvos, and manic high spirits of the first Prestissimo, Improvisation, while the succeeding Allegretto subjects a banal, waltzing melody—which might have passed in elegant drawing rooms for the very substance of good taste—to a fretfully laconic hustle. Just as it seems about to broach some delicious confidence, the aura of intimacy is crushed by a virtuosic paroxysm while the lingering coda suggests at once an obsessive send-up and exhaustion. With the concluding Allegro marziale, there is a direct and exhilarating hit at the harum-scarum melodramatics of Liszt's Grande Fantaisie on themes from Pacini's opera Niobe, the work with which he challenged Sigismond Thalberg in their legendary "duel" on March 31, 1837. Alkan's startling intransigence no doubt owed to the revelation of Beethoven—whose symphonies were introduced to Paris by François Habeneck and the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, founded in 1828—though Alkan's tacit rivalry with his friend Liszt probably provided a decisive spur. Beethoven's liberating example can hardly be overemphasized—it had catalyzed the arch-Romantic style of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, premiered December 5, 1830—and Alkan is known to have taken the piano part in a performance of Beethoven's "Triple Concerto" at a Société concert on Saint Cecilia's Day in 1833. Thus, the Improvisations (3) are witness to a forgotten but powerful strand of satire in the burgeoning of Romanticism, a form of titanism ultimately owing to Beethoven's example.

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