Bob's Blog - Celebrating Beethoven at 250!
Week 1
Piano Trio in E flat Major, Op. 1, No. 1
In 1791, the 21 year old Ludwig van Beethoven, moved from Bonn to Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, where he lived until his death in 1827. His first work to be published in Vienna was the Opus 1, a set of three piano trios, each with four movements for piano, violin, and cello.
Throughout his life, chamber music was so dear to Beethoven. In this early work you will hear the imagination, emphasis on rhythm and accents, tenderness, humanity, and genius. As the weeks go by, we will see how these traits infuse his symphonies, chamber music, concertos, and songs.
Week 2
Sonata No. 8 Op. 13 (Pathetique)
The 32 Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven represent one of the most monumental achievements in all of western music. From the humorous to the elegant, from the beautiful to the searingly profound, these sonatas are a remarkable achievement. The Sonata for Piano in c minor “the Pathetique” (1797-98) is one of his most beloved compositions. In the first movement you will hear the drama and force of the c minor opening slow statement followed by the energetic, almost improvisatory, fast section. Pay attention to the shifting harmonies and the tension diminished chords bring. The slow movement begins with one of the most beautiful and noble themes in music. Close your eyes and be moved. The third movement returns to the tempestuous c minor of the opening. Listen to the Pathetique often until it’s part of you. The attached performance by Daniel Barenboim is wonderful in its sensitivity and understanding. And what a beautiful sound!
Week 3
String Quartet No 4 Op 18 in C minor - Alban Berg Quartett
The string quartet was a very important medium for Beethoven, He wrote 16 of them from early in his career in Vienna to the very last piece he wrote. Today we will look at the 4th in the set of 6 of Opus 18 (1798-1800). The 4th is in the key of c minor, the only one in this set in a minor key. If your curiosity so guides you you’ll find that the others are in the keys of #1 F Major, #2 - G Major, #3D Major, #5 - A Major, and #6 Bb Major. While these quartets certainly reflect the heritage of Haydn and Mozart they look forward at the same time to a new musical expression - harmony, emphasis on rhythm, motivically conceived “melodies”, etc. Thus it is with Opus 18 #4 in c minor. The opening movement has that Storm und Drang furious feel to it but with no real formal surprises to it. Then, instead of a typical slow second movement he writes a flowing 3/8 fugue which is absolutely beautiful and charming. An elegant minuet usually follows but rather comes a wildly fast scherzo movement in 3/4 time that is actually counted one beat to a bar. And last a rollicking rondo in c minor to bring us home. These quartets together foreshadow the great genius and mystery that Beethoven will reveal to us as his musical life unfolds. I urge you to acquaint yourselves with as many of these wonderful Opus 18s as you can.
Week 4
Symphony No. 1 in C Major Opus 21
While in Vienna from 1792 to 1800 Beethoven established himself as an important performer and composer. String quartets, string trios, piano trios, and piano sonatas solidified his reputation as a worthy successor to Mozart (d.1791) and Haydn (d.1803). He worked within the standard forms of the day - sonata allegro form, rondo, variations, etc. - always infusing them with his own very personal approach. One can hear and sense his fiery personality and incredible imagination in these early works. Thus in 1800 Beethoven enters the world of the symphony. Unlike Haydn who wrote 104 and Mozart who wrote 40, his Symphony no.1 in C Major opus 21, is the first of but 9, but what symphonies they are!
Eighteenth century audiences must have been surprised if not shocked by the Adagio Molto introduction with its unsettled wandering harmonies that only truly resolved into C Major, the home key of the movement, in the Allegro section. Here we hear motivically conceived melodies, emphasis on rhythm, rugged use of accents, unusual harmonic relationships, all contributing to his own individual stamp. Instead of the usual slow movement we have a stately and very beautiful fugue. Enjoy the extensive and playful use of woodwinds. The other middle movement is a furiously fast Minuetto that one cannot imagine dancing to. In the contrasting middle section listen to and marvel at the flying fingers of the violinists! The finale begins with a humorous introduction that plays on a G Major scale that erupts at last into the raucous Allegro Molto. Listen to the rhythmic exuberance and creative energy as this his first symphony comes to a close, a harbinger of marvels to come. Enjoy the attached link to this symphony conducted by the great Loren Maazel, Wise indeed!
Week 5
Piano Sonata No. 14 in C♯ minor "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2, popularly known as the "Moonlight Sonata"
After his Symphony no. 1 Opus 21 of 1799-1800, Beethoven turned his attention to piano sonatas and chamber music including sonatas for violin and piano and a trio for flute, violin, and viola.
In 1801 he published his Opus 27 nos. 1 and 2, the second of which is the famous “Moonlight” Sonata, a name attached forever to the piece by the poet Ludwig Rellstab, 5 years after Beethoven’s death. The name has stuck as has our love for this wonderfully beautiful and rather challenging mysterious piece.
Interpreters have long wondered what tempo the first movement requires to fulfill the “quasi fantasia” description Beethoven gives. Then there is the almost funeral march character to the right hand melody that enters. While this movement is relatively short, it takes us on a very profound journey. A delightful Minuet and Trio relieves the tension and carries us forward to the incredibly raucous, fiery and tempestuous finale. How unusual for a sonata to start with a slow movement and then end with all the fireworks in the last. And to subtitle it “Quasi una Fantasia”! Beethoven the revolutionary! Our hero continues to emerge. Listen and enjoy this wonderful recording by the great Claudio Arrau.
Week 6
Symphony No. 2 in D major Op. 36
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D major Op. 36 was the first symphony of his that I ever played. I thought it was so difficult. So many fast notes, rapid key changes, offbeat accents, and such tempos! But the second movement, the slow movement, was probably the most beautiful thing I’d ever played up until then. That A Major movement just shines and I will never forget that first exposure to it. To think that Beethoven wrote this while he was going through such extreme duress about his deteriorating hearing is striking. We will discuss that situation far more next week. In this symphony I love the juxtaposition of virtuosity, humor, and great profound beauty. I hope you will all enjoy the accompanying link to a great performance.
Week 7
Beethoven's Biography
In 1802, Beethoven was acutely and depressingly aware of his failing hearing. As you will read in the link below, one of his doctors recommended that he go to one of the Vienna suburbs for the summer to get away from the noise of the city. They thought that perhaps
that would be beneficial to his hearing. It proved not to be. In a period of great self-examination, Beethoven confessed to his brothers, and subsequently to the world, his despair. He admitted his thoughts of suicide but felt that he would be betraying his art to do so. That is why Beethoven is my hero. His dedication to music and what was in his mind was more important than personal comfort and escaping his agony.
Please carefully read the link below. I think you’ll find it very insightful of one of the great geniuses that the world has produced. I hope you also will be inspired by Beethoven’s great courage.
Week 8
Beethoven's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C minor Opus 37
As you now know, Beethoven first made his way into musical Vienna as a pianist and then a composer. He wrote 32 piano sonatas; many chamber music pieces that included keyboard, and 5 piano concertos, many of which he used to showcase his extraordinary pianistic prowess.
Shortly after the Heiligenstadt Testimony, acknowledging his deafness and despair, Beethoven wrote the wonderfully powerful and beautiful Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C minor Opus 37. C minor was a very important key for our hero. Think of the 7th violin sonata, Coriolanus Overture, the Opus 9 #3 string trio, and of course the monumental 5th symphony.
Listen to the contrast of themes in the first movement. How angular is the beginning. Heed the rhythmic underpinning of quarter note, eight rest, eighth note through much of the first movement. Then the lovely gentle second theme. We’ve come to learn that this is who Beethoven was. Sometimes angry and bitter but caring and loving underneath. This is what I always hear. Then the second movement! Following the sometimes raucous c minor first movement comes this beautiful E Major. Such gentle and exquisite contrast. How wonderful. The concerto closes with a c minor rondo. Note that the cadenzas are Beethoven’s own. They require stunning virtuosity. He wrote them for himself. Show off!!
Included below you’ll find two links, one that shows the music (solo part with piano reduction of the orchestra) and one that shows the musicians. Enjoy!
Week 9
The “Kreutzer” Violin Sonata, Opus 47 in A Major
After the Heiligenstadt Testament of Oct 1802, Beethoven was in what musicologists call his second style period. So much of Beethoven’s music that we love comes from this period which spans the years from approximately 1802 to 1817. These are not sharp chronological lines of course but rough guidelines. These are the years when we hear Beethoven the rebel, the blossoming romantic, the artist subordinate to no one or anything but his art, the genius.
The “Kreutzer” Sonata, Opus 47 in A Major, was written from 1802-3. It is a pillar of the violin repertory and is known for its great emotional depth and technical difficulty. Originally dedicated to George Bridgetower (Mulatto Sonata composed for the mulatto Brischdauer, great madman mulatto composer). After a falling out, it was ultimately dedicated to Rudolf Kreutzer, one of the leading violinists of the day. Kreutzer didn’t like the piece and never performed it. As you listen to this performance, note its length, contrasting emotional elements, and its great rhythmic interest and energy. The powerful first movement is followed by the beautifully gentle F Major Andante. Don’t be deceived. This Andante is as difficult to play as it is wonderful to hear. The Finale is a spectacular 6/8 movement in A Major. Hold your breath as you go on this terrific ride.
This attached performance is brilliantly played by two great young artists - Joshua Bell and Yuja Wang. I am such a fan of her playing especially. Enjoy this wonderful performance. As you do, consider the great length of the piece compared to works by other composers. Listen to the emphasis on rhythm and accents, the emotional range, and the great demands made on the performers.
Week 10
Movies About Beethoven to Thrill Your Heart
We all like the movies! And we all love Beethoven! What could be better than three movies about Beethoven? I imagine many of you have seen the movie Amadeus about the life of Mozart. Many musicologists and scholars scoffed at it pointing to historical inaccuracies and distortions. Music history and literature was one of my minors as I worked on my doctorate at Indiana University. Let me tell you that this scholar absolutely loved Amadeus. I saw the flaws and liberties but so what?! It was fun and most importantly filled with such music! Such it is with these movies about Beethoven. Are they romanticized to a fault sometimes? Yes. Is who Beethoven is exaggerated? Somewhat. Are they emotional? Yes, wonderfully so in my opinion. So please enjoy them with a not too critical an eye and be blessed by the troubled lonely genius and his incredible music.
Immortal Beloved
This deals with the life of Beethoven. In about 1812 he had written a letter to his Immortal Beloved addressed only that way. Scholars have long fought over who she was. One of the themes here is the search by Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s amanuensis, to discover her identity and deliver the letter to her after Beethoven died. There is much true biographical material here - his troubled childhood, his hearing loss, his relationship with his nephew Karl, his loneliness, never having been married, etc. Another theme is the composition of the great Ninth Symphony. There is some wonderful acting by Gary Oldman as Beethoven. I’m sure you will enjoy this movie. I’ve seen it 6 or 7 times and I always do.
Available on YouTube, PrimeVideo, and Netflix.
Copying Beethoven
A young woman arrives in Vienna in the early 1820s to study musical composition, unheard of then. A woman composer!? Somehow she is introduced to Beethoven, a gruff old man. She becomes his copyist. A wonderful relationship develops - caring, difficult, respectful eventually symbiotic - all the while as he is finishing his Ninth Symphony. In a way the old saying holds true - “I couldn’t have done it without you”. I love this movie. The music! The ending is so poignant.
Available on YouTube, PrimeVideo, and Netflix.
Eroica
Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica, in Eb Major is one of the most important pieces in all of music literature. It was revolutionary in its length, emphasis on rhythm, unusual harmonic relationships, but especially the depth of emotion and the showing of his soul. Sometimes somber and often comical we see here the preparation and first performance of this masterpiece. It’s reception was mixed at best by both the musicians and the nobility. The period costumes, period musical instruments, and performance style are fun and interesting.
Enjoy this one. It’s one of my favorites. Available on YouTube.
Week 11
Piano Sonata No 21 in C Major, Opus 53, the Waldstein
As we continue to explore Beethoven’s life of music, let’s consider his Piano Sonata No 21 in C Major, Opus 53, known as the Waldstein. This monumental piece stands firmly in his great middle period. It is very long and is very difficult and arduous to perform. There are moments of great agitation and rhythmic turmoil, juxtaposed with periods of beauty and tenderness. Listen to the sometimes odd, strange harmonic relationships. There is such an exquisite transition from the second to the third movement, so wonderful that a friend of mine uses it as her ringtone! It is a sonata that every music lover should know! Listen to this beautiful performance by Daniel Barenboim.
I thought it would be interesting for you to hear what goes into musical performance preparation at the highest level. Below you’ll find links to masterclasses given to two extraordinary pianists by two musical stars, Andras Schiff and Daniel Barenboim. Schiff is acknowledged to be a great pianist and musical thinker. His series of lectures on the Beethoven sonatas are legendary. Barenboim’s career as a pianist, conductor, and collaborator is staggering in its accomplishments. Please note the radically different approaches the two men take in getting their musical points of view across. There is no right or wrong. You will see that high levels of playing open one up to more scrutiny. The better you get, the harder you must work. It’s endless, the search for insight and something like perfection. I hope you’ll have the patience to listen to it all. There is so much to learn here about the musical minds of two great musicians.
Andras Schiff Masterclass on Waldstein Sonata
Daniel Barenboim Masterclass on Waldstein Sonata
Week 12
Symphony No.3 in E flat major Op. 55
The symphony of Beethoven No.3 in E flat major Op. 55 is one of the most monumental and consequential pieces in the symphonic literature. It was also an incredibly important piece to Beethoven. You can read elsewhere how captured he was by the notion of Napoleon, a champion of the common people standing against the nobility. You will also read how frustrated and infuriated Beethoven became by Napoleon’s appointing himself Emperor. Therefore, Beethoven withdrew the dedication to him and instead named it simply the Eroica, the Hero. This important piece has fascinated musicians since it was written. First, it’s extraordinary length. The first movement alone is longer than many other entire four movement classical period symphonies by say Haydn or Mozart. It calls for larger forces, e.g. three French horns instead of two. Its complexity, difficulty to perform, the gamut of emotions that it runs make it such a challenge. No wonder then then it has fascinated conductors from the very best to the very worst. There are so many things to consider when confronting this piece. How good is the orchestra before you? How much rehearsal time do you have? Has the orchestra become familiar with it in the past? What are the acoustics? What are your sensitivities to the emotional content of the piece?
I am attaching a file below that shows you the differences in approach of some of the world’s greatest conductors through the 20th century. It only shows the first two notes of the symphony that frame the first movement. Those are the two mighty E flat major chords played at the beginning. You will hear radically different tempos, resonances, and pitches. It is almost comical the differences that you’ll hear. First let’s consider tempo, how fast the piece will be played. The tempo depends on so many different things, for instance what speed best conveys the emotional content of the music. Too fast and it might just sound flighty and trivial. Too slow and it might just sound ponderous. But say the orchestra isn’t that accomplished and it can’t handle the very fast technical passages. Then you might have to adjust your tempo down a little bit. But there’s more. Say you are performing this in an acoustical environment that is very very resonant such as Boston’s Symphony Hall or Vienna’s Musikvereinhalle. If you play too fast it becomes garbled and almost nonsensical sounding. Therefore, you must adjust your tempo downward to allow space for the music to be heard. Conversely if the acoustic is very dry as was Chicago’s Orchestra Hall’s before its most recent renovation you must speed up the tempo to fill in the holes as it were.
In the baroque period the local cathedral’s organ determined the pitch of music in that city. So if the cathedral’s organ was pitched to A=410 you had a very low pitch. Some cities might have one as high as A=460 or very high pitch that’s at least a half step higher than A=410. That variation from town to town was crazy and a source of great frustration for traveling musicians. Well, in modern recorded history it wasn’t quite that bad but you can hear in the attached example that the pitch from city to city was still quite different, nothing like a half step but very very significant. For instance, the Vienna Philharmonic has always been known for having a very high A about A=444+ whereas other cities in Europe and even America were much lower. Most at about A=440. The Chicago Symphony’s standard was A=440 but it always played at A=442.
I hope you enjoy considering this as you listen to the first two bars of Beethoven’s mighty Eroica Symphony as played by many great orchestras under many great conductors. It takes about two minutes to listen to the whole thing. Feel free to laugh, I always do when I hear this.
Week 1
Piano Trio in E flat Major, Op. 1, No. 1
In 1791, the 21 year old Ludwig van Beethoven, moved from Bonn to Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, where he lived until his death in 1827. His first work to be published in Vienna was the Opus 1, a set of three piano trios, each with four movements for piano, violin, and cello.
Throughout his life, chamber music was so dear to Beethoven. In this early work you will hear the imagination, emphasis on rhythm and accents, tenderness, humanity, and genius. As the weeks go by, we will see how these traits infuse his symphonies, chamber music, concertos, and songs.
Week 2
Sonata No. 8 Op. 13 (Pathetique)
The 32 Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven represent one of the most monumental achievements in all of western music. From the humorous to the elegant, from the beautiful to the searingly profound, these sonatas are a remarkable achievement. The Sonata for Piano in c minor “the Pathetique” (1797-98) is one of his most beloved compositions. In the first movement you will hear the drama and force of the c minor opening slow statement followed by the energetic, almost improvisatory, fast section. Pay attention to the shifting harmonies and the tension diminished chords bring. The slow movement begins with one of the most beautiful and noble themes in music. Close your eyes and be moved. The third movement returns to the tempestuous c minor of the opening. Listen to the Pathetique often until it’s part of you. The attached performance by Daniel Barenboim is wonderful in its sensitivity and understanding. And what a beautiful sound!
Week 3
String Quartet No 4 Op 18 in C minor - Alban Berg Quartett
The string quartet was a very important medium for Beethoven, He wrote 16 of them from early in his career in Vienna to the very last piece he wrote. Today we will look at the 4th in the set of 6 of Opus 18 (1798-1800). The 4th is in the key of c minor, the only one in this set in a minor key. If your curiosity so guides you you’ll find that the others are in the keys of #1 F Major, #2 - G Major, #3D Major, #5 - A Major, and #6 Bb Major. While these quartets certainly reflect the heritage of Haydn and Mozart they look forward at the same time to a new musical expression - harmony, emphasis on rhythm, motivically conceived “melodies”, etc. Thus it is with Opus 18 #4 in c minor. The opening movement has that Storm und Drang furious feel to it but with no real formal surprises to it. Then, instead of a typical slow second movement he writes a flowing 3/8 fugue which is absolutely beautiful and charming. An elegant minuet usually follows but rather comes a wildly fast scherzo movement in 3/4 time that is actually counted one beat to a bar. And last a rollicking rondo in c minor to bring us home. These quartets together foreshadow the great genius and mystery that Beethoven will reveal to us as his musical life unfolds. I urge you to acquaint yourselves with as many of these wonderful Opus 18s as you can.
Week 4
Symphony No. 1 in C Major Opus 21
While in Vienna from 1792 to 1800 Beethoven established himself as an important performer and composer. String quartets, string trios, piano trios, and piano sonatas solidified his reputation as a worthy successor to Mozart (d.1791) and Haydn (d.1803). He worked within the standard forms of the day - sonata allegro form, rondo, variations, etc. - always infusing them with his own very personal approach. One can hear and sense his fiery personality and incredible imagination in these early works. Thus in 1800 Beethoven enters the world of the symphony. Unlike Haydn who wrote 104 and Mozart who wrote 40, his Symphony no.1 in C Major opus 21, is the first of but 9, but what symphonies they are!
Eighteenth century audiences must have been surprised if not shocked by the Adagio Molto introduction with its unsettled wandering harmonies that only truly resolved into C Major, the home key of the movement, in the Allegro section. Here we hear motivically conceived melodies, emphasis on rhythm, rugged use of accents, unusual harmonic relationships, all contributing to his own individual stamp. Instead of the usual slow movement we have a stately and very beautiful fugue. Enjoy the extensive and playful use of woodwinds. The other middle movement is a furiously fast Minuetto that one cannot imagine dancing to. In the contrasting middle section listen to and marvel at the flying fingers of the violinists! The finale begins with a humorous introduction that plays on a G Major scale that erupts at last into the raucous Allegro Molto. Listen to the rhythmic exuberance and creative energy as this his first symphony comes to a close, a harbinger of marvels to come. Enjoy the attached link to this symphony conducted by the great Loren Maazel, Wise indeed!
Week 5
Piano Sonata No. 14 in C♯ minor "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2, popularly known as the "Moonlight Sonata"
After his Symphony no. 1 Opus 21 of 1799-1800, Beethoven turned his attention to piano sonatas and chamber music including sonatas for violin and piano and a trio for flute, violin, and viola.
In 1801 he published his Opus 27 nos. 1 and 2, the second of which is the famous “Moonlight” Sonata, a name attached forever to the piece by the poet Ludwig Rellstab, 5 years after Beethoven’s death. The name has stuck as has our love for this wonderfully beautiful and rather challenging mysterious piece.
Interpreters have long wondered what tempo the first movement requires to fulfill the “quasi fantasia” description Beethoven gives. Then there is the almost funeral march character to the right hand melody that enters. While this movement is relatively short, it takes us on a very profound journey. A delightful Minuet and Trio relieves the tension and carries us forward to the incredibly raucous, fiery and tempestuous finale. How unusual for a sonata to start with a slow movement and then end with all the fireworks in the last. And to subtitle it “Quasi una Fantasia”! Beethoven the revolutionary! Our hero continues to emerge. Listen and enjoy this wonderful recording by the great Claudio Arrau.
Week 6
Symphony No. 2 in D major Op. 36
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D major Op. 36 was the first symphony of his that I ever played. I thought it was so difficult. So many fast notes, rapid key changes, offbeat accents, and such tempos! But the second movement, the slow movement, was probably the most beautiful thing I’d ever played up until then. That A Major movement just shines and I will never forget that first exposure to it. To think that Beethoven wrote this while he was going through such extreme duress about his deteriorating hearing is striking. We will discuss that situation far more next week. In this symphony I love the juxtaposition of virtuosity, humor, and great profound beauty. I hope you will all enjoy the accompanying link to a great performance.
Week 7
Beethoven's Biography
In 1802, Beethoven was acutely and depressingly aware of his failing hearing. As you will read in the link below, one of his doctors recommended that he go to one of the Vienna suburbs for the summer to get away from the noise of the city. They thought that perhaps
that would be beneficial to his hearing. It proved not to be. In a period of great self-examination, Beethoven confessed to his brothers, and subsequently to the world, his despair. He admitted his thoughts of suicide but felt that he would be betraying his art to do so. That is why Beethoven is my hero. His dedication to music and what was in his mind was more important than personal comfort and escaping his agony.
Please carefully read the link below. I think you’ll find it very insightful of one of the great geniuses that the world has produced. I hope you also will be inspired by Beethoven’s great courage.
Week 8
Beethoven's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C minor Opus 37
As you now know, Beethoven first made his way into musical Vienna as a pianist and then a composer. He wrote 32 piano sonatas; many chamber music pieces that included keyboard, and 5 piano concertos, many of which he used to showcase his extraordinary pianistic prowess.
Shortly after the Heiligenstadt Testimony, acknowledging his deafness and despair, Beethoven wrote the wonderfully powerful and beautiful Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C minor Opus 37. C minor was a very important key for our hero. Think of the 7th violin sonata, Coriolanus Overture, the Opus 9 #3 string trio, and of course the monumental 5th symphony.
Listen to the contrast of themes in the first movement. How angular is the beginning. Heed the rhythmic underpinning of quarter note, eight rest, eighth note through much of the first movement. Then the lovely gentle second theme. We’ve come to learn that this is who Beethoven was. Sometimes angry and bitter but caring and loving underneath. This is what I always hear. Then the second movement! Following the sometimes raucous c minor first movement comes this beautiful E Major. Such gentle and exquisite contrast. How wonderful. The concerto closes with a c minor rondo. Note that the cadenzas are Beethoven’s own. They require stunning virtuosity. He wrote them for himself. Show off!!
Included below you’ll find two links, one that shows the music (solo part with piano reduction of the orchestra) and one that shows the musicians. Enjoy!
Week 9
The “Kreutzer” Violin Sonata, Opus 47 in A Major
After the Heiligenstadt Testament of Oct 1802, Beethoven was in what musicologists call his second style period. So much of Beethoven’s music that we love comes from this period which spans the years from approximately 1802 to 1817. These are not sharp chronological lines of course but rough guidelines. These are the years when we hear Beethoven the rebel, the blossoming romantic, the artist subordinate to no one or anything but his art, the genius.
The “Kreutzer” Sonata, Opus 47 in A Major, was written from 1802-3. It is a pillar of the violin repertory and is known for its great emotional depth and technical difficulty. Originally dedicated to George Bridgetower (Mulatto Sonata composed for the mulatto Brischdauer, great madman mulatto composer). After a falling out, it was ultimately dedicated to Rudolf Kreutzer, one of the leading violinists of the day. Kreutzer didn’t like the piece and never performed it. As you listen to this performance, note its length, contrasting emotional elements, and its great rhythmic interest and energy. The powerful first movement is followed by the beautifully gentle F Major Andante. Don’t be deceived. This Andante is as difficult to play as it is wonderful to hear. The Finale is a spectacular 6/8 movement in A Major. Hold your breath as you go on this terrific ride.
This attached performance is brilliantly played by two great young artists - Joshua Bell and Yuja Wang. I am such a fan of her playing especially. Enjoy this wonderful performance. As you do, consider the great length of the piece compared to works by other composers. Listen to the emphasis on rhythm and accents, the emotional range, and the great demands made on the performers.
Week 10
Movies About Beethoven to Thrill Your Heart
We all like the movies! And we all love Beethoven! What could be better than three movies about Beethoven? I imagine many of you have seen the movie Amadeus about the life of Mozart. Many musicologists and scholars scoffed at it pointing to historical inaccuracies and distortions. Music history and literature was one of my minors as I worked on my doctorate at Indiana University. Let me tell you that this scholar absolutely loved Amadeus. I saw the flaws and liberties but so what?! It was fun and most importantly filled with such music! Such it is with these movies about Beethoven. Are they romanticized to a fault sometimes? Yes. Is who Beethoven is exaggerated? Somewhat. Are they emotional? Yes, wonderfully so in my opinion. So please enjoy them with a not too critical an eye and be blessed by the troubled lonely genius and his incredible music.
Immortal Beloved
This deals with the life of Beethoven. In about 1812 he had written a letter to his Immortal Beloved addressed only that way. Scholars have long fought over who she was. One of the themes here is the search by Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s amanuensis, to discover her identity and deliver the letter to her after Beethoven died. There is much true biographical material here - his troubled childhood, his hearing loss, his relationship with his nephew Karl, his loneliness, never having been married, etc. Another theme is the composition of the great Ninth Symphony. There is some wonderful acting by Gary Oldman as Beethoven. I’m sure you will enjoy this movie. I’ve seen it 6 or 7 times and I always do.
Available on YouTube, PrimeVideo, and Netflix.
Copying Beethoven
A young woman arrives in Vienna in the early 1820s to study musical composition, unheard of then. A woman composer!? Somehow she is introduced to Beethoven, a gruff old man. She becomes his copyist. A wonderful relationship develops - caring, difficult, respectful eventually symbiotic - all the while as he is finishing his Ninth Symphony. In a way the old saying holds true - “I couldn’t have done it without you”. I love this movie. The music! The ending is so poignant.
Available on YouTube, PrimeVideo, and Netflix.
Eroica
Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica, in Eb Major is one of the most important pieces in all of music literature. It was revolutionary in its length, emphasis on rhythm, unusual harmonic relationships, but especially the depth of emotion and the showing of his soul. Sometimes somber and often comical we see here the preparation and first performance of this masterpiece. It’s reception was mixed at best by both the musicians and the nobility. The period costumes, period musical instruments, and performance style are fun and interesting.
Enjoy this one. It’s one of my favorites. Available on YouTube.
Week 11
Piano Sonata No 21 in C Major, Opus 53, the Waldstein
As we continue to explore Beethoven’s life of music, let’s consider his Piano Sonata No 21 in C Major, Opus 53, known as the Waldstein. This monumental piece stands firmly in his great middle period. It is very long and is very difficult and arduous to perform. There are moments of great agitation and rhythmic turmoil, juxtaposed with periods of beauty and tenderness. Listen to the sometimes odd, strange harmonic relationships. There is such an exquisite transition from the second to the third movement, so wonderful that a friend of mine uses it as her ringtone! It is a sonata that every music lover should know! Listen to this beautiful performance by Daniel Barenboim.
I thought it would be interesting for you to hear what goes into musical performance preparation at the highest level. Below you’ll find links to masterclasses given to two extraordinary pianists by two musical stars, Andras Schiff and Daniel Barenboim. Schiff is acknowledged to be a great pianist and musical thinker. His series of lectures on the Beethoven sonatas are legendary. Barenboim’s career as a pianist, conductor, and collaborator is staggering in its accomplishments. Please note the radically different approaches the two men take in getting their musical points of view across. There is no right or wrong. You will see that high levels of playing open one up to more scrutiny. The better you get, the harder you must work. It’s endless, the search for insight and something like perfection. I hope you’ll have the patience to listen to it all. There is so much to learn here about the musical minds of two great musicians.
Andras Schiff Masterclass on Waldstein Sonata
Daniel Barenboim Masterclass on Waldstein Sonata
Week 12
Symphony No.3 in E flat major Op. 55
The symphony of Beethoven No.3 in E flat major Op. 55 is one of the most monumental and consequential pieces in the symphonic literature. It was also an incredibly important piece to Beethoven. You can read elsewhere how captured he was by the notion of Napoleon, a champion of the common people standing against the nobility. You will also read how frustrated and infuriated Beethoven became by Napoleon’s appointing himself Emperor. Therefore, Beethoven withdrew the dedication to him and instead named it simply the Eroica, the Hero. This important piece has fascinated musicians since it was written. First, it’s extraordinary length. The first movement alone is longer than many other entire four movement classical period symphonies by say Haydn or Mozart. It calls for larger forces, e.g. three French horns instead of two. Its complexity, difficulty to perform, the gamut of emotions that it runs make it such a challenge. No wonder then then it has fascinated conductors from the very best to the very worst. There are so many things to consider when confronting this piece. How good is the orchestra before you? How much rehearsal time do you have? Has the orchestra become familiar with it in the past? What are the acoustics? What are your sensitivities to the emotional content of the piece?
I am attaching a file below that shows you the differences in approach of some of the world’s greatest conductors through the 20th century. It only shows the first two notes of the symphony that frame the first movement. Those are the two mighty E flat major chords played at the beginning. You will hear radically different tempos, resonances, and pitches. It is almost comical the differences that you’ll hear. First let’s consider tempo, how fast the piece will be played. The tempo depends on so many different things, for instance what speed best conveys the emotional content of the music. Too fast and it might just sound flighty and trivial. Too slow and it might just sound ponderous. But say the orchestra isn’t that accomplished and it can’t handle the very fast technical passages. Then you might have to adjust your tempo down a little bit. But there’s more. Say you are performing this in an acoustical environment that is very very resonant such as Boston’s Symphony Hall or Vienna’s Musikvereinhalle. If you play too fast it becomes garbled and almost nonsensical sounding. Therefore, you must adjust your tempo downward to allow space for the music to be heard. Conversely if the acoustic is very dry as was Chicago’s Orchestra Hall’s before its most recent renovation you must speed up the tempo to fill in the holes as it were.
In the baroque period the local cathedral’s organ determined the pitch of music in that city. So if the cathedral’s organ was pitched to A=410 you had a very low pitch. Some cities might have one as high as A=460 or very high pitch that’s at least a half step higher than A=410. That variation from town to town was crazy and a source of great frustration for traveling musicians. Well, in modern recorded history it wasn’t quite that bad but you can hear in the attached example that the pitch from city to city was still quite different, nothing like a half step but very very significant. For instance, the Vienna Philharmonic has always been known for having a very high A about A=444+ whereas other cities in Europe and even America were much lower. Most at about A=440. The Chicago Symphony’s standard was A=440 but it always played at A=442.
I hope you enjoy considering this as you listen to the first two bars of Beethoven’s mighty Eroica Symphony as played by many great orchestras under many great conductors. It takes about two minutes to listen to the whole thing. Feel free to laugh, I always do when I hear this.
Week 13
Symphony no. 3 in Eb Major, Eroica Video Clip
I hope you all took the opportunity to listen to the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in Eb Major, the Eroica. As you recall, a link was provided in last week’s blog. How well I remember as a very young boy visiting my Aunt Ruth’s and Uncle Jim’s house. Wonder of wonders! They had a modest record player and a small collection of 78 rpm discs. I would say my hellos and disappear to listen and be absorbed for hours. I was but a fledgling musician then, but hopelessly in love with music. How captured I was by the liner notes of the Eroica Symphony. I struggled to hear all of the specific items the annotator described, very often unsuccessfully. My relatively unsophisticated ear and the poor fidelity of the the old 78 system made it so difficult for me to keep my place in this very complicated movement. So what did I glean? Wow! What a long piece of music this first movement was! How beautiful, powerful, strange at times! I certainly affirmed my love for classical music.
I remember being an undergraduate student in one of the Indiana University School of Music’s orchestras. The Eroica was on the program. For the first time I learned how arduous it could be to rehearse and perform this masterpiece. The first movement alone is about 18 minutes long, as long as many entire 4 movement classical period symphonies! How seemingly angular it was. Loud and brusque followed by beautiful and gentle. Those accents creating unstable rhythmic patterns. Huge emotional juxtapositions that were beyond my ken. It was also technically difficult for me then. How inspirational it was however. I couldn’t talk after the performance. The power of Beethoven!
Many years later, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra recorded all 9 Beethoven symphonies with Sir Georg Solti. We then toured both Europe and the United States playing them. Needless to say, I got to know the Eroica very well through this process perforce. One might think or wonder if a musician would get tired or bored playing music over and over. With lesser music, maybe, but with music like this, never! Its power and grandeur with its broad emotional sweep captures the spirit forever. When technical issues disappear with one’s playing, new vistas appear. How lucky I was. My spirit was forever enriched.
I’m now in phase 4 as it were, retired from performance, but not from music. I live it daily. The Eroica reaches me as never before. Its message is so profound. It’s as if Beethoven was and is showing me who he was. His struggles and anger with his deafness, his loneliness, his wanting a life of love and matrimony, his belief in the people as opposed to nobility, his belief in his God, his sense of a higher spirituality and the beauty of life, all shine through to me now. It’s an experience more and more profound and I trust it will be for you.
Rather than my trying to explain and analyze the first movement, listen to the great Leonard Bernstein’s explanation. Please listen to this first movement talk. We’ll move on next week to the rest.
Week 14
Symphony no. 3 in Eb Major, Eroica
As a student, amateur, and then a professional, I must have performed the Eroica symphony at least 75 times and, if you include recording sessions, close to 100. So, clearly I’ve had great exposure and familiarity with the second movement of this great piece. I've played it so many different ways with many different conductors. Faster, slower, stricter, looser with great freedom, and rubato. No matter the treatment, I’ve always been moved by Beethoven’s communicating such powerful depth of expression in this Marcia Funebre. He marks it in the score Adagio Assai - very slow. It’s in C minor, a key in Beethoven’s hands that’s heavy with tragedy, power, and emotion. It is in a broad ABA form. In the first A section a dotted rhythm prevails. The strings play a drum like figure under the oboe’s playing of the tune giving the effect of a cortege. This opening section is also marked by a falling figure first heard in the third bar.* The key, the tempo, the falling figure, and the accompaniment all lend an incredible seriousness and sadness to the opening section.
After a cadence in C Minor, three rising notes in the cellos and bases bring us to the key of C major (the B section). The sun comes out and seemingly there is hope. The music is made more buoyant by the accompaniment in the strings of a triplet figure. The first section has been primarily in duple. But now we have these triplets. It's wonderfully glorious music.
We then return to the beginning section but here Beethoven doesn't nearly repeat the opening but develops it into something wildly personal and anguished. The ending becomes very fragmented and puzzling. I've always felt that this music delves deeply into Beethoven's despair. Remember, this is shortly after Beethoven acknowledged to himself and others his deafness, his complete deafness.
Attached is Leonard Bernstein's explanation and examination of the second movement. His thinking and discussion of it is brilliant so please enjoy that and listen more than once to the wonderful second movement of the Beethoven Eroica symphony. I know that over the years my exposure to this piece of music has changed me. The more I open myself and let it reach me, the more I get from it. That sounds very simplistic but it's very true.
*The great composer Richard Strauss was so fascinated by this motive that he wrote a wonderful piece Metamorphosen for 23 strings. The descending motive appears from fragments of other melodies. I hope you’ll listen to it also.
Leonard Bernstein speaks on the 2nd movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urmIjdxWqto&t=33s from about 13:15
Continued here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBvDefnCCek
Strauss Metamorphosen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBvDefnCCek
Week 15
My audition story of the Chicago Symphony:
Imagine what it's like to be sitting in a great orchestra playing Beethoven's Eroica Symphony - a piece of music that is so powerful and emotional. Have you ever wondered how does a person get to be in a great orchestra? I thought I would describe the process to you this week.
When an opening occurs in an orchestra, there's an advertisement placed in the musician’s union newspaper, advising to the musical world that a position has become vacant. You sign up to appear and then you practice your butt off and get in "as good as possible instrumental shape" as you can. You show up on the appointed day and are taken to a warmup room and are subsequently told to follow someone upstairs to the stage. Using my audition for the Chicago Symphony as an example, you then walk along a carpeted path on the stage. It's carpeted so that the orchestra audition committee that's listening to you, cannot tell if you're a male or female by your gait. There is a screen erected across the front of the stage so that the audition committee cannot recognize you. Trying to eliminate favoritism, sexism, nepotism, ageism, or other isms is very important these days and rightly so. You are then asked to perform a couple of concerto movements followed by excerpts from the orchestra repertory followed by reading of orchestra excerpts that you might not have seen before. This process only takes 15 minutes or so for they are trying to whittle down the number of applicants to a manageable level. Once again, in my case there were 200 applicants for the one position in the viola section that was vacant. In my case, it was narrowed down to two candidates. Finalists are then asked to return for another round of playing. This round is much longer. They listen to more of the concertos and they demand more difficult excerpts from the orchestra literature. So what does this all have to do with the Eroica Symphony? Well, one orchestra excerpt that is invariably asked on viola auditions is the opening of the Eroica Symphony’s Third Movement, the Scherzo. Why would this be asked for? Beethoven marks the opening as pianissimo, very soft. There are also dots above every note meaning very short. It's also very fast, three notes to a bar, Allegro Vivace very fast. It's difficult to do all this and it's difficult to control your bow, especially when you're nervous. As you play along, all of a sudden you’re asked by Beethoven to go from pianissimo to fortissimo, the extremes of the dynamic range of an instrument, in the space of one bar or three notes - very difficult to do. Beethoven was very demanding. He didn't care if it was difficult; he knew what he wanted musically and therefore you had to do it. There are many more reasons why this excerpt would be included. The rhythm isn't always the easiest thing to accomplish, e.g. there's a place where it changes from three to a bar to four to a bar and it feels very unnatural if you haven't played it before. All the while, great delicacy juxtaposed with power and intensity, must be shown while under great pressure. This is what the great Beethoven required of us. We must live up to him with all we have.
The Trio section of this 3rd movement is on every French Horn player’s audition. One listen and you’ll hear why,
As in the past two weeks, let’s turn to Leonard Bernstein for his wonderful explanation of these two final movements. I hope you’ve enjoyed exploring this monumental and extraordinary Third Symphony of Beethoven.
3rd Movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBvDefnCCek&t=118s from 5:00
4th movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBvDefnCCek&t=118s from 10:18
4th movement continued https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQchH5Bkqb0
Week 16
Triple Concerto Opus 56, the Appasionata Sonata Opus 57, and the 4th Piano Concerto in G Major Opus 58
The Eroica Symphony was a piece of tremendous emotional and energetic output. Subsequent to it, Beethoven turned to three pieces that revolved around the piano.
The Triple Concerto Opus 56, the Appasionata Sonata Opus 57, and the 4th Piano Concerto in G Major Opus 58. While they are all very serious pieces, I don’t think they have the same psychological heft of the Eroica. How would it be possible for a composer to sustain that kind of effort work after work? Am I trivializing the pieces under discussion here? Not at all! They are masterpieces that all serious listeners should know, but in a different category as it were.
I must say that, in some quarters, the Triple Concerto is devalued. I am not in that camp. I love this piece, especially the incredibly beautiful and inspired 2nd movement. BTW, this concerto strikes terror into cellists everywhere due to the fiendish difficulty of the solo cello part. The legendary recording below is wonderful! It features Sviatislav Richter piano, David Oistrakh violin, and Mstislav Rostropovich cello.
Concerto for Piano, Violin, Cello, and Orchestra in C Major Opus 56
The Appasionata Sonata is a favorite of classical music lovers everywhere. Its opening alternating between the subdued and fiery in the deeply emotional key of f minor stirs the heart. You’ll enjoy this beautiful performance by Murray Perahia one of our generation’s most stellar pianists.
Sonata #23 in f minor Opus 57
Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto churned aggressively in c minor (the same key of his 5th symphony) and the Eroica symphony exulted in power and drama. But in his 4th piano concerto, he turns much more reflective and gentle. The first movement even begins without the orchestra. That didn’t happen before in the world of concertos. Beethoven once again the radical. The music must serve the needs of the heart and mind, not tradition. While there are a great many technical demands on the pianist, the overall feeling is repose and serenity, however the second moment is another story. A strange dialogue between forte strings and the piano playing piano ensues. It’s a profoundly personal piece of music that seems to go right to Beethoven’s soul. It elides then into a wonderfully graceful finale. I hope you’ll be interested in Barenboim’s, not only playing the solo piano part, but also conducting from the keyboard. No mean feat.
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G Major Opus 58
Please enjoy these three pieces from Beethoven’s incredibly fertile 2nd style period.
Week 17
Rasoumovsky String Quartets
Opus 59 String Quartets: No 1 in F Major, No 2 in E minor, and No. 3 in C Major
Count Andrey Kirillovich Razumovsky (1752 - 1836) was the son of Kirill Razumovsky, the last Hetman of Zaporizhian Host, kind of a Grand Poobah, of Imperial Russia. Being born to the privileged class in St Petersburg, he developed a refined taste for the exquisite in art, architecture, and thankfully for us, music. In 1792, he was appointed the Tsar's diplomatic representative to the Habsburg court in Vienna. It was no surprise then that a man of his sensitivities would come to know Beethoven the pianist, improviser, and composer who so intrigued musical Vienna. Many, if not most, musicians’ livelihoods depended on the largesse of wealthy merchants, publishers, but especially the nobility. Curiously and perhaps hypocritically, Beethoven was not above accepting support from these quarters, while at the same time pronouncing to the world that the nobility should be bowing down to artists like his buddy Goethe and himself, rather than the other way around, something he refused to do. However, he would take their money. In 1806 Beethoven published his Opus 59 String Quartets - No. 1 in F Major, No. 2 in E minor, and No. 3 in C Major. These were dedicated to and paid for by the Count. Forever after they have been known as the Rasoumovsky String Quartets. They continue on in the incredibly fecund period we’ve been looking at lately, starting with the second symphony, continuing through the mighty Eroica, and all of the works in last week’s chapter.
These three string quartets are so different from each other. Op. 59 No. 1 is so wonderfully welcoming, but with a feeling of great importance in its opening movement. The next movement seems to be a minor masterpiece created out of the most minimal and simplistic material, while the third is tragically elegiac (one of my favorites in all of Beethoven), and the finale rouses with the inclusion of a Russian, or more accurately Ukrainian, folk song feature, shared by the 2nd quartet. The Count had asked Beethoven to add this feature as part of the commission.
The E minor Quartet 59 No. 2 is much more austere and abstract. In some ways, while incredibly beautiful, it is less approachable for the listener. I must say I believe it is the most difficult to perform. It feels more fragmented and harder to sustain. That could just be me but I think not. I’ve heard murmurings from some great quartet players that they share the thought.
Opus 59 No. 3 opens with a somewhat strange, harmonically vague slow introduction followed by a cheerful, sunny Allegro that shows off the virtuosity of the first violinist especially. Our Count Rasoumovsky had a resident string quartet in his Vienna palace headed by Ignaz Schupannzigh, one of Beethoven’s favorite violinists. He also was one of Beethoven’s teachers of violin. The second movement is a haunting A minor 6/8, followed by a radiant minuet, gentle and sweet with a rather frolicking trio. This movement slitheringly elides into an absolutely spectacular C Major fugue! The faster the better as long as the faster doesn’t ruin the better! On a personal history note, during my last year in graduate school, I was in a string quartet with three other wonderful colleagues whom I love to this day. We worked on this piece, the Op. 59 No. 3, and the Bartok String Quartet No. 4. We entered and won the prestigious Coleman Chamber Music Competition in Los Angeles, California. We repeated the concert when we came back to Indiana University. When we got to the Finale/Fugue, which begins with the viola playing solo unaccompanied, I was so hopped up on adrenaline that I played it so fast that my colleagues had all the blood drain from their faces as they sat there knowing they would have to play it that fast also. William Primrose, the greatest viola player that ever lived, was on my faculty committee and was in attendance. He said he had never heard it that fast in his life. We got through it and we all lived to tell about it.
My favorite recordings of the Beethoven Quartets are by the Guarneri String Quartet. Their complete Beethoven cycle is available for purchase on Apple Music and on other sources I’m sure.
If you go to YouTube you will find links to individual movements. I’m including here a link to the first movement of Opus 59 No. 1. Once you’ve finished listening, look for a link to the second movement in the sidebar, etc. It would be far too cumbersome for me to list all the single movements here.
Opus 59 No. 1 - first movement
Or:
Opus 59 No. 1 F Major
Opus 59 No. 2 E minor
Opus 59 No. 3 C Major
Listen well and enjoy! These are important pieces to have in your musical quiver.
Week 18
Beethoven Violin Concerto Op. 61 in D Major
Vivaldi wrote 230.
Tartini 135
JS Bach wrote 2,
Nardini 4
Mozart 5
and Louis Spohr wrote 18.
Beethoven only wrote one but what a violin concerto it is.
Norwalk High School was a beautiful old Georgian building and it had the best auditorium in town, well, the only auditorium in town. So I, a young teenage boy and my best friend David sneaked into that auditorium to hear the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra play one of their concerts. Of course fearing the long arm of the law we sat and cowered in the last row of the balcony. We figured it might be harder to locate us there. This was part of my first exposure to the Beethoven violin concerto. Little known to me the soloist was one of the most famous violinists in the world, the great Hungarian Josef Szigeti. Actually his star was fading. His intonation was shaky and his tone less pure. He had been known for decades for his insightful interpretations of the classics. I didn’t know all of this then, it’s something I’ve learned during the course of my career as a musician. Nonetheless, I was captured that night by the Beethoven Violin Concerto Op. 61 in D Major. To this day that piece resonates in me stronger than any other. It is not only my favorite violin concerto but my favorite concerto of any kind. Interestingly not everyone is taken by this piece of music. I’ve known some wonderful violinists in my time who thought that the concerto didn’t hold much for them. That it was merely a collection of scales and arpeggios and almost exercise-like features. They wondered where were the gutsy emotional melodies that you find in Brahms or Tchaikovsky. Where were the technical fireworks? Or where was the elegance and refinement of Mozart concertos. The critics of Beethoven’s day didn’t like the piece so much or at least they were lukewarm to it for all the reasons listed above. However the public really liked it and was quite enthusiastic. The public seemed to have a greater connection and understanding with the piece than the music critics did. A situation that unfortunately continues to this day.
While at Indiana University I heard KW play this piece on her recital. She studied with the wonderful Joseph King called. Her performance was flawless and inspired and unforgettable. And then over the years I was so fortunate to be able to play in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with world famous violinists playing the Beethoven concerto with us. I’ve always been so touched by this piece and especially by the second movement, the slow movement. There is a something about it that is so noble and pure that shows Beethoven’s heart. It contains a march- like rhythm in 4/4 time in G major, a very beautiful and settled key. The violin seems to play obbligato lines or interjections above the orchestra. Simple and singing. You’ll hear in the first version below by Fritz Kreisler at 27:45 a beautiful statement in the violin that never fails to bring me to tears. To use the word again it is so noble and unembarrassed showing Beethoven’s love of existence, his soul. I also love the Fritz Kreisler cadenzas in the first and third movements. Violinists through history have written their own cadenzas to the concerto since Beethoven didn’t leave us any. I’ve always just adored Fritz Kreisler’s above them all. The great contemporary violinist Gidon Kremer commissioned the contemporary composer Alfred Schnittke to write a cadenza which I’ll include here. You decide if you like it. (BTW, I like the Schnittke.)
Please enjoy these different versions which I’ve included below. I truly hope you will come to love this concerto as much as I do. I think it’s one of the most important pieces in all of music.
Here is the famous 1926 recording by Fritz Kreisler with hissown cadenzas. This YouTube was taken from the 78rpm discs, thus the scratchy quality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhfZEjw9roM&t=1396s
Jascha Heifitz’s 1950 recording of the concerto with Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra is legendary. https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?
fr=aaplw&p=beethoven+violin+concerto+heifitz#id=4&vid=0c4508f77f1fb0bc5b7f42a98aab85c5&action=view
The story goes that Pinchas Zuckerman filled in at the last moment for an ill soloist. This was a live concert recording. It’s one of my favorites. I just love his playing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfX_6Z5zzEo&t=2156s
Here’s an example of thoroughly modern violin playing. Absolutely perfect. Every note is in place, perfectly in tune, etc. but some would say without some of the personal music making and charm of the older nerations. Hilliary Hahn in this brilliant performance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cg_0jepxow
And finally here’s the modern cadenza by Schnittke I mentioned earlier. It’s a 2:45 on this recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0upniIs7qSs
Week 19
Beethoven Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
The four most famous notes in the world! Thus begins Beethoven’s immortal Symphony No 5 in C minor Opus 67. Masterpiece after masterpiece has led up to this masterpiece and incredibly more of them follow, such was the fertility of Beethoven’s genius.
I found a link included below of Leonard Bernstein’s 1954 Omnibus Theater lecture for the American public, which appeared on the very new medium - television. I think you’ll also find it interesting to watch the forward to his actual lecture describing the history of the series. Bernstein’s explanation of the first movement and a little bit of the second is wonderful. As a composer himself, he understands the creative process and is able to examine the struggle that Beethoven went through as he composed.
Leonard Bernstein on Beethoven 5th first movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrDyvxSnqb0&t=21s
The second movement is a set of variations on two seemingly different themes, the first - a gentle one in A flat major, and the second a more boisterous martial one in C major. The second theme however, to my ear, seems to grow out of the first theme opening material. As you listen, try to be carried away by the different characters of the variations. This is one of my favorite movements in Beethoven’s orchestral works.
The third movement begins with a very mysterious, almost eerie theme, played by the cellos and bases. Curiously, if you transposed this theme into the key of G minor rather than the key of C minor in which it’s written, you would have the exact opening theme of the last movement of Mozart’s 40th Symphony. Homage I’m sure. This movement has all the features of a very expanded scherzo movement, although Beethoven doesn’t mark it as such. It brings back as a main motive the four note rhythm of the opening of the symphony, the most famous four notes in music as we have observed. This section alternates between the eerie opening and this powerful four note motive. It eventually seems to dissolve until it melts into a very raucous trio section once again begun by the cellos and basses. The opening section then repeats and at the end of it begins one of the most remarkable transitions in music. Over a very long suspended C in the lower instruments are hints of our four note motive. It’s so suspenseful with the violins seemingly playing or toying with the harmony until it finally hits the dominant chord and a great crescendo begins and we gloriously enter the last movement, a brilliant celebration in C major. Just revel in its glory! And then all of a sudden Beethoven reintroduces quietly our four note theme that we heard in the third movement that reminds us of the opening of the symphony. Remember? This provides an incredible unity to the entire symphony. There’s nothing that can be said about how this piece ends. It’s magnificent, glorious, inspirational, and full of hope for all of us. Beethoven, our guide!
Beethoven Symphony No 5 in C minor Opus 67 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lHOYvIhLxo&t=104s
Week 20
Beethoven Symphony No. 6, in F Major, Op.68
Beethoven’s Symphony No 6 in F Major Opus 68. What a dramatic difference between the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony and his sixth. The fifth so portentous and fiery and the sixth so serene and gentle. Many scholars say that he worked on the fifth from 1804 through 1808 and the sixth from 1807 through 1808. Someday, take a look at the list of Beethoven’s compositions (I’m including a link). You’ll see that he worked on many compositions simultaneously, even many of the great masterpieces. Imagine holding in your mind as he did the opening of the furious fifth alongside the caressingly calm sixth. A wonder! A look at the indications Beethoven includes in the score at the beginning of each of the five movements, suggests why this symphony is nicknamed the “Pastorale”.
1.Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the country: Allegro ma non troppo
2.Scene by the Brook: Andante molto moto
3.Merry gathering of the country folk: Allegro
4.Thunderstorm: Allegro
5.Shepherd’s song. Happy and grateful feelings after the storm: Allegretto
Reflect on Beethoven’s characterizations as you listen. They are perfect of course since he is the one who wrote both the music and the notes! However, musicologists have argued whether or not this is program music. What is that? Very simply put, it is music that tells a story or tries to evoke a picture or scenario in the listener’s mind. Beethoven said that this music evokes feelings, his feelings. I think it’s a little bit of both, or maybe a lot. You decide.
Many consider this their favorite symphony. Not just of Beethoven but of all composers. It’s full of grace, elegance, and beauty. Fodder for the dilettante or the connoisseur. Using the link below, you’ll be able to both listen to and follow the score to this wonderful Beethoven Symphony No 6!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4CCU2-AFZE
List of Beethoven’s Compositions
https://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Ludwig_van_Beethoven
Week 21
Beethoven Sonata in A Major for Cello and Piano
Derived from Latin, Cantata is a piece to be sung. Sonata is a piece to be sounded or played. These terms reach far back to the second half of the 16th century with music by Giovanni Gabrieli, a figure who bridged the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The sonata flourished during the baroque period, especially in Italy with composers such as Corelli, Vivaldi, Veracini, etc. Baroque sonatas were typically written for one or two solo instruments, a keyboard (harpsichord), and a bass line instrument that would support the bass of the keyboard. For instance, that instrument could be a cello, bass viol, theorbo, lute, etc.
As we gradually moved into the Classical period (c.1750-1800), the sonata became more formalized, typically for a single solo instrument with keyboard or even just a solo instrument, usually piano in that case. (Beethoven wrote 32 sonatas for piano alone that are monuments in the pianist’s repertory.) Early sonatas from this period relied heavily on the virtuosity of the keyboard player with the other instrument, violin, or flute perhaps, playing a supporting role. But as time moved on, more of a balance between the two voices was achieved, especially in the hands of our hero, Ludwig van Beethoven. Do you recall the week we spent looking at Beethoven’s Op. 47, his Kreutzer sonata for violin and piano? There is no question at all that by then, in Beethoven’s mind, the two instrumentalists were equal in importance. Such it is also with Beethoven’s monumental Op. 69 Sonata in A Major for cello and piano.
I have asked Marina Hoover, wonderful cellist and friend of the White Lake Music Society, to offer a few thoughts on this piece from a cellist’s perspective. Many of you will remember her participation in last year’s White Lake Chamber Music Festival as she played three concerts with the Avalon String Quartet. She and Andrea Swan were scheduled to perform this very sonata on the 2020 White Lake Chamber Music Festival that so sadly, had to be canceled due to the virus. The following are some of her thoughts paraphrased by me at times.
"The A Major possesses an overt optimism and lyricism, even with the occasional outbursts, there is always a certain regalness.”
"The first two sonatas (Opus 5 No’s 1,2) were more like piano concerti with the cello commenting. Beethoven sonatas were the first example of the piano part fully written out. With Beethoven’s meticulous writing, there is no room for the pianist to elaborate on the figured bass that was traditionally written.”
“In the A major sonata each part has equal responsibility and music making, total equality.” Therefore, “The challenge is finding a partner that speaks the same musical language and has the same musical approach. The parts are so interwoven that it is really the melding of two voices into one.”
“The last movement has to be played with a certain ease and facility.”
Thank you Marina! As an instrumentalist myself let me say that, playing Beethoven with a certain ease and facility, is as the saying goes, much easier said than done. I’ve always been struck by this sonata being so sunny in its first and last movements. Then the incredibly whimsical second movement where Beethoven likes to play with us with the rhythmical tricks he uses. Just where is the beat? I’m always touched by that short little slow movement going into the finale. It has to be in the right hands however, to achieve the kind of emotional impact that Beethoven demands.
I am including links to two recordings of very different character. The first by Jacqueline Du Pre, so heartfelt and personal. The second by Paul Tortelier, very patrician and perfectly played.
Jaquiline Du Pre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyAfZuI-8r8&t=1248s
Paul Tortelier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hnAQA8DWj4&t=1279s
I hope you all enjoy this brilliant sonata by Beethoven!
Week 22
Beethoven Trios Opus 70, No 1 in D Major the “Ghost” and No 2 in Eb Major
Remember Blog #1? It featured Beethoven's Opus 1 Piano Trios, a set of three. This medium (violin, cello, and piano) was very dear to Beethoven, having written seven of them during his Vienna years. There exists one or two others from his very early years, plus a couple of sets of variations, and a trio for piano, flute, and bassoon. This week we are concerned with the very important trios of Opus 70, No 1 in D Major the “Ghost” and No 2 in Eb Major.
I have asked Andrea Swan to offer her thoughts on these two trios and she has graciously agreed to do so. You will remember her as guest piano recitalist at last year’s White Lake Chamber Music Festival. In her professional life she has performed many times, all of Beethoven’s chamber music that includes piano. Please enjoy her thoughts.
“The Opus 70 Trios stand in the center of the Beethoven Trio output. The Opus 1 Trios are definitely “piano heavy” and the Archduke Trio, Opus, 97 is regarded by musicians as one of the masterpieces of the Trio literature.
The two Opus 70 Trios share an opus number but are totally different in character. No. 1, nicknamed “The Ghost” because of its mysterious, eerie 2nd movement filled with tremolos and shocking dynamics, contrasts with the outer movements that are delightfully upbeat and carefree.
No. 2 is probably the least played of all of Beethoven’s trios, although many historians regard it as the most original. It has 4 movements, including a Theme and Variation 2nd movement that ping pongs between C Major and C Minor, a 3rd movement called Allegretto that has the sweetest theme (and the weirdest 4 measures I have ever encountered in all of Beethoven - if you listen, you can’t miss them!), and a very long, very demanding Finale.
As a pianist, I find the D major much easier technically. It lies in a comfortable key for both the pianist and the string players. There’s lots of interplay and “joking around” between the 3 instruments and the outer movements are both joyous romps.The 2nd movement is so completely different - very somber and mysterious, and its length and slow tempo require enormous concentration to pull off successfully.
The Opus 70, No. 2 Trio is much more difficult, technically and musically. There are some passages for the pianist, especially in the outer movements, that are challenging and demand good fingerings and a lot of practice! The first two movements are quite serious - then Beethoven changes to a much lighter mood in the 3rd movement and the 4th movement takes the listener on a wild ride of jubilation and boundless energy.”
Thank you, Andrea. Wonderfully said. I’m including below links to two performances, one of each trio. The pianist in the Opus 70 No 2 is Menahem Pressler with whom Andrea studied.
Opus 70 No 1 Barenboim, Zuckerman, Du Prez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReZeyI8Z5wk&t=105s
Opus 70 No 2 Beaux Arts Trio Pressler, Coen, Greenhouse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FMBO1LE4xM&t=352s
Week 23
Beethoven Fidelio Overture
Fidelio is Beethoven’s only opera, however he wrote four different overtures for it. The numbering and titles of those overtures are somewhat confusing. Here’s why: The opera was premiered in 1805 under the title Leonore, Oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe (“Leonore, or The Triumph of Married Love”). The overture for that performance is believed to be what is known as the Leonora Overture No 2, Opus 72a.
When the opera was presented again in 1806, Beethoven tightened up No 2 and wrote the Leonora Overture No 3, Opus 72b. This is the overture that is most often heard in concert halls as a stand-alone piece.
There was a planned performance of the opera in Prague and for some reason, scholars call the overture for this performance Opus 138. I don’t think I’ve ever played or heard this version.
Finally, for the 1814 revival and reworking of the opera, he wrote a completely new Overture entitled Fidelio. I love this piece and how it plays with alternating C major and E major. Wonderful.
I’m including links to all four overtures. Please enjoy this wonderful outpouring of music by the master. More on the opera next week.
Leonora Overture No 2 Opus 72a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egp07RjNlQI
Leonora Overture No 3 Opus 72b https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZzwA_dntCM
Leonora Overture No 1 Opus 138 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THyZq67bkXk
Fidelio Overture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMPJl_qzlTc
Week 24
Beethoven Fidelio
Fidelio was Beethoven’s only opera. This doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a lover of opera. He grew up with it in Bonn where was lucky enough to sneak into performances at the local opera house. He was a great fan of Italian opera and became a fan of what was kind of a rage, the “rescue opera”. Brought on by the spirit of revolution that was sweeping both the Old World and the New World, the theme was that somehow a person was unjustly captured and imprisoned for political reasons and what was through the force of good able to see the light of day once again. As you know by now, this fits in perfectly with Beethoven’s vision of the nobility and its relationship to the common man. As was mentioned once before here, Beethoven once commented to someone, I believe Goethe, that “we should never step aside for nobility to pass, they should step aside for us for we are artists; they were merely born to their position where as we achieved ours.”
Fidelio originally titled Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe (Leonore, or The Triumph of Marital Love) is such a “rescue opera”. Let me insert here a link to an excellent synopsis of the plot:
https://www.metopera.org/user-information/synopses-archive/fidelio
As we mentioned last week in our discussions of the overtures, Beethoven labored with the opera from its first performance in 1805 to its first revision in 1806 to his final version in 1814. But how wonderful it is! Perhaps the section that moves me the most occurs at the end of Act 1 when the prisoners are let out of their dungeon to the courtyard where they see daylight for the first time since their long imprisonment. The symbolism of that moment aligns perfectly with Beethoven’s soul and sensibilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdB0roPqg7Q&feature=share
I will include a couple of links to complete performances of yet another one of our Maestro’s masterpieces.
Fidelio Bernstein, Vienna State Opera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI-CF_rOApI&feature=share
Fidelio Furtwangler, Vienna State Opera (1953)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uapL7hImOY&feature=share
Week 25
Piano Concerto in Eb Major, Opus 73 “The Emperor”
Beethoven’s concerto in Eb Major, Opus 73 “The Emperor” is, along with the Tchaikovsky Bb minor (the second most famous four notes in music) and the Grieg A minor concerto, among the most well-known and beloved piano concertos in the literature. It’s a remarkable combination of power, exuberance, sensitivity, and virtuosity. It also has some unusual formal features. For instance, it begins with majestic orchestral chords outlining music’s most basic chord progression, I - IV - V - I. Between these mighty statements, the piano’s wildly virtuosic expressions of these chords lead to the next chord. There is a definite cadenza-like feel to these interpolations. Cadenzas were traditionally placed near the end of the movement in Beethoven’s time. It must have ruffled a few musical feathers back when listeners first heard this. It wasn’t until later in the Romantic period when such liberties with the form of music were taken, a good example being the placement of the cadenza of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in the middle of the movement. Also, Beethoven wrote these “cadenzas” out whereas soloists typically improvised their own.
Another jolt to the very early 19th century listener, it’s being composed in 1809, must have been the key of the second movement - B Major. He moved from 3 flats to 5 sharps in the key signatures, a relationship of a major third, not seen too often in classical period music. I can think of one other right now, Haydn Opus 76 #5 in D Major where the slow movement is a major third away in F# Major. These are relationships that one doesn’t hear with regularity until the full-blown romantic period. Think Schubert. (Ah Schubert!) Such a gentle comforting melody with piano embroidery entwined! I love the recapitulation of the theme with the wonderful orchestration of flute, clarinet, and bassoon singing the tune with the strings providing a soothing rocking accompaniment. The movement cadences in B and the simply slithers down a half step to Bb. The piano quietly and slowly foreshadows the theme of the last movement and then virtually explodes with abandon and exuberance into one of the greatest finales in the piano concerto literature.
I thought it would be interesting to include performances from three different generations. First, the great Arthur Rubenstein whose recording is the favorite of many to this day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhJjCScsOn4
Next the great Glenn Gould - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpz_U8wHpa8
And lastly Maurizio Pollini - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTLOQGF-c1E
Week 26
Thayer Biography of Beethoven
Alexander Wheelock Thayer (1817 - 1897) was born in Massachusetts and died in Trieste, Italy. He was a journalist and professional librarian. A lover of music and scholarship, he was dismayed by the lack of an accurate biography of Beethoven, the musical giant who dominated the musical world at that time. So he decided to write his own. His story is told much better in a couple of articles I’ve found. I suggest you music lovers peruse these. I’ve admired and looked up to Thayer for so long for his commitment and scholarship. I’ve read that some don’t enjoy reading his Life of Beethoven because of his dated writing style. What?! Are Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens dated? Should a modern day author be intimidated by what a reader 150 years hence might think? Ridiculous. So dear friends, consider buying a copy and enjoy! In the meanwhile I’m sure you’ll find these very interesting. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/01/alexander-wheelock-thaye.html
https://www.jstor.org/stable/737995?seq=1#mobileBookmark
Those incredible nine symphonies! The concertos and chamber music! The sonatas! What a treasure trove of monumental instrumental music. We tend to overlook some beautiful vocal works of his. Soon we will examine some of Beethoven’s songs and where they fit in to his musical output. As a little teaser I’d like to offer this stunningly beautiful song Adelaide sung by the great tenor Fritz Wunderlich. https://youtu.be/e4SaCYgxze8
Week 27
Beethoven’s String Quartet #10 Opus 74 in Eb Major
Beethoven’s String Quartet No.10 Opus 74 in E-flat Major has always been one of my favorites. By now you all know how important this key is to Beethoven. Piano trios, sonatas, the “Emperor” concerto, the “Eroica” symphony! Masterpieces all. The Opus 74 measures up. It begins with a fairly short slow introduction gentle in character. After roaming through a few strange harmonies, the main body of the first movement begins Allegro. After a short while the violins alternate pizzicato (plucking the strings) for four bars, an idea that is expanded in the development section. Here the pizzicatos are passed through all the instruments starting with the cello. The rhythm accelerates giving a harp like quality, thus the nickname “the Harp” quartet. Near the end of this movement is one of the most thrilling passages in all of chamber music. The first violin plays an extended passage of bariolage, the rapid crossing of the strings back and forth, either 2, 3, or all 4 of them. Underneath, the other instruments first replay the harp idea and then the second violin and viola engage in a canon. They play the same notes an octave apart but the viola copies the violin exactly one bar later. They sing! Amazing result. Absolutely joyous!
A wonderfully serene and sensitive Adagio second movement is followed by and absolutely furious third movement scherzo. The contrast of these inner moments is remarkable.
Some critics, I like to call them the “Great Unwashed”, say that the finale is weak compared to the rest of the quartet. How wrong they are. I adore this set of variations. They are consistent with the other three movements; they maintain the overall calm and inner looking aspects of the others (excluding the wild third). They come to an exuberant close. Please enjoy this wonderful quartet. I’m attaching links to two performances. The first by the legendary Budapest String Quartet. This group first established the high standard of quartet playing that has carried forward to this day. The second is by the Alban Berg Quartet, an excellent modern-day group.
Budapest String Quartet
The Alban Berg Quartet
Week 28
“Choral Fantasy” Opus 80 in C minor
In 1808, Beethoven needed money so he decided to put on a benefit concert for himself. Included on this grand concert were the premieres of his wonderful piano concerto, #4 in G Major, and his fifth and sixth symphonies, along with selections from his Mass in C Major. He decided to write a piece that would include all the participants in a glorious finale to the concert, thus, the birth of the Choral Fantasy Opus 80 in C minor. The fantasy is scored for solo piano, vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra. A truly monumental piece. Can you imagine a concert of that length in the present day? Theirs was a time with no TV, internet, or even radio. I imagine people then welcomed such events.
A fantasy in music is typically a sectionalized composition and this piece is very much that way. Do you remember that Beethoven came to Vienna renowned as a great virtuoso and improviser on the keyboard? Well that’s just how this piece begins, an extended improvisatory section with Beethoven himself at the piano for the premiere. It’s said that he did improvise at that concert and only later did he write the opening down. Next, we have a sequence of variations, some involving the piano and some not. We travel through some different keys - A Major, F Major, C Minor again, and finally C Major when the voices enter. I’m inserting the text below for you to follow. Scholars aren’t in agreement as to the authorship of the text.
Flatteringly sweet and lovely ring out
our lives' harmonies,
and from our sense of beauty arise
flowers that eternally bloom.
Peace and joy move together,
like the alternating play of waves;
that which seemed harsh and hostile,
transforms itself into inspiration.
When music's magic holds sway,
and poetry's sacredness speaks out,
magnificent things must take form,
night and storms turn into light.
Outer calm, inner joy,
prevail for the happy person;
indeed, the arts' spring sunshine
lets, from sorrow, light come into being.
Greatness, that was deep in the heart,
blooms anew then, reaching up beautifully;
if a spirit rises up,
it is always echoed by a chorus of spirits.
Therefore accept, you lovely souls,
happily, the gifts of beautiful art.
If love and power join together,
humanity is rewarded by the gods' favor.
The shape of the melody of the vocal soloists and choir is very similar to the “Ode to Joy”, the famous tune in the finale of his ninth symphony. This has led many musicologists to claim that this was kind of a trial piece, an experiment for working things out for later on. Who knows for sure but I think it’s just a wonderful piece! I found it thrilling every time I played it or listened to it. I hope you will enjoy it too. I’m including two performances for you. One with the great Seiji Ozawa conducting with the equally great Martha Argerich playing piano. The other performance has the score presented as the piece is played. Have fun listening!
Ozawa/Argerich https://youtu.be/cSfMH9Y5bi8
The Score https://youtu.be/mN1R6T7m6NE
Week 28
Beethoven Sonata in Eb Major Opus 81a “Les Adieux”
Beethoven’s great sonata for piano in Eb Major Opus 81a “les adieux” was written on the departure from Vienna of the Archduke Rudolph, one of his dearest friends. The publisher, Breitkopf and Haertel came out with a French edition, thus the nickname. Beethoven had titled it in German “Lebewohl” a much more intimate expression than the generic French word. The opening three notes follow the shape of the words in both languages however. It is one of my favorites as it is for many. It has some very interesting structural elements.
This is an excellent time to introduce to all of you the great Hungarian pianist, Andras Schiff, who can explain them better than I. Not only is he a beautiful player, but an extraordinary teacher and lecturer on music. One of his great accomplishments is a series of lectures on the Beethoven piano sonatas, one for each of the 32 masterpieces. They are grounded in his profound experience with them as he has performed the complete cycle of sonatas 27 times!! He is a great communicator who has saturated himself, not only with music, but with art, literature, and the great thoughts of mankind. Therefore, this week, I’m including a link to his talk on Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 81a in Eb “les adieux”. I’m sure you’ll be delighted and perhaps encouraged to explore some of his others. May I suggest Opus 13 “Pathetique”, Opus 27#2 “Moonlight” to start.
Andras Schiff lecture on Beethoven Opus 81a https://youtu.be/3jpiqAbpojA
Barenboim plays Beethoven Sonata in Eb Major Opus 81a “les adieux” https://youtu.be/gEpeKi5R1Wo
Week 30
With last week’s blog we’ve reached the year 1810. Beethoven is 40 years old and at the height of his artistry. He has achieved great fame and by now is acknowledged as the greatest composer alive. He loves nature and his God and is hopeful for marriage. However, he is very deaf, frustrated in love, suffering from various health issues, has an irascible and difficult personality, etc. As we have seen through the course of these weeks his music reflects these conflicts, anguish and despair alongside a beautiful optimism. I have asked a longtime friend, Elizabeth Morrison, writer and cellist, to share her insights on the element of joy in Beethoven’s music.. In a few weeks Foley Schuler will comment on the other side of Beethoven - pain, disappointment, anguish. Elizabeth’s thoughts follow here along with included musical examples.
Beethoven’s Joy
By Elizabeth Morrison
Do you know the novel Howard’s End, by E.M. Forster? An elegant dissection of love and class in early-20th-century England, it’s one of my favorite books. Early on there is a scene set in a London concert hall, where a family group, the Schlegels, are taking in a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Forster uses each character’s reaction to the music to suggest something about them: Aunt Juley, “wanting to tap surreptitiously when the tunes come,” Margaret, who can “see only the music,” her younger brother Tibby, “profoundly versed in counterpoint, holding the full score open on his knee,” and their German cousin Fraulein Mosebach, who “remembers all the time that Beethoven is ‘echt Deutch’”–really German.
The one I always recall, though, is Margaret’s sister Helen, the young woman at the center of Forster’s story. She alone “can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood.” When the third movement begins, Helen feels that “a goblin was walking quietly over the universe. Goblins were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. Helen could not contradict them, for she had felt the same, and seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right.”
As the third movement gives way to the fourth, it seems to Helen that “Beethoven appears in person. He gives the goblins a little push, and they begin to walk in a major key, and then–he blows with his mouth, and they are scattered! …Amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he leads his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven, when he says other things.”
You can hear all this for yourself in a 1990 recording by the Chicago Symphony. When the third movement begins, at 28.11, there are the goblins. They are followed by an interlude that Helen calls “elephants dancing” (actually it’s just the cellos and basses); and then the goblins again. The enormous breath that blows them away is unmistakable too, at 33.18. This is certainly joy, fully realized in a symphonic masterpiece.
But exhilarating as it is, triumphal joy is only one of the many sorts of joy to be found in Beethoven’s music. In his piano sonatas, for example, there are more intimate expressions. There, too, joy is highlighted by contrast, but it need not be to “panic and emptiness.” In one of his most beautiful sonatas, Opus 53, the “Waldstein,” joy emerges from high seriousness and profound inner concentration.
I hope you’ll listen to all of this wonderful recording by Daniel Barenboim, but please start paying special attention at the start of the second movement, marked Adagio molto (very slow), at 11:30. After an exciting and forward-leaning first movement, Beethoven takes us into a sound world that is as much meditation as music. The notes are distinct and vital, like words spoken quietly by someone we love, or perhaps whispered to ourselves. Throughout the four short minutes of the movement, the bass line stays very low, reaching down to a low F, very deep on the piano. Our thoughts are drawn into the depth with them. All is hushed and dark. Then, at 15:50, Beethoven places a high G, four octaves above the F, repeats it, and lets it hang in the air until, as the third movement opens, we look up and see the stars.
The theme here, very simple and pure, gives us four of these high Gs, then four high Fs; they make me think of the stars appearing, one after another, in the night sky. From the inner focus of the Adagio, joy comes as we feel their unbroken perfection over all. Oh, and there’s joy too in watching Barenboim’s left hand cross over his right to play the high notes. From the depth to the heights–literally!
I promise I am not trying to turn you into Helen Schlegel, who can’t listen to music without a picture in her mind. You may be more like Tibby, immersed in the details of how it is done; you might prefer me to describe joy as being structured in major keys, brighter tempos, or the sound of the trumpet. And there’s nothing wrong if, like Aunt Juley, you just want to tap. But I am a bit of a Helen myself, and a picture helps me put my thoughts about music into words. So I’m happy to find words by Beethoven himself in my final example, the unavoidable one in any discussion of Beethoven’s joy, the Ninth Symphony.
This enormous work, his last symphony, is almost synonymous with joy. In the fourth and final movement he brings in four vocal soloists and a chorus, the first time a major composer brought voices into a symphony, to sing the words of a poem by Friedrich Schiller, the famous “Ode to Joy.” But the first words we hear, from the baritone soloist, are not by Schiller. Beethoven wrote them himself, as an introduction to the poem. In this famous recording, made by an international group of musicians led by Leonard Bernstein in Berlin in 1989 to celebrate the fall of the Wall, we hear them at 1:06:09. Yes, that’s one hour and six minutes in; there has been a lot of music before we get there! The words Beethoven wrote are,
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere!
Freude! Freude!
(Oh friends, not these notes!
Let us strike up more pleasing, more joyful ones!
Joy! Joy!).
It takes the baritone, Jan-Hendrik Rootering, a full minute to sing words we could speak in a few seconds. Just as he begins, a row of little girls of the chorus, who have been waiting quietly behind the timpani player for over an hour, get to their feet. It is a matchless moment, in history and in music. And yes, Rootering substitutes Freiheit, freedom, for Freude. Even so, it’s all about joy.
But what does Beethoven mean, “Not these notes?” It is an extraordinary statement, after the three incredible movements that have preceded it. Amazingly, he seems to be telling us to leave it all behind. He wants more joyful sounds–and here they are. Nothing I can say could possibly add to the experience of listening to the Ode to Joy. Just do it, and feel it all for yourself.
So here we have three distinct facets of Beethoven’s joy: triumphant in the Fifth Symphony, contemplative in the Waldstein Sonata, transcendent in the Ninth. And they are just the beginning. Beethoven, our romantic hero, who constantly finds beauty in anguish and superhuman striving, who suffered greatly in his own life, has left us joy that is simply inexhaustible. Here are a few more pieces for you; and with all the music Bob has presented in his blog, I’m sure you can find many more.
Piano Sonata Opus 78, “à Thérèse”, in a performance with the score. Joy in tenderness.
Symphony Number 6, the “Pastoral”, Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Joy in nature.
Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Opus 11, Camerata Pacifica. Joy in playful humor. The last movement, based on a song, “Before I go to work, I must have something to eat,” begins at 14.56. Be sure to watch to the end for a rare instance of classical musicians joking around.
Howard’s End was made into a Merchant-Ivory movie in 1989, with Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, and Helen Bonham Carter as Helen Schlegel. It is available on Netflix. Unfortunately, the scene where the Schlegels hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a shambles. For whatever reason, the producer chose not to hire an orchestra, substituted a pianist and a lecturer, and disrespected the goblins. You’ll see what I mean. It’s a good movie anyway.
Week 31
Egmont Overture, Op. 84
Ludwig van Beethoven and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe were two of the dominant intellectual forces of the early 1800s in Europe. They were well acquainted with each other with much mutual admiration. However, they were friends with reservations. Goethe thought that Beethoven was somewhat of a sans culotte, a ruffian, ill-mannered and crude, but a tremendous genius. Beethoven appreciated Goethe’s work, especially those with noble and aspirational themes for the common man, however, he was put off by his deference to nobility and in that sense - a lack of spine. There is a famous anecdote about the two of them walking along, perhaps in the Stadt Park in Vienna, when a group of the nobility approached them from the opposite direction. Goethe stepped aside and bowed deeply as they passed whereas Beethoven just marched right through them without so much as nodding his head. He reproached Goethe afterwards and said, “You must understand that they should be bowing to us!” Such was Beethoven.
Inspired by Goethe’s play, Beethoven wrote an overture and nine incidental pieces to it. It includes pieces for soprano, male narrator, and full symphony orchestra. The play deals with a Spanish nobleman of the 16th century who stood up to oppression and died for that cause. Of course, this is a theme close to Beethoven’s heart. Remember Fidelio?
The Egmont overture is the first piece of Beethoven that I ever played or ever heard. It opens in the key of F minor and is very powerful in its slow, heavy, portentous rhythmic statement. As a youth, I remember being so stirred by playing it. I hated when the piece ended. I’m sure all of you will recognize it. I just love the rest of the incidental music also. The soprano aria is so beautiful and the narrator lends a wonderful feeling to it. Here is an interesting aside I found from an old Chicago Symphony Orchestra program:
Beethoven met Bettina Brentano in May 1810, when he was hard at work on his incidental music for Goethe’s Egmont. He sang and played two of his recent settings of poems by Goethe for her, because he knew that she was a good friend of the great poet. Bettina wrote to Goethe about the composer with such enthusiasm that he answered her at once, suggesting that Beethoven meet him that summer in Karlsbad. In letter after letter that month, Bettina boasted to Goethe about Beethoven’s remarkable talent and, in particular, of the way he had uncovered a “new sensuous basis in the intellectual life.” On May 28 she even quoted Beethoven: “Music, verily, is the mediator between the life of the mind and the senses.” Nice!!
I so hope that you will enjoy listening to this beautiful and powerful music, wonderfully performed by Claudio Abbado and the Vienna Philharmonic. I will also include a translation of the text.
Beethoven Overture and Incidental Music to Goethe’s Egmont
https://youtu.be/G7J0SvmhScM
THE DRUM IS RESOUNDING!
Die Trommel gerühret! Das Pfeifchen gespielt! Mein Liebster gewaffnet Dem Haufen befiehlt, Die Lanze hoch führet, Die Leute regieret.
Wie klopf mit das Herz! Wie wallt mir das Blut!
O hätt’ ich ein Wämslein, Und Hosen und Hut.
Ich folgt’ ihm zum Tor ’haus Mit mutigem Schritt,
Ging’ durch die Provinzen, Ging’ überall mit.
Die Feinde schon weichen, Wir schiessen da drein— Welch Glück sondergleichen, Ein Mannsbild zu sein.
The drum is resounding, And shrill the fife plays; My love, for the battle, His brave troop arrays; He lifts his lance high, And the people he sways. My blood it is boiling!
My heart throbs pit-pat! Oh, had I a jacket,
With hose and with hat!
How boldly I’d follow,
And march through the gate; Through all the wide province I’d follow him straight.
The foe yield, we capture
Or shoot them! Ah me!
What heart-thrilling rapture
A soldier to be!
BLISSFUL AND TEARFUL
Freudvoll und leidvoll, Gedankenvoll sein; Langen und bangen
In schwebender Pein; Himmelhoch jauchzend, Zum Tode betrübt; Glücklich allein
Ist die Seele, die liebt.
Blissful and tearful,
With thought-teeming brain; Hoping and fearing
In passionate pain;
Now shouting in triumph, Now sunk in despair;
With love’s thrilling rapture What joy can compare!
Translations from The Harvard Classic, vol. 19 (New York: P.F. Collier & Sons, 1909)
Week 32
Piano Sonata No.27 in E minor, Op.90
We are now entering Beethoven’s final style period. As you know by now his music is generally divided into three of them, appropriately named early, middle, and late. There are no bright red lines between them however. With his sonata In E minor Op. 90 we begin to enter his late period. Soon we will look at some other pieces in this transition - the Op. 95 string Quartet and the Seventh Symphony opus 92. He starts to enter a different world, a very personal, emotional yet abstract world. Extraordinarily personal with little regard to how the music will be accepted but only thinking of reaching inside of himself to show, perhaps to him, who he is and what he is about and what he believes. This is some of that the most extraordinary music ever penned by man. It is not always easy to understand nor to write about it. It’s almost impossible to put into words where Beethoven was going.
As we enter this world we are going to use the aforementioned sonata for piano in E minor Op. 90. Once again I’m going to ask that you listen to the incomparable Andras Schiff in his wonderful lecture series on the Beethoven piano sonatas speak on this particular piece. As I’ve said before he can do a much better job examining it and describing it than I can. I’m including a performance by the legendary Alfred Brendel. Also one by the amazingly talented yet controversial Ivo Pogorelich.
Andras Schiff lecture on Beethoven opus 90: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztADv0Zn_Cc&feature=share
A performance by Alfred Brendel: https://youtu.be/uDzQnkIvCcg
Ivo Pogorelich rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4OG1-biycs&feature=share
Week 33
Symphony No. 7
With his 7th Symphony in A Major Opus 92, as with last week’s E minor Sonata for Piano Opus 90, Beethoven continues to move into his late style period. For many, the 7th is their favorite Beethoven symphony. It would be mine too if it weren’t for the 9th and its powerful message. Richard Wagner thought the 7th evoked feelings of the dance, thus a nickname that has stuck. For me it’s once again the juxtaposition of the tragic seriousness of life and its joy. Isn’t that one of the wonders of great art - that it is so personal on different levels? That’s such a simplistic thing to say maybe, but true.It begins with a fairly simple quiet statement that develops through the piling up of instrumental layers to a very powerful reiteration of the opening theme. Some E octaves lead to an ostinato rhythm that is the key idea of the first movement. Perhaps this is where Wagner first got his notion of the dance. The movement drives to the end where it cadences on an A major chord. Suddenly the second movement begins in A minor! An A minor chord with a E in the bass lends a suspended, haunting and foreboding air. A funeral march ensues with variations. An incredible counter theme appears over the march motive, one of the most powerful themes in music, I think. It develops through the addition of instruments, rhythmic acceleration, and emotional density. All of a sudden, A Major! Sunshine and tranquility! Remarkable. Then the dirge returns more complicated, even with a fugato. The sun reappears in major then the minor again. Even in the major key, listen for the rhythm of the dirge in the basses. It ends with the same chord it began with, an A minor in the 2nd inversion. What a powerful movement! Next a brilliant F Major very fast scherzo. Its trio section is in D Major, a third relation from F Major, a scheme Schubert used often. Then the fiery finale. (*see the Oscar Levant anecdote below.)
The movement begins with a chord on E, a chord over an E, and then a A chord. To my ear, this gives the whole symphony a feeling of moving from A to E to F to E to A.
*There is a wonderful story I remember hearing where the great pianist and comedian, yes, comedian, Oscar Levant related a story germane to this piece. He said he was driving on the New Jersey Turnpike when he was pulled over by a state policeman. The policeman asked if he realized how fast he was going. Levant replied no and the policeman told him he was going at least 20 miles an hour over the speed limit. He asked what possible explanation he could have. Levant said, “Have you ever tried not to speed when listening to the last movement of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony?” Apocryphally the policeman let him off.
I’ve included two different recordings below. The Toscanini is legendary.
Toscanini https://youtu.be/8AuFNGCVsgg
Solti https://youtu.be/DMUhKV4oMsM
Between Op.19 and opus 92 lies - guess what? Op. 91. Wellington’s Victory, a piece by Beethoven commemorating the defeat of Napoleon at a particular battle. You will hear all sorts of drum rolls, trumpet fanfares, and familiar tunes that will make you smile. It’s kind of enjoyable listening. It’s certainly nothing profound. It’s a short piece that’s worth listening to a couple of times. It’s not regarded as one of Beethoven’s better pieces however. So, whenever anyone mentions it, you should wrinkle your nose and haughtily harrumph. Here it is:
Wellington's Victory https://youtu.be/R_ibES7i-HU
Week 34
String Quartet No.11 in F minor, Op.95
Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, Op. 96
“Archduke” Piano Trio, Op.97
Three great works of chamber music usher out Beethoven’s middle style period and look forward to his late powerful yet austere period to come. These are the tumultuous Opus 95 String Quartet in F minor, the graceful and elegant Opus 96 Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, and the beautiful soaring Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano Opus 97 in Bb Major.
You will hear the fast and furious opening of the quartet and its gentler contrasting theme in the major key of Db. This movement is dense and very compact and concise. Next, listen and contrast that movement with the opening of the violin sonata. Do you hear how gentle it is? Even as the movement develops, we continue to see the softer side of Beethoven, don’t we? The “Archduke” piano trio has always been one of my favorite pieces since I played in high school. The melodies in the first movement are unforgettable. There are some virtuoso fireworks to follow of course.
The Emerson Quartet’s rendition of Op. 95 is excellent. Don’t be fooled by their apparently cool collective exterior. They are wonderful players and they play this piece beautifully, bringing out all the contrasting elements.
String Quartet No. 11, Opus 95, in F minor https://youtu.be/dSb86IJdrHs
This video of Yehudi Menuhin and Glenn Gould performing the Beethoven Op. 96, G major Sonata is compelling, not only for their music making but also for the conversation that begins the video. I think you will be interested in hearing these two incomparable masters discuss music making. Glenn Gould is such a wonderful and interesting musician and the glowing sound that Yehudi Menuhin gets from his “Lord Wilton” Guarnerius violin is stunning.
Sonata for Violin and Piano Opus 96 in G Major https://youtu.be/jzJLqvXlMWI
I find it difficult to listen to the opening of the “Archduke” trio without coming to tears. Certainly, that’s the case with this beautiful recording by three incredible musical geniuses. Listen to how the music soars at the beginning and how tender it is.
"Archduke" Piano Trio, Op 97 https://youtu.be/LUwTwQTXG8E
If you’ve had to deal with some ads in these YouTube links, please accept my apologies. It is an imperfect technology, isn’t it?
Week 35
An die ferne Geliebte, (to the distant beloved) Opus 98
Der Mann von Wort Opus 99
Merkenstein Opus 100
We leave the three great masterpieces of last week’s discussion and now look at some far less known and underappreciated works. They are the songs of Opus 98,99, and 100. Opus 98 is the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, (to the distant beloved) 1816, the Opus 99 song Der Mann von Wort 1816, and the Opus 100 song Merkenstein (re the Merkenstein ruins) 1814. Despite the “Ode to Joy” of the ninth symphony, the Missa Solemnis, and countless songs Beethoven wrote in his lifetime, he is not thought of as a great composer for the voice. Perhaps it is due to the stature of his incredible symphonic writings, his piano works, and his chamber music overshadowing all else but his vocal work is controversial. I have talked to many singers who truly dislike his vocal writing or at least don’t enjoy singing it. They claim that Beethoven didn’t understand the voice and wrote very awkwardly for it. Also, that it didn’t show the voice in it’s most comfortable and flattering range and so forth. Down the road in this blog we are going to be having another guest writer, Thomas Wikman, who is a great expert on the human voice, having taught voice and conducted great vocal works throughout his career. He will be doing a guest blog on the Missa Solemnis, one of Beethoven’s true masterpieces. Perhaps we can get him to comment on this controversial aspect of Beethoven’s writing. Nonetheless, as someone who is not an expert on the voice, let me say that I love listening to Beethoven’s vocal music. I love the songs and I think that you have to take them for what they are supposed to be, a pouring out from the heart. And in the Opus 98, die ferne Geliebte, we find one of the earliest ever song cycles composed. Of course we know that Schubert, Schumann, etc. wrote great song cycles but this one by Beethoven is one of the first, if not the first. It’s about a man’s longing for his distant love and how the separation pains his soul. And in the spirit of the romantic era that we’re entering, here’s an appeal to nature to convey his love to the distant one. I’m sure you will enjoy the recording that’s included with the great Fritz Wunderlich. I found a unique recording of it that has the subtitles embedded. Enjoy! I wasn’t so successful finding translations for the others but I think you’ll enjoy listening to the music anyway as I have. I must confess as a chamber musician and as a symphonic player I was unfamiliar with this music. How delighted and thrilled I am to now see a different part of Beethoven’s soul. Please enjoy As I have.
An die Ferne Geliebte Opus 98 Fritz Wunderlich
https://youtu.be/AMVKKgqrkzs
Der Mann von Wort Opus 99
https://youtu.be/efN_o2tQnwU
Merkenstein Opus 100
https://youtu.be/vQJAiAPdHVY
Week 36
Piano Sonata No.28 Opus 101 in A Major
We now enter Beethoven’s last style period, perhaps his greatest. We remember how he came to Vienna in 1791 or so as a great pianist/improviser and a promising composer. He soon mastered writing symphonies, chamber music, piano and string sonatas, and other incidental pieces. We also remember his Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802 that acknowledged to the world and to himself, his growing deafness. He became very lonely, not only because of his hearing issues, but because of his unsuccessful attempts at love and relationships. In spite of this, from that man’s heart and mind came some of the most glorious music ever. The great Eroica Symphony, the Fifth Symphony, the Seventh Symphony, five piano concertos, 11 string quartets, violin and cello sonatas, and all those great piano sonatas. The list goes on. He became widely acknowledged as the greatest composer alive. But we are now at the year 1816 and our hero is almost completely deaf. He has had some pretty severe financial problems. He has had great difficulty with his nephew Carl and has been in a struggle for guardianship of him. Consequently, there has been about a four-year hiatus in his composing. This is not a total gap but relative to what his usual output was, it was very sparse. When he resumed - what masterpieces he produced! Five monumental piano sonatas and the Diabelli Variations, five incredible string quartets and the Grosse Fugue, the Missa Solemnis, and of course the ninth Symphony!
What is so important about this last style period of his life? Musicians look at this music and have different opinions about it and what it all means, but most agree that Beethoven had chartered new musical waters. He stretched musical forms, expanded instrumental possibilities, created unique textures, challenged interpreters, etc. But far more importantly, it was as if he used music to show us the universe and what he saw in it. He entered another world and allowed us to catch a glimpse of it. This other world seen through his music is not only sublime and surreal but also generous and loving. You can hear longing and despair in it, but also beauty and the gift of life.
When I was much younger, probably in my 20s, I used to cringe and recoil when I would hear some old-timer say something like, “Well Sonny, you would really need to be much older to understand late Beethoven.” I would say, to myself of course because I respected my elders, “Oh come on cut it out. I get it! I played all the notes in tune at the right time and I felt the music.” Well I’m one of those old-timers now and those geezers were absolutely right. Take my word for it please. Please. There is so much in this music. One must listen to it over and over and let it into your soul.
Our first example from this period is the Piano Sonata No.28 Opus 101 in A Major. I love how gentle and welcoming the opening movement is. Next comes a very spirited march, then a very reflective slow movement in a minor, and we finish with a very interesting movement that is fugal in nature. Beethoven was not known as a great writer of fugues but I think this movement can dispute that notion. I will include Andras Schiff’s lecture on this sonata. I will also attach two complete performances, one by Daniel Barenboim the other by the great Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Piano Sonata No. 28 Opus 101 in A Major - Lecture by
Sir Andras Schiff
https://youtu.be/xfXAuP2ugQ0
Piano Sonata No. 28 Opus 101 in A Major - Vladimir Ashkenazy
https://youtu.be/t1obWHQANPk
Piano Sonata no 28 Opus 101 in A Major - Daniel Barenboim
https://youtu.be/lZBkxRy2hoo
Week 37
Books, Quotes, and More
Anyone intrigued by the life of this great man should acquaint themselves with two wonderful books. Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven and Jan Swafford’s Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. In these volumes, not only is there great insight into his music, but you also get a feeling through his daily life just who this great man was.
Thayer was born in 1817 and died in 1897. He studied at Harvard and became a researcher and librarian. He was also a music lover, although he didn’t seem to play an instrument. He was frustrated by the lack of a great biography of Beethoven. There were so many inconsistencies between the ones that existed, the accounts by Schindler, Ries, and even Czerny. So, in a remarkable example of scholarship and dedication, he decided that he would write one. On his own dime so to speak, he moved to Germany and began to learn the German language. Serious publications in musical scholarship were always published in German those days. Back-and-forth to America he came due to financial constraints, finally landing a job with the International Herald Tribune, which afforded him enough money to continue his research. Eventually he became an ambassador to Trieste, a steady position with income and location that allowed him to continue his work. The biography is incomplete for he died in 1897. He only took Beethoven to the year 1817, curiously the year that Thayer was born. His work was completed by some of his fellow researchers, Dieters, Riemann, and Krehbiel. In my opinion, Alexander Wheelock Thayer is a true hero dedicated to Beethoven and true scholarship.
Jan Swofford curiously also was a Harvard graduate, balanced by graduate school at Yale. I urge you to read his Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph for it is not only full of information and insight into his music and life, Swofford also being a composer, but it is also so wonderfully easy to read, almost conversational. As an aside, let me say that it is available for download to a Kindle device for very little money. It’s pretty easy to have it in your library and well worth it.
I’m including here some of my favorite quotes from Beethoven himself. The first I find humorous but also very true. It’s often said that Beethoven wrote what he heard even when he was deaf, without regard for how difficult it would be to sing or to play on an instrument. What he composed was the truth.
“Do you think I give a damn about you and your pathetic violin?”
We’ve mentioned before Beethoven’s disdain for aristocracy:
“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.” (Good for you Beethoven!)
Beethoven on music and his music: “What I have in my heart and soul - must find a way out. That's the reason for music.”
“The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are.”
“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.”
“I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.”
“I haven't a single friend; I must live alone. But well I know that God is nearer to me than to the others of my art; I associate with Him without fear, I have always recognized and understood Him, and I have no fear for my music, -it can meet no evil fate. Those who understand it must become free from all the miseries that the others drag with them.”
“What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is subject to the changes of time, and - more's the pity- the fashions of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock and no wanton hand will ever venture to defile it. Then, let every man do that which is right, strive with all his might towards the goal which can never be obtained, develop to the last breath the gifts with which the gracious Creator has endowed him, and never cease to learn. For life is short, art eternal.”
“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.”
“Music can change the world.”
It is said that these were Beethoven’s last words on his deathbed. Reflect on this how this great man summed up his life with the corners of his lips turned up.
“Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est. (Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.)
I’m including a link below to a symphony by one of Beethoven’s students Ferdinand Ries. It’s interesting that you’ll hear the motive from Beethoven’s great fifth Symphony here quite a bit. You will also hear that while it’s reasonable listening it doesn’t have the depth, cohesion, and message that you hear in the master’s writing.
Ferdinand Reese Symphony No 5 in D Minor
Week 38
Beethoven's Letters by Elizabeth Morrison
Of the many wonders to be found in Beethoven’s letters, the most amazing to me is the simple fact of their existence. Beethoven, our most cherished composer, whose music is now, in 2020, keeping many of us alive, turns out to have dashed off notes–to friends, patrons, relatives, lovers and (above all) publishers–just like anyone else.
Of course, I am here addressing people who have followed Bob Swan’s Beethoven Blog through these many weeks, encountering masterpiece after masterpiece. After reading Week 37’s entry, you may now be immersed in Thayer or Swofford’s biographies. I think you would enjoy an encounter with Beethoven’s letters as well. They will give you another window into his genius, through words written by Beethoven himself.
Though Beethoven often calls himself a “poor, lazy correspondent,” and at times apologizes for having taken months or years to respond to a friend, he was actually quite prolific. I have not been able to find out how many letters he wrote; Google appears not to know; perhaps no one does. Beethoven’s Letters, from the Dover Books on Music series, claims to contain “Four hundred fifty-seven of the most important” ones, but there are thought to be more, hidden away in private collections and curio cabinets, beyond the reach of scholars and music lovers alike.
If this many letters seem daunting, why not start with Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations, edited, translated and introduced by Michael Hamburger? Here you will find about 200 of them, interspersed with letters and journal entries by Beethoven’s contemporaries, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer, the pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and many more. I must admit that I owned this book for years before I dared to open it. I’m not sure what I was afraid of – perhaps that the letters would be elevated beyond my grasp. But once I picked it up, I saw I had been quite wrong. The letters are fascinating, accessible, revealing and entertaining.
The first impression is of spontaneity. Beethoven, unlike composers like Wagner, Berlioz or Schumann, appears not to have his eye on future publication, nor to be trying to burnish his reputation later on. Hamburger calls Beethoven a careless speller and erratic capitalizer (German capitalizes most nouns; Beethoven doesn’t, unless a word should not be capitalized, in which case he does). His handwriting can be elusive, and he is a relentless punster, sometimes making it difficult to make out exactly what he means. But what comes through is startlingly intimate, a “naked thinking heart, that makes no show,” in the words of John Donne.
To give you a sense of what you will find, here are a few examples. First, a letter to his friend Eleonore von Breuning, written when he was 23:
“Only now that I have spent a whole year in the capital do you hear from me, and yet I have preserved you in my memory both vividly and constantly. Very often I conversed with you and with your dear family, only often without the inner calm for which I would have wished. It was then that I remembered the fatal quarrel, during which my behavior appeared so despicable. But it could not be undone…It is true, dear friend, that your noble character assures me of your forgiveness; but it is said that the most sincere repentance is that in which one admits his own faults; this was my intention. Now let us draw the curtain on this whole episode…”
He then goes on to offer Eleonore the dedication to his Variations on the Theme “Se vuol ballare” from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. I, for one, would certainly have forgiven him for whatever it was he did!
In this letter to Franz Hoffmeister, one of his publishers, written in 1802, we see another side of Beethoven. Written two years before Beethoven took back his dedication of the Eroica Symphony from Napoleon, you can see his feelings already beginning to build.
“May the devil ride the whole lot of you, gentlemen–what, suggest to me that I should write a sonata of that sort? As the time of the revolutionary fever–well, at that time it would have been worth considering, but now that everything is trying to get back into the old rut, Buonoparte has made his concordat with the Pope–a sonata of that sort? If at least it were a Missa pro Sancta Maria or a Vespers, etc.–well, in that case I should immediately take hold of the brush and write down a Credo in Unum in enormous notes weighing a pound each.”
The many letters Beethoven wrote to his publishers are especially interesting, as they have references to his compositions, his finances, and his politics. In a single letter to the publisher Nikolaus Simrock, from 1794, he compliments the publisher’s work (“I must congratulate you on the engraving, which is pleasant to look at, clear, and legible, seriously, if you continue in this way, you will soon be the very paragon of engravers.”); deplores business dealings (“I have been looking out for an agent, and have found an extremely decent, efficient man for you. All you need to do now is to write to me or to him, proposing your terms. He asks for a third discount. May the devil understand your bargaining; I wash my hands of it.”); and weighs in on a political question of the day (“Here they have been arresting several persons of importance; they say that a revolution was about to break out–but I believe that as long as the Austrians have brown beer and sausages, they’ll never revolt.”).
On the other hand, you will rarely find Beethoven discussing his music itself. What he wanted to say in his music, he said; he felt no need to explain. This note about the 6th Symphony, the Pastoral, is one of the few times he does drop a hint, and it comes not from a letter but from an 1807 entry in his Sketchbook, which Hamburger includes in his book.
“It is left to the listener to discover the situation. “Sinfonia caracteristica” or a reminiscence of country life. Every kind of painting loses by being carried too far in instrumental music. “Sinfonia pastorella.” Anyone who has the faintest idea of country life will not need many descriptive titles to be able to imagine for himself what the author intends. Even without a description one will be able to recognize it all, for it is a record of sentiments rather than a painting in sounds.”
I hope you can sense from these few examples the way Beethoven’s letters might draw you in. They reflect his daily concerns, yet his unfathomable genius never quite leaves your awareness. The contrast, indeed, is part of their attraction. But there is also the sadness of reading about his struggles with his health and above all his deafness. In a very affectionate 1801 letter to his friend Karl Amenda, he writes,
“I wish you were with me, for your Beethoven lives most unhappily, in discord with Nature and with the Creator. More than once I have cursed the latter for exposing his creatures to the slightest accident, so that often the loveliness blossoms are destroyed and broke by it. You must be told that the finest part of me, my hearing, has deteriorated. Already then, at the time you were with me, I felt signs of this and kept quiet about it; now it has grown progressively worse. Whether it can be cured remains to be seen…”
I found it heartrending to read, in letter after letter, of Beethoven’s many ailments, including abdominal pain, joint pain, eye inflammation, and much more. He died at age 56, having suffered greatly and having been profoundly deaf for at least eleven years.
Which brings us to his most famous letter, the Heiligenstadt Testament, which he wrote in 1802, when he was 31 years old. Bob pointed you to this unique document in Week 7’s blog entry. It is a letter written to his brothers Carl and Johann from the resort town of Heiligenstadt, where his doctor Johann Adam Schmidt had sent him in pursuit of a cure for his deafness. The cure was not to be, but in the period of rest and reflection Beethoven put his feelings on paper openly, as he was never able to do in person.
Perhaps it is not strictly speaking a letter, as it was never sent, and Beethoven guarded it carefully for the rest of his life. It was found among his papers after his death, and published several months later. However, Hamburger includes it in his book, in the same chronological order as other, more conventional letters, and it is very moving to come across it almost casually, between letters to two of his publishers.
As Bob wrote, “Beethoven confessed to his brothers, and subsequently to the world, his despair. He admitted his thoughts of suicide, but felt that he would be betraying his art to do so. This is why he is my hero.” Despite his personal agony, Beethoven chose to go on, and to give us the incomparable masterpieces still to come. Even if you have already read the Testament, I hope you will go back and read through it again. That we can hear these echoes of Beethoven’s thoughts from the distance of 250 years, is a great privilege and a great joy.
Link Here to Heiligenstadt Testament
Link Here to Beethoven’s Letters by Michael Hamburger
Missing Links from previous email:
Se vuol ballere variations - Yehudi Menuhin, violin and Wilhelm Kempff, pianoBeethoven Symphony #6 in F Major Opus 68 - Two historically important performances.
Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic (1978)
Arturo Toscanini (1938)
Elizabeth Morrison and Bob Swan are old friends, having met at Norwalk Youth Symphony, in Norwalk, CT, when they were teenagers. While Bob went on to a distinguished career in the Chicago Symphony, Elizabeth became a professional writer. She is the author of four books on health and nutrition, including the New York Times Bestseller Body Type Diet, two books on Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and a book on telepathic animal communication, Wisdom of the Animals. She has never forgotten her love of cello playing, and has written over 60 articles on music, focusing on chamber music and music by women composers. She is honored to be a guest contributor to Bob’s Beethoven Blog.
Week 39
Beethoven Cello and Piano Sonatas
Beethoven wrote five sonatas for piano and cello. They are: Opus 5 No 1 in F Major and No 2 in G minor both written in 1795; Opus 69 in A Major written in 1808; and Opus 102 No 1 in C Major and No 2 in D Major both written in 1815. You will notice that each grouping falls in a different one of Beethoven’s style periods. The Opus 102 sonatas share most of the characteristics of the last period. Concise use of material, intellect, writing sometimes ethereal and distant, sometimes quite aggressive. There is, however, always that mysterious looking over the emotional and psychological horizon showing us his view of his mind and the universe. Keep your minds open as you listen to these masterpieces and let Beethoven in.
https://youtu.be/k0Mavok879A and https://youtu.be/ifLpGGuoDo4
Please play the above two links one after the other in order to hear the Sonata Op. 102 No 1 played by the great Janos Starker. You will hear in his playing a wonderful purity of approach. His intonation is perfect and he plays with immaculate precision and taste. When I was a student at Indiana University Starker was the primary cello teacher. He had a wonderful class of students who all played with the same musical integrity. He had his notion of what great cello playing was and it didn’t matter to him what was fashionable at the time. He tried to play in the same style as Emmanuel Feuermann and that school. I remember how he used to rail against what he called tonal discrepancies, distortions caused by rash, inattentive or thoughtless playing. In addition, some people preferred a more aggressive, lush, romantic approach. Of course that will be always more popular but Starker would be undeterred. He stuck to his musical guns. While I admired his prowess then I admire it even more now.
https://youtu.be/wfs9WXfJWM4
Listen now to Opus 102 No2 played by the incomparable Mstislav Rostropovich cello and Sviatoslav Richter piano. What a contrast in style from Starker! This Russian style of playing is far more aggressive and out front. Many would say it’s more emotional. Well if that’s what extroverted means then it is. I love his playing as much as I love Starker’s approach. Good is good. Isn’t it fortunate that we don’t have to choose either red wine or white wine? I hope you will enjoy and revel in these two fantastic sonatas as performed by two of the leading virtuosos of the 20th century.
Week 40
The Hammerklavier
In 1817 Thomas Broadwood, one of the sons of the John Broadwood & Sons piano company of London, met Beethoven in Vienna. He told him that he wanted to present him with one of his firm’s best instruments since Beethoven was the greatest musician/composer alive. This piano was grander in scale than what Beethoven had. It had a greater range, a complete octave more. More sophisticated pedals and stringing apparatus also enhanced the sound of the famed Broadwood instruments. Inspired by these prospects, Beethoven began writing a new huge sonata for it well before it even arrived, the Sonata in Bb Major opus 106, the “Hammerklavier”. Hammerklavier (hammer keyboard) is the German term for fortepiano - what we now simply call the piano. The Broadwood piano made its long journey from London by ship through the Straights of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean Sea to Trieste, and then by cart to Vienna. Even though he could barely hear it, the new owner reveled in its possibilities. As you listen to the sonata, you’ll notice Beethoven’s use of the extremes, the louds and softs, the highs and lows (heaven and earth). Here is a link to photos and more of Beethoven’s Broadwood Hammerklavier!
https://www.worldpianonews.com/historical/beethoven-broadwood/
The sonata has long beguiled, challenged, and perplexed pianists and listeners alike. There is its great length, its monstrous technical difficulties, unusual key juxtapositions, and almost strange fugal writing. And then there is that wondrously profound slow movement in F# minor, a key rather remote to the sonata’s home key of Bb. This movement is long! Performances of it alone vary from 13’ to 22’! It is transformative and powerful enough to touch your soul if you’ll let it.
This sonata is regarded by many musicians as one of the most important sonatas, if not pieces of music, ever written! I certainly agree. I love this piece and would be happy to have it be the last music I ever heard.
I’m including links parts 1 and 2 to Andras Schiff’s lecture on the Hammerklavier Sonata below. If you have a score to the piece I recommend following along. Both his playing and verbal insights are revealing.
http://download.guardian.co.uk/sys-audio/Arts/Culture/2006/12/13/03-29_bflatmaj_op106.mp3
http://download.guardian.co.uk/sys-audio/Arts/Culture/2006/12/13/04-29_bflatmaj_106_2.mp3
Here are three wonderful performances of the sonata representing different generations of music making. The first is by the great Solomon (1902-1988). His full name was Solomon Cutner but he was known professionally as Solomon. He must have really arrived I suppose, not unlike present icons such as Tiger or Madonna. But what a wonderful pianist!
https://youtu.be/YKlLPe86Flk
Next the ever-elusive Glenn Gould. Not the slowness of his opening tempo compared to the other two.
https://youtu.be/O09CkVbl4RQ
And finally, the brilliant young Yuja Wang!
The Hammerklavier, Op.106
https://youtu.be/E17EsNWanzQ
Week 41
Beethoven: A Commentary on a Master
Guest Presenter Foley Schuler
I have asked our friend Foley Schuler, the afternoon host on Blue Lake Radio, to share with us his thoughts on the elements of anguish, pain, and despair as heard in Beethoven’s music. Here is his generous essay. - Bob Swan
Beethoven at the Abyss:
Some Meditations in a Minor Key by Foley Schuler
“Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.” ―E.M. Cioran
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” ―William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Beethoven first mentions a “buzzing” in his ears in his letters as early as 1796, when he was about 26 years old. It was the first indication of the hearing difficulties that would leave him totally deaf by the time he was in his mid 40s. One wonders about these first inklings--did he perhaps think it merely his imagination, or convince himself that it was something that would go away? (And later, what was the last sound he heard?) I once saw a photo of all of the various ear trumpets Beethoven used during that slow descent into silence--long, curved and coiled atrocities, laid out in display on a large piece of cloth--a dispiriting and surreal sight to say the least, and one I have never forgotten. By his mid 40s, with 10 years left to live (he would die in 1827 at the age of 56), he was no longer able to converse unless he passed written notes back and forth to his colleagues, visitors and friends. He was also, of course, all the while writing some of his greatest music.
To find oneself engulfed in total deafness is of course the greatest tragedy that can possibly befall someone who lives their life for--and by--music. Yet Beethoven persevered. What could possibly be added to this well-worn cliche? His struggle in the face of deafness is central to Beethoven’s legacy--as well as to the mythic image of composer-as-hero that Beethoven projected onto history, and that would, indeed, become one of the defining motifs of Western civilization. This year, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, he has returned to us in all his glory, profundity and power--and yet does so, as always, clad in the armor of that myth, which, while speaking a truth all its own, fights us at every turn in our attempt to know the man.
For me, however, it is not his heroism, but his humanity, that most deeply appeals. More than any other composer, Beethoven braved the abyss. He not only peered over its edge, but submerged himself--lived there. Indeed, that final decade represented a profound journey inward--right up to that edge and beyond. It is there that we encounter King Lear raging on the heath, where we meet Goya painting his “Black Paintings” and William Blake furiously scribbling his Marriage of Heaven and Hell--and it is there that I find the Beethoven I cherish. (Suddenly now, it strikes me that Beethoven, Goya and Blake--the three great visionaries in their respective arts of the Romantic Age--would die within around a year, in some cases mere months, of one another...a cosmic conjunction to explore, no doubt, another time.)
This is the Beethoven who would write, in the now-legendary letter to his brothers Carl and Johann on October 6, 1802--in a tortured cry of despair over his increasing deafness, known, with reference to the Vienna suburb where he was convalescing, as the Heiligenstadt Testament:
"What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life--only Art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence--truly wretched, an excitable body which a sudden change can throw from the best into the worst state..."
It is the deaf Beethoven, left alone in his silence, after the bombast (however artfully expressed) has died down, after the fist shaken at the heavens has fallen to the side, and then opened to accept one’s head buried in it--it is that Beethoven, who, bolstered by Art (with a capital A), embraces the Abyss (also, capital A), for whom I feel the deepest affection and kinship. I picture us furiously passing notes back and forth, perhaps sitting amongst the ruins of the piano he pounded to pieces trying to hear it--the same one whose legs he sawed off, so as to set it on the floor and feel the sounds he couldn’t hear. (As for that image, I could have sworn that when starting out as a writer, I encountered an old engraving in a book, depicting Beethoven and that shattered piano, though I cannot now seem to find it, or any reference to it, anywhere. Did I imagine it? That engraving even inspired an early poem of mine--also now lost, or at least deeply buried. The Italians have that wonderful saying, “If it’s not true, it should be.”) Let this missive be my side of the conversation, thoughts that, as you might gather, are not in E-flat--key of hunting horns and heroic exploits--but perhaps D Minor, which Nigel Tufnel, of the fictitious rock band Spinal Tap, in the famed film mockumentary about the group, declares to be “the saddest of all keys.”
That abyss had always been there, of course, growing in him, opening wider as his hearing deteriorated. One can hear it in the twin blasts (or perhaps the silence in between, or immediately following) that open the Symphony No. 3, “Eroica”--like great lightning flashes illuminating its contours. That “slender Grecian maiden between two Nordic giants” (as Schumann would refer to the Fourth) fleetingly felt its caress. In Fate’s insistent knocking on the door that so famously opens the Fifth Symphony (indeed, the most familiar four notes now in all of music, and yet still startling), we can certainly hear it trying to get in--or escape. The bucolic walk through the Austrian countryside of his Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” slowed the pace a bit so as to smell the roses, but was still part of that same march to the abyss, not to mention the beguiling Allegretto of the Symphony No. 7--that mesmerizing dirge amid this “apotheosis of the dance”--a turning point in the path perhaps. The mighty Ninth was the last hurrah (and what a hurrah it is) before the leap--not to mention the work that, speaking of abysses, started the superstition that no major composer would write beyond a ninth symphony, a legend furthered by the examples of Schubert and Bruckner, to the point that Mahler would go out of his way to title what would have been his Ninth something other than a symphony, calling it instead “Das Lied von Der Erde”--and sure enough, his “Symphony No. 9” that followed would the last one he completed.
This descent into silence was marked by the ascent in Beethoven’s work of the form the composer would make all his own--a form he would take with him on that journey (or, perhaps more accurately, that would take him on it). I am, of course, speaking of the string quartet. The string quartet was nothing new to Beethoven at this point. His works for quartet span the entire of his musical maturity (his first, the Op. 18, in fact, coincide closely with the onset of his deafness in his 20s). Indeed, together, they form one of the most succinct ways of charting his development as a composer. He had inherited the form from its progenitor, Papa Haydn, who had been his teacher in Vienna--though before long he would infuse it with a rigor and invention that would, ultimately, reinvent the quartet for the ages, and in ways that Haydn and Mozart could scarcely could have imagined. Furthermore, he would, in addition to the composer-as- hero archetype he gave us, also create the template (seen more widely in the 20th Century, most prominently with Shostakovich) of the quartet as vehicle for the composer’s deepest, innermost expression--counterposed with the symphony as the composer’s public face.
In the year following his last great public statement--the epochal Ninth Symphony--Beethoven would return with renewed vigor to the intimate form he had explored so brilliantly and invest it with an all-new intensity, autonomy and profundity, and, with the formal innovation and profound depth, both intellectual and emotional, that characterizes Late Period Beethoven, he would continue this exploration right up to the end. Comprising his String Quartets Nos. 12-16 along with the Grosse Fuge, these six works, collectively known as the Late Quartets, are very much of their time--those times being revolutionary--and at the same time ahead of them (they still seems modern, and even ahead our own time). They would be his last major compositions--his final statement--or, if you prefer, his last will and testament.
With these works, the “conversation between four intelligent individuals” upon which we are privileged to eavesdrop (as Goethe had famously described the string quartet) was turned profoundly inward by this composer who could no longer hear a conversation--which is to say, the conversation was now with himself. Elias Canetti’s memorable phrase “Dialogue with the Cruel Partner”--the name he gave to an essay on the diary as conversation with oneself--seems appropriate here, and this dramatization of the various parts of one’s inner self closely resembles what the pioneering Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, nearly 100 years later, would term active imagination. Beethoven, in his final symphony, with its glorious choral apotheosis, had ascended into the heavens. In the Late Quartets he descended into himself. In both cases, he transcended himself--and, though Beethoven wrote no formal requiem, with the act of sonic individuation brought by these extraordinary works for string quartet, he was, in effect, writing one now--for himself. “A requiem out to be quiet music,” Beethoven once remarked. “Memories of the dead require no hubbub.” This one, however, had it all--everything from heartfelt introspection to profound fury, from deepest melancholy to music that over brims with the fullness of life.
For many out there, it would be the Ninth Symphony, I imagine, they would select as that single work of Beethoven’s to take with them for companionship on the proverbial desert island--and understandably. For me, however, I think it would be--if I might cheat and include a group of works--these Late Quartets, If further forced, though, to narrow it down from there, I might well choose the remarkable work known as the Grosse Fuge, of “Great Fugue.”
Originally written to be the final movement Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130, the Grosse Fuge presents--rather, confronts--the listener with an immense double fugue of staggering depth and volcanic intensity. Though reflecting Beethoven’s immersion during this period in the fugues of Bach, the Great Fugue is, in reality, unlike anything else that had been heard up to that time--and really ever since. It stands alone outside of time, outside of Beethoven’s output, outside the string quartet, perhaps even outside of music itself. It would prove too overwhelming for audiences of Beethoven’s time, and was universally condemned by the critics of the day-- though later assessment would deem it utterly essential, with Stravinsky describing it as "an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever.”
Beethoven’s publisher, fearing the liability posed by the Great Fugue for the quartet’s commercial success, charged Karl Holz--violinist with Schuppanzigh String Quartet, which debuted the Grosse Fuge, and was a confidant of Beethoven in his last years--with the unenviable task of convincing Beethoven to substitute a more conventional alternative ending. Shockingly, Beethoven, with very little resistance or hesitation, agreed to do so--and to assign the Grosse Fuge its own separate opus number, Op. 133. Why the notoriously stubborn composer was so readily persuaded to make the change remains of the many enigmas of this most enigmatic work. It would seem unlikely that concern for the audience's delicate sensibilities drove the decision. Disregard for the conventional tastes of the time is part and parcel of innovation, and, in this case, also a reminder that the appeal, intrigue and power of the string quartet lay in the fact that the first audience for the music is always the players themselves.
Some have suggested that money had something to do with it. Finances were Beethoven’s Achilles’ heel; He was nearly always in dire straits, and his publisher had offered to pay extra for the new ending. Another driving force, of course, was likely the music itself. I would surmise that he already saw the Great Fugue for what it was--another entire world unto itself--and was willing to follow where it may lead. Thus it was entirely natural to have it breaking off from this other mass and floating further out into the unknown...to drift in the abyss and toward (and clearing the way for) what was to come.
In this case, that meant the awe-inspiring String Quartet in C# Minor, Op. 131. This deeply compelling work, in its way also unclassifiable, bursts the traditionally four movement form at the seams with its seven continuous movements, each in a different key, played without pause in what Beethoven would deem his own personal favorite, and indeed, the most perfect of all his compositions. Upon hearing it Schubert remarked, "After this, what is left for us to write?" Schumann said that this quartet, along Op. 127, possessed a "grandeur...which no words can express. They seem to me to stand on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination." Schubert, who served as a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral, only to die the following year, arranged to have the Op. 131 performed at his bedside as he himself was dying, wanting it to be the last music he ever heard. (And if I allow myself this digression, it is because I too have a special love of the work, and admit an ulterior motive in further linking it to the Grosse Fuge--namely that the gods governing such things may look the other way and grant me another desert island work, and that I might take the Op. 131 with me as well.)
Opus numbers and other distinctions aside, these Late Quartets are really one great work, with the Great Fugue at its mysterious heart. Countless analyses have attempted to delve into the structure of the Grosse Fuge, with conflicting results, further revealing the paradoxes at its elusive core. I will leave some sort of note-by-note dissection--the sort so thoroughly resisted by the work--to other hands, more interested in such futile endeavors. Instead, I hope, humbly, that these words may inspire and entice you, with all the struggles you are facing, to join in this journey of a lifetime. One needs to see it as well as hear it--which is precisely why I’ve included a video of its performance here--if only that one may properly experience the element of titanic human struggle involved. Mahler would later say that a symphony “should contain the entire universe,” but here, already, Beethoven has crammed an entire universe into a single 15 minute movement for string quartet. These writhings on the part of the performers--are they death throes, or birth pangs? Or both? Arnold Steinhardt of the Guarneri String Quartet calls it "Armageddon...the chaos out of which life itself evolved.”
This would seem what poet T.S. Eliot was getting at in the famous opening of The Four Quartets--his own late-career masterpiece, and believed by many to be a literary response to Beethoven’s Late Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls
echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.
In Beethoven’s end, was, indeed, his beginning--as it is for all of us. This year, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth--amid a global pandemic, civil unrest, and a bitterly contested presidential election (and, as if that weren’t enough, at the time of this writing, NASA has just announced that an asteroid is heading our way)--we look to this colossal figure, who also lived in and survived tumultuous times, and not only defined them but helped transform them into the modern world we now share.
And in his despair was his joy. It is precisely the depths at which Beethoven so often lived, and for so long, that made possible the profound uplift of his Ninth Symphony--and if the “Ode to Joy” can resound throughout the ages, it is only because he fully lived his despair. One thinks here of the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s reason for declining Freud’s offer of analysis: “I don’t want to get rid of my demons, lest my angels leave with them.”
I picture Beethoven, in that moment when he had just finished “conducting” (conducting, that is, without having been able to hear a thing) the premier of his Ninth Symphony--that moment just before a member of the orchestra (one imagines, the concertmaster) took Beethoven by the shoulders and turned him around to face the thunderous applause he could not hear. I think of him in that moment, as he turned, between facing the orchestra (that world) and facing...the world, between facing history and facing eternity--and in that turning became a giant with the contours of a man, a man driven inward and outward...one who could endure the myth we have made of him. I think of the music he heard in that moment, his last quartets still stretching like a vast sea before him, and I myself struggle to hear the silence he heard then--what in earlier ages might have been referred to as the “music of the spheres”--the deep silence that is the sound of infinite possibility.
_____________________
Here are some links that Foley also wanted to share with you.
The Alban Berg Quartet performs Beethoven’s String Quartet the Grosse Fugue in Bb Major Opus 133
https://youtu.be/13ygvpIg-S0
The Alban Berg Quartet performs Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C# Minor, Op. 131:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA4_FnH49tA&t=12s
Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament, read by Irish actor Ciarán Hinds, with pianist David Quigley performing the Adagio Sostenuto from Sonata in C# Minor, op.27, "Moonlight":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5nprz7d5zQ&t=33s
Actor Alec Guiness reads Four Quartets by T.S. Eliott:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccupYGfiDEw
Week 42
Opus 108: Twenty-Five Scottish Songs
By Elizabeth Morrison
Wait, twenty-five what?
Bob’s Beethoven Blog has now taken us deep into the period we know as “late Beethoven.” Last week, Foley Schuler showed us Beethoven staring into the Abyss. Two weeks ago, Bob described the monumental Hammerklavier Sonata, opus 106, as one that “has long beguiled, challenged, and perplexed pianists and listeners alike.” Now we are looking at a set of folk song settings for voice, piano, violin and cello, that has not so much beguiled or challenged as whizzed right by the heads of Beethoven lovers everywhere. Are we plunging from the sublime to the ridiculous?
No, but we are plunging from the famous to the obscure. Back in Week 35, discussing the songs of Beethoven’s Opus 98, 99, and 100, Bob confessed to being unfamiliar with many of Beethoven’s songs. That goes double for Opus 108. Who would guess that the folk-song arrangement was the single genre where Beethoven was most prolific? Between the years 1809 and 1820, he made an astounding 179 folk-song settings. Granted, it takes a good bit less time to dash off an arrangement of Auld Lang Syne, say, than a symphony or a string quartet. But still.
Even more surprising, these songs are in English, a language Beethoven barely spoke. It all came about through a Scotsman named George Thompson, a resident of Edinburgh, who had jumped belatedly on a craze for folk song collecting. Rather than enlisting local musicians, Thompson hoped to out-do other collectors by soliciting arrangements from the great composers of the day, most notably Haydn. When they ran out of steam, Thompson approached Beethoven himself.
There was much back and forth about bread and butter issues; one of Beethoven’s letters makes clear he knows Haydn had received a payment of one pound per song. But at length a deal was struck, and Thompson began sending Beethoven songs to arrange. One of the odd parts of the arrangement was that he gave Beethoven many tunes without a text attached. Beethoven complained, asking how he was expected to produce an arrangement when he didn’t know what the song was even about. It turned out Thompson was also soliciting poets of the day for new versions of the words, whether to ward off Scottish dialect or to clean up vulgarities in the original is unclear.
If you look through Beethoven’s work by opus number, this set of 25 is the only set of folk songs you will see. What happened to the other 154? They are listed as “WoO,” which stands for “werke ohne Opuszahl,” or works without opus number. Apparently, receiving an opus number from a composer confers a kind of status on a work; it is part of your official oeuvre, not something you wrote for a pound. The complete list of Beethoven’s arrangements includes more Scottish songs, many Welch and Irish songs, six English popular songs, and a few of “diverse nationalities.”
Since they have an opus number, the Opus 108 songs are presumably the ones Beethoven liked best. You can listen to them in many versions on Youtube, and I recommend you do so. A link is below. I hope you find them as delightful as I do. Beethoven took them seriously and called them “compositions.” However, sales were disappointing and Thompson seems to have found them a bit Beethoven-y. “He composes for posterity,” he groused, and asked that they be toned down a little. Beethoven predictably replied, “I am not accustomed to retouching my compositions; I have never done so, certain of the truth that any partial change alters the character of the composition.”
I’m glad he didn’t. For a taste, try this one, Music, Love and Wine. It is the first of the set, and takes up the age-old question of which of these is more vital for our happiness. Here are the words:
O let me Music hear
Night and Day!
Let the voice and let the Lyre
Dissolve my heart, my spirit's fire;
Music and I ask no more,
Night or Day!
Hence with colder world,
Hence, Adieu!
Give me. Give me but the while,
The brighter heav'n of Ellen's smile,
Love and then I ask no more,
Oh, would you?
Hence with this world of care
I say too;
Give me but the blissful dream,
That mingles in the goblet's gleam,
Wine and then I ask no more,
What say you?
Music may gladden Wine,
What say you?
Tendrils of the laughing Vine
Around the Myrtle well may twine,
Both may grace the Lyre divine,
What say you?
What if we all agree,
What say you?
I will list the Lyre with thee,
And he shall dream of Love like me,
Brighter than the wine shall be,
What say you?
Refrain
Love, Music, wine agree,
True, true, true!
Round then round the glass, the glee,
And Ellen in our toast shall be!
Music, wine and Love agree,
True, true, true!
This charming rendition is from an album called Beethoven Folksong Settings. It really is wonderful. Of course you will hear the piano, but if you listen closely you can also hear the violin and cello adding their tones. Beethoven made the arrangements so that they worked without the string instruments, in case they were not available, but were much enhanced if they were.
There is yet another benefit to Opus 108: this is Beethoven we can partake in directly. We may not be able to play his string quartets, or have had the good fortune, like Bob, to have performed the Eroica Symphony 100 times; but we can print these Beethoven songs and try them ourselves. How about Auld Lang Syne? The link is to a website called IMSLP, which stands for the International Music Score Library Project, an incredible resource where you can find almost every piece of music ever written that is in the public domain. Open the link, print out the music, and you can sing Beethoven’s very arrangement (remotely) with your friends on New Year’s Eve! I certainly plan to.
Links:
Beethoven’s 25 Scottish Songs (many choices) YouTube
Music, Love and Wine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erj8-ysJbV0 YouTube
Auld Lang Syne (sheet music) IMSLP
Elizabeth Morrison and Bob Swan are old friends, having met at Norwalk Youth Symphony, in Norwalk, CT, when they were teenagers. While Bob went on to a distinguished career in the Chicago Symphony, Elizabeth became a professional writer. She is the author of four books on health and nutrition, including the New York Times Bestseller Body Type Diet, two books on Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and a book on telepathic animal communication, Wisdom of the Animals. She has never forgotten her love of cello playing, and has written over 60 articles on music, focusing on chamber music and music by women composers. She is honored to be a guest contributor to Bob’s Beethoven Blog.
Week 43
Piano Sonatas
Beethoven considered his sonata in Bb opus 106, the “Hammerklavier” to be his finest. I love all of them but it too is my favorite. But then there are the three sonatas opus 109 in E Major, opus 110 in Ab Major, and opus 111 in c minor! With these masterpieces Beethoven leaves us with 32 brilliant piano sonatas! They have touched us with tragedy, pathos, humor, love, tenderness, and whatever the human heart can hold. Listening to them how could they not be my favorites?!
As is my custom here I will include links to Andras Schiff’s lectures on these wondrous pieces. I must say that his lectures on all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas are a must for anyone, musician or not.
They are replete with historical perspectives, interpretive suggestions, just the right amount of descriptive analysis, and beautiful piano playing. I just can’t say enough about Schiff’s genius.
Opus 109 begins in such a sunny smiling way followed shortly by a rather questioning second subject. There follows a furious scherzo in e minor, Then the most beautiful E Major theme, a sarabande which is a rather ancient Spanish dance form found in many Baroque dance suites. Six variations follow before the movement ends with a simple restatement of that wonderful theme.
Opus 110 starts in feeling much like how op 109 ended. It’s key of Ab Major is a major third away from the previous sonata, the same interval that much of 109 was based on. It is also in the same 3/4 meter. A beautiful love song appears near the beginning. Some say that it was written for Antoinie Brentano, presumably Beethoven’s great “Immortal Beloved”, the woman he loved but couldn’t have. And so it was with women, friends, and most relationships for our hero. A raucous almost sarcastic scherzo follows and then a most profound third movement Adagio. Full of great sadness and resignation there appears a recitative section, a section without rhythm, almost declaratory. It’s “melody” is a quote from the great St John Passion by J.S. Bach where Christ declares “Es Ist Vollbracht” - “It is consummated”. Of course we must ask ourselves what Beethoven was telling us. Then comes a glorious fugue, a form he used more and more in his late style period. Then the recitative returns rhythmically even more ambiguously and tragically followed by another fugue using the earlier fugue subject inverted, turned upside down. Opus 110 is the only one of the final three sonatas that concludes with a powerful, spirited, and glorious ending.
Opus 111 is only two movements long. It begins in C minor, once again a major third it away from the ending of the previous sonata. It begins very seriously and the whole adagio introduction is characterized by diminished seventh chords and dotted rhythms giving it almost the feeling of a French Overture from the baroque era. It’s followed by a very fugal movement whose theme contains a sequence of notes that Beethoven became fascinated with more and more in his life. A sequence of four notes that contained an augmented second. An augmented second is 1/2 step bigger than a major third. This difficult and rather wild movement subsides into a very peaceful conclusion. Then follows one of the great pieces of music ever conceived. He titled it Arietta, little aria or song. Variations follow, more and more intricate. Trills, rumblings in the lowest reaches of the instrument, high notes seemingly touching heaven all quietly bring to a conclusion one of the greatest contributions a single man had ever made to humankind, the 32 Piano Sonatas! Thank you Beethoven.
I do realize just how trivial these précis will seem to some. They do to me. This blog was never intended to offer in-depth analysis of these pieces. I urge you all to go to the Adam Schiff lectures and attentatively listen to them. After that listen to his performances of them which I will also attach. I must confess that I have been so moved by listening to these late sonatas and studying with score in hand and seeing what marvels are held there. They take one on a journey that’s incredibly emotional but also intellectually inspiring. As I’ve said many times Beethoven is my hero.
Schiff Lecture Opus 109 https://youtu.be/I57VVPAaUsI
Schiff Lecture Opus 110 https://youtu.be/L8YZdJK5qLE
Schiff Lecture Opus 111 https://youtu.be/DdYRCOMAqnA
Schiff Performance Opus 109 https://youtu.be/15EFrXnj49Q
Schiff Performance Opus 110 https://youtu.be/f4trghQBzBo
Schiff Performance Opus 111 https://youtu.be/YKwNlP0s4WY
Week 44
The Diabelli Variations, Opus 120
We can wonder if it was just fun, or vanity in wanting to be associated with the best composers alive, or curiosity in seeing what would happen. Nonetheless, in 1819 Anton Diabelli (1781-1858) wrote a waltz theme described by many then and now as banal, cheap, trite, a mere trifling. Diabelli, a publisher and composer of more lightweight musical ditties, then presented it to the greatest composers alive. Schubert, Ries, Czerny, the 11-year-old Franz Liszt, a total of 50 of them including Beethoven. Each was to write a single variation. His idea then was to publish them all together. Our irascible hero wanted nothing to do with the project. He thought that Diabelli’s theme was beneath him and declined. But his mind clearly changed for over the next four years he wrote a set of 33 variations that some have called the greatest of all piano works ever!
A theme with variations is one of the oldest forms in music. The greatest example of the form from the Baroque period, 1600c to 1750c, is the Goldberg Variations of J.S. Bach, a theme with 32 variations with the theme recapitulated at the end. (Remember the last movement of the Beethoven opus 109 piano sonata? It is a theme with 6 variations and the theme restated to close it.) It is a form very much in favor during the Classical period, 1740c to 1800c. Decoration, changes of mode, tempo, character, were all common techniques employed. But in Beethoven’s hands, we explore every tiny component of the theme - the little turn at the beginning, the incessantly repeated notes, rests, accompaniments figures, cascading or ascending passages, etc., but more, he takes us to a different world of emotion and psychology. Especially near the end he shows us his world and how he has seen the universe. He finishes with a charming minuet, a not overly fond form for him. Looking over his shoulder maybe? Waving goodbye to the past?
Beethoven titled this piece Große Veränderungen über einen bekannten Deutschen Tanz ("Grand Variations on a well-known German dance"). The word Veranderungen in German not only means variations, but also transformations which is what these feel like to me. This piece is monstrous, over 50’ long. It’s both fun and difficult to listen to. It is diabolically (inevitable, right?) difficult to play. Prepare to be delighted, dazzled, and moved as you listen to this remarkable masterpiece.
I will attach links to some brilliant interpretations plus a session of Stephen Kovacevich coaching a young pianist on the wondrous Diabelli Variations of Beethoven.
Alfred Brendel https://youtu.be/l3qktiSzwMI
Anderszewski https://youtu.be/Wp59KCg_DC
Gregory Sokolov https://youtu.be/pAI4-9yc6kA
Sviatoslav Richter https://youtu.be/dokkniOwSlQ
Stephen Kovacevich https://youtu.be/PjZsCNT7ocE
Week 45
Missa Solemnis by Thomas Wikman
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, opus 123, is a singular work, unmatched in its scope since Bach’s B minor mass. Scored for full orchestra of the time, plus chorus and a quartet of soloists, it represents an overwhelming challenge to all the performers, and perhaps most of all, the conductor. It’s hard to think of any other piece in the standard repertoire that when played by a great conductor, great orchestra, and chorus, that runs so great a chance of not really succeeding at all. I myself have witnessed such performances. I particularly remember certain movements that touched me greatly; Martinon’s Kyrie, Giulinini’s Crucifixus, Solti’s Et vitam venturi, etc.
What is it about this piece that is so daunting? First of all, the demands on the singers are extraordinary; in the Credo alone, there are 28 high B flats for the sopranos, many of them sustained for measures at a time, and at a high dynamic. All of the other choral parts and the solo parts are equally demanding.
Many have laid these problems to the fact that Beethoven was deaf at the time of writing the Mass. But, in fact, he had been deaf for over 20 years by the time he composed the Missa.
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was described by Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance.” The Missa Solemnis could well be described as “the apotheosis of the fugue.” Because of the nature of the text, Beethoven was deprived of two of his most trusted musical forms; namely, the sonata form and the variation form. However, in his later works, Beethoven turned more and more to the fugue, and no work exploits this more than the Missa.
The Kyrie plunges us immediately into the world of the sublime. After a 21-measure orchestral introduction, the chorus enters with massive chords, answered by the soloists, on the word “Kyrie.” In measure 36, the chorus takes up the word “Eleison, in wonderfully mystic polyphony. This continues until the “Christe,” which introduces a key change, and more importantly a time change to triple meter, in the fashion of Renaissance masses. The “Christe’s” smoothly flowing counterpoint is worthy of a Monteverdi. It begins with the soloists and passes to the chorus, which then produces a double-choir texture. As this winds down, we enter the final “Kyrie,” using the same original themes, but not the same music; new keys are explored. A 15-bar coda brings this wonderful movement to a peaceful conclusion.
The Gloria explodes like a rocket, with both the chorus and orchestra playing ascending themes, eventually settling down to chordal exclamations in the classic style, however heightened by Beethoven’s inspirational magic, culminating in a rugged fugue on the words “glorificamus te.” A short modulatory passage by the orchestra brings us to a new key, and a lovely, gracious motet-like passage for the soloists (Gratias animus tibi), twice interrupted by the full forces quoting the opening thematic material. A quiet orchestral interlude leads us to the poignant Qui tollis, cast as a double choir motet, with the soloists being choir I, and the chorus, choir II. The brief, declamatory Quoniam gives way to a wonderful double fugue on the words, In gloria Dei Patris, Amen. Just when one might think it is going to end, Beethoven returns to the opening words and thematic material, Gloria in excelsis Deo; indeed, the movement ends with three repetitions of the word, Gloria!
The Credo opens with a “head motif” that reappears through the movement, with the chorus singing over a striding orchestral accompaniment. A sudden transition and key change bring us to the hushed, mystical Et incarnates est, with the soloists taking the lead, and the chorus supplying a “second choir.” The mood turns very dark for the Crucifixus. This is the most “operatic” of all the movements in the Missa, with the orchestra supplying tremendous “hammer strokes” over the chorus’s powerful declamation, while the soloists sing a “wailing” motif. A brief a cappella setting (6 measures) on the words, Et resurrect leads to a thrilling setting of Et ascendit in coelum, with the chorus and orchestra rocketing scale-wise to their highest register. The movement continues in propulsive fashion until the words, Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, which returns us to the open musical material, but wholly transformed.This yields to one of the greatest movements in all music, the double fugue on the words Et vitam venturi. It starts at a modest tempo, but when the second theme enters, the tempo doubles and produces a fantastically difficult movement to sing and play. It is followed directly by a tremendous Grave, for full orchestra and chorus. The soloists enter with beautiful scale like passages, with the chorus supplying amens beneath them. This whole section acts as a mighty “exhalation,” after all the stormy music that proceeds it. The Credo ends in a very peaceful manner.
The Sanctus is of fairly conservative classical proportions. However, Beethoven being Beethoven, it has some unusual twists. The opening Adagio is for orchestra and soloists, the latter singing in a very low register. It is very atmospheric. The Pleni sunt Coeli and the following Osanna are fine Bachian fugues, which make a wonderful effect sung by the full chorus. But Beethoven marks these movements to be sung by the soloists! Even with Beethoven-era instruments, this is an almost impossible demand on the human voice. Most conductors opt for using the chorus. I’ve heard many performances of this piece, but have never heard these passages sung by the soloists.
The Benedictus is proceeded by a slow, solemn Prelude. In the 32nd measure, a solo violin enters, representing the descent of the Holy Spirit. As the movement proceeds, the chorus chants the text softly in the background. The soloists take up the thread, their theme being and inversion of the violin melody. This is truly music sent from Heaven! It places enormous demands on the soloists for long, sostenuto lines, which tax the extremes of their vocal compass. However, hearing this music sung by a great quartet is magical! Toward the end of the movement, the chorus takes up the quartet’s musical material and bring the Benedictus to a wonderful end!
The Agnus Dei begins in B minor. It is a grand scene, with the soloists spinning long lines, and the chorus functioning as a soft liturgical choir. It begins with the Bass soloist, singing the theme in a deep, profound register. The same material is then taken up by the Alto and Tenor, then finally by all 4 soloists together. It is music of both great sadness and great majesty. A short modulation brings us back to the key of D Major, where the chorus and orchestra pick up a new theme, sort of in the rhythm of Smetana’s “Moldau,” a barcarolle feeling in the chorus, with rushing 16th notes in the strings. This, in turn, gives way to a martial sound of trumpets and drums, all Haydn. But after repeated iterations of the word “Miserere,” brings the movement to a sudden close. No extended “Beethovian” endings for this piece.
There are really only two pieces like this in the repertoire; Bach’s B minor Mass, and this; both are glorious pieces of music!
An amusing note to end this, e.g. the abrupt ending. Georg Solti conducted this in Carnegie Hall. When he reached the end, no one applauded! After about 5-10 seconds, Solti turned to the audience, threw his hands in the air and said, “Dat’s it!”
Arturo Toscanini
Kyrie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYeYjhSJF64
Gloria I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3Zrz26_Uu8
Gloria II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v6Eq47oKxQ&app=desktop
Credo I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo-U29y3NNQ
Credo II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htvaPxCngAg
Sanctus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad9JWa81rNk
Benedictus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0gYD3Nb-yQ
Agnus I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIy9-xpeUlk
Agnus II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BgZJU5NHV0
Herbert Von Karajan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoYJfGdw8fs
Week 46
Beethoven's Symphony No. 9
I was very young and struggling to earn enough money to continue my studies at music school. I gave music lessons, worked in a factory, and played in a few local orchestras in SW Connecticut. I’ll never forget at a New Haven Symphony rehearsal, seeing the viola part to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony on the music stand. I was humbled, intimidated, and excited! The rehearsals and concerts came and went but I’m still not sure what I got out of it. I played all of the notes and reveled in the wonderful sounds. But the grand message of Joy and Brotherhood was completely lost on me. Even so, there is much more to it than that - secrets that Beethoven shared with us through his genius. Over the weeks we have seen how Beethoven shows himself to us. How unembarrassedly he reveals his soul, his vision of the Universe - what the stars mean. The late piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis have brought us here as this 9th symphony will lead us to that other world of the late string quartets.
Below you will find three links. The first is Leonard Bernstein providing his own sociological take on this great symphony. The second is a very nice piece by Rebecca Schmid, a music writer and annotator. Last is the memorable performance of the 9th by Bernstein celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Please read and listen. We will look further at this masterpiece over the next week or two.
1) Bernstein - https://youtu.be/eCiz9XMW_jA
2) Rebecca Schmid - Why Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Speaks to All People
Yhe composer's great work of humanity transcends politics. listenmusicculture.com.“The history of classical music is littered with monuments. Some stood as temples, guiding the human spirit toward its most elevated potential. Some crumbled under the forces of political turmoil, only to be reassembled with their fissures laid bare. Others looked down sadly above the fray. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony belongs to a category all its own.
At once innocent and ruthless, mythical and mundane, it has raised its glorious head without flinching—accompanying Western history through its greatest losses and triumphs—since its 1824 premiere. Many people associate the symphony with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a symbol of hope and solidarity for the entire Western world. But it was also performed by a children’s choir in Auschwitz, only to be reinvented as the official European Anthem less than thirty years later. A crucial source of inspiration for Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, it inaugurated the Bayreuth Festival in 1872 and returned in 1933 under Richard Strauss’s baton for the first time under Nazi rule. The symphony has been performed every year in Japan since 1940, with singers numbering up to five thousand.
“My Beethoven is not their Beethoven,” as Nietzsche, and later Mahler would say. Already in the nineteenth century—looking toward the aforementioned concert of 1989, in which Bernstein replaced “Freude” (joy) with “Freiheit” (freedom)—the French historian Edgar Quinet understood the symphony as “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1927, the centenary of Beethoven’s death, the composer was heralded as both a “true democrat” by the governor of New York and a “titan of prehistoric times” by Nazi party leader Alfred Rosenberg. In his collection of essays, Blood and Honor: A Struggle for German Rebirth, Rosenberg wrote: “‘Tread your path, brothers/ joyful, like a hero, toward victory!’ That is the climax of the Ninth Symphony…. [T]he German Beethoven towers over all people on the continent.”
Propaganda like this makes it hard to argue with sociologist and critic Theodor Adorno, who believed that the symphony had been distorted by social use. “The Ninth has been interpreted out of existence,” declared musicologist Nicholas Cook in a similar vein. “It has been swallowed by ideology.” Yet it is no coincidence that this single symphony has been appropriated for one political or social statement after another. It conveys a belief—the potential of mankind to create a new world order by sheer force of will—that has spoken as directly to fascists as to technocrats. Beethoven’s late works emerged in a time of great political repression, and the composer had no problem adopting the position of a musical hero who could liberate his listeners from the confines of their reality. After the Napoleonic Wars, Beethoven would write work that could easily be labeled propaganda, such as the cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick (The Glorious Moment) for the Congress of Vienna, which ordained a new German Confederation to replace the Holy Roman Empire in 1814. The previous year he had composed Wellingtons Sieg (Wellington’s Victory)—a creatively barren celebration of the British victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Vitoria, replete with simulated gunshots—for a charity concert in honor of Austrian and Bavarian soldiers.
3) Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra Luis Castilla
And now, in the era of globalization, a worldly Beethoven has risen from the ashes of the politics of the previous two centuries. Daniel Barenboim, in his project Beethoven for All with the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble that brings together young musicians from Israel, Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries, declared that Beethoven’s music “regardless of where [we are] in the world speaks to all people.” He and the orchestra gave a high-profile performance of the Ninth two summers ago in Berlin’s Waldbühne, an arena built by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics, before recording the complete Beethoven Symphonies and embarking on a tour of four different continents. Last spring, the Ninth became the focus of Deutsche Grammophon’s first app with educational software developer Touch Press—a new format that hopes to aid the ailing recording industry. The design allows users to seamlessly compare historic recordings by Leonard Bernstein, John Eliot Gardiner, Ferenc Fricsay and Herbert von Karajan while scrolling through four different versions of the score, from a nineteenth-century manuscript to a graphic display of pulsing dots that map the orchestra’s different sections. Anyone, anywhere can hear the call of brotherly love with a single touch.
In spite of the Ninth’s many appropriations as propagandistic rallying cry, vessel for transcendent pacifism, and untouchable masterpiece, it was actually a deeply personal work: Beethoven’s deep-seated political views are sublimated into its musical fabric. The Ninth was a stroke of fearless modernity, not only in the introduction of text in the final movement—an unprecedented move for symphonic writing that opened the form to infinite possibilities—but in the development of the simplest material to the most extreme ends, which paved the way to the epic sound worlds of Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich and anybody who followed them. Today it is certainly not unusual for a classical work to turn the most basic material into an explicitly political statement by thematizing a current event or integrating electronic samples. Beethoven, however, had the courage to use symphonic form as a vehicle for his own struggle—against physical illness, society (of which politics was a part), and his own fate—and turn it into an allegory for the human race. “Only art held me back,” the composer wrote in his despondent Heiligenstadt Testament. “Almighty God! You look down into my innermost being, you know it, you know that the love of mankind and an inclination to do good dwell therein.”
The Ninth is Beethoven’s testament to humanity, a search for salvation that evolves into its own worldly sermon. The two-note motive of the opening Allegro descends out of a celestial void, as if bearing God’s word through a haze of mountain mist. The clarinet, oboe and flute join the horns one by one to open the way, but less than a minute into the symphony, the timpani and a tutti passage thunder in to bring us back to earth. The winds—which protest ever so slightly—are subsumed into an epic greatness as barbaric as it is uplifting: throughout the course of the first movement, any attempt to bring respite is reversed by the low strings, sweeping it into the militant, dotted rhythms of universal truth. In order for peace to prevail, the individual must cede to the faith of the masses.
But it is a secular faith—one that allows man to triumph above nature and take fate into his own hands. In his unfinished fragments about Beethoven, Adorno describes the symphony as a “ritual of appeasement, on the mountain path of myth, de-mythologicization and mythologicization at once... his music is the inner prayer of the bourgeoisie.” As Europe’s politico-religious structures crumbled, the Ninth emerged as a temple of hope for his fellows. The second movement, with its sleek fugue and clean descending octaves, is certain of victory, even as the timpani seem to stumble in like a drunken man. More than one writer has wondered if Beethoven’s deafness hadn’t gotten the best of him by the time he wrote his last symphony, but that is exactly where its glory lies. A folk-like tune emerges serenely in the horns—setting off cascades of descending pizzicatos and a playful oboe solo—but comes abruptly to an end when the recapitulation bludgeons its way back. It is in the sublime Adagio that Beethoven provides the most unselfconscious bridge into late Romanticism, from the pair of clarinets that voice a Mozartean line into the slow-moving melody of the first violins, which could have come from the pen of a young Mahler. The brutish unisono chords that creep in for two to three measures at a time have no chance in this world of wistful beauty. Until the final movement, that is, when scampering winds and bashing timpani usher in a short recitative for cello and bass, chasing away the operatic drama that came before. Material conjured from previous movements—a brief entrance of primordial mist, two measures of caressing winds—cannot hold their own against the grandeur that is to follow. The low strings interrupt the woodwinds’ initial announcement of the “Ode to Joy” theme to officially usher in the chorale with their funereal timbre.
But who can resist this magnificent march toward happiness? “It was no rude hankering for the sea that had urged the master on to this long voyage,” wrote Wagner in his Artwork of the Future. “Resolutely he threw out his anchor, and this anchor was the word. This word, however, was not that willful, meaningless word which the fashionable singer chews over and over as the mere gristle of the vocal tone; it was the necessary, allpowerful, all-uniting word in which the whole stream of full heartfelt emotion is poured out... this word was ‘Joy.’” The sopranos reach for the heavens, but by the Alla Marcia, the battle has been won. This is a purely human realm, with a male chorus calling beneath the solo tenor to go, in the words later appropriated by Alfred Rosenberg, toward victory. The “starry canopy” is pulled down to earth: “Are you falling down, millions? Do you perceive your Creator, World?” The chorus dominates the orchestra—a triumph above all odds—only to disappear again like a collection of phantoms, dispersed by the percussion of the Turkish march that closes the piece. Only in death, it would seem, can humanity achieve the harmonious unity we strive for in life.
Even if history might teach us that the Elysium on earth so fervently desired in the “Ode to Joy” is an illusion, the Ninth has preserved itself as a place where nature can cede to the voice of human truth—whatever that may be. Rosenberg heard the hope for a will to create new worlds; Leonard Bernstein, the struggle for peace. “Somehow it must be possible for us to learn from [Beethoven’s] music by hearing it: no, not hearing but listening to it, with all our power of attention and concentration,” Bernstein says in a video captured on the Deutsche Grammophon app. Beethoven—sick, deaf, utterly alone and disillusioned by a German empire caught between repression and revolution—found the means to resist despair. The Word was the only way forward. And after the Ninth, in its fusion of poetry, philosophy, and morality with aesthetic revolution, history would never be the same. “What men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and, in their moment of fulfillment, have jubilantly proclaimed—it is not to be,” says the composer Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus as he revokes the Ninth. But it marches on, an “Energizer Bunny,” in the words of Richard Taruskin, carrying an irresistible mix of idealism and nihilism. Only when the citadel is destroyed can the chorus rejoice above its remains. Freude! Freude! is all that is left to sing.
This feature originally appeared on listenmusicculture.com, an award-winning music magazine.
Leonard Bernstein - Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125
This is the famous concert celebrating the falling of the Berlin Wall.
https://youtu.be/Hn0IS-vlwCI
Symphony no. 3 in Eb Major, Eroica Video Clip
I hope you all took the opportunity to listen to the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in Eb Major, the Eroica. As you recall, a link was provided in last week’s blog. How well I remember as a very young boy visiting my Aunt Ruth’s and Uncle Jim’s house. Wonder of wonders! They had a modest record player and a small collection of 78 rpm discs. I would say my hellos and disappear to listen and be absorbed for hours. I was but a fledgling musician then, but hopelessly in love with music. How captured I was by the liner notes of the Eroica Symphony. I struggled to hear all of the specific items the annotator described, very often unsuccessfully. My relatively unsophisticated ear and the poor fidelity of the the old 78 system made it so difficult for me to keep my place in this very complicated movement. So what did I glean? Wow! What a long piece of music this first movement was! How beautiful, powerful, strange at times! I certainly affirmed my love for classical music.
I remember being an undergraduate student in one of the Indiana University School of Music’s orchestras. The Eroica was on the program. For the first time I learned how arduous it could be to rehearse and perform this masterpiece. The first movement alone is about 18 minutes long, as long as many entire 4 movement classical period symphonies! How seemingly angular it was. Loud and brusque followed by beautiful and gentle. Those accents creating unstable rhythmic patterns. Huge emotional juxtapositions that were beyond my ken. It was also technically difficult for me then. How inspirational it was however. I couldn’t talk after the performance. The power of Beethoven!
Many years later, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra recorded all 9 Beethoven symphonies with Sir Georg Solti. We then toured both Europe and the United States playing them. Needless to say, I got to know the Eroica very well through this process perforce. One might think or wonder if a musician would get tired or bored playing music over and over. With lesser music, maybe, but with music like this, never! Its power and grandeur with its broad emotional sweep captures the spirit forever. When technical issues disappear with one’s playing, new vistas appear. How lucky I was. My spirit was forever enriched.
I’m now in phase 4 as it were, retired from performance, but not from music. I live it daily. The Eroica reaches me as never before. Its message is so profound. It’s as if Beethoven was and is showing me who he was. His struggles and anger with his deafness, his loneliness, his wanting a life of love and matrimony, his belief in the people as opposed to nobility, his belief in his God, his sense of a higher spirituality and the beauty of life, all shine through to me now. It’s an experience more and more profound and I trust it will be for you.
Rather than my trying to explain and analyze the first movement, listen to the great Leonard Bernstein’s explanation. Please listen to this first movement talk. We’ll move on next week to the rest.
Week 14
Symphony no. 3 in Eb Major, Eroica
As a student, amateur, and then a professional, I must have performed the Eroica symphony at least 75 times and, if you include recording sessions, close to 100. So, clearly I’ve had great exposure and familiarity with the second movement of this great piece. I've played it so many different ways with many different conductors. Faster, slower, stricter, looser with great freedom, and rubato. No matter the treatment, I’ve always been moved by Beethoven’s communicating such powerful depth of expression in this Marcia Funebre. He marks it in the score Adagio Assai - very slow. It’s in C minor, a key in Beethoven’s hands that’s heavy with tragedy, power, and emotion. It is in a broad ABA form. In the first A section a dotted rhythm prevails. The strings play a drum like figure under the oboe’s playing of the tune giving the effect of a cortege. This opening section is also marked by a falling figure first heard in the third bar.* The key, the tempo, the falling figure, and the accompaniment all lend an incredible seriousness and sadness to the opening section.
After a cadence in C Minor, three rising notes in the cellos and bases bring us to the key of C major (the B section). The sun comes out and seemingly there is hope. The music is made more buoyant by the accompaniment in the strings of a triplet figure. The first section has been primarily in duple. But now we have these triplets. It's wonderfully glorious music.
We then return to the beginning section but here Beethoven doesn't nearly repeat the opening but develops it into something wildly personal and anguished. The ending becomes very fragmented and puzzling. I've always felt that this music delves deeply into Beethoven's despair. Remember, this is shortly after Beethoven acknowledged to himself and others his deafness, his complete deafness.
Attached is Leonard Bernstein's explanation and examination of the second movement. His thinking and discussion of it is brilliant so please enjoy that and listen more than once to the wonderful second movement of the Beethoven Eroica symphony. I know that over the years my exposure to this piece of music has changed me. The more I open myself and let it reach me, the more I get from it. That sounds very simplistic but it's very true.
*The great composer Richard Strauss was so fascinated by this motive that he wrote a wonderful piece Metamorphosen for 23 strings. The descending motive appears from fragments of other melodies. I hope you’ll listen to it also.
Leonard Bernstein speaks on the 2nd movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urmIjdxWqto&t=33s from about 13:15
Continued here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBvDefnCCek
Strauss Metamorphosen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBvDefnCCek
Week 15
My audition story of the Chicago Symphony:
Imagine what it's like to be sitting in a great orchestra playing Beethoven's Eroica Symphony - a piece of music that is so powerful and emotional. Have you ever wondered how does a person get to be in a great orchestra? I thought I would describe the process to you this week.
When an opening occurs in an orchestra, there's an advertisement placed in the musician’s union newspaper, advising to the musical world that a position has become vacant. You sign up to appear and then you practice your butt off and get in "as good as possible instrumental shape" as you can. You show up on the appointed day and are taken to a warmup room and are subsequently told to follow someone upstairs to the stage. Using my audition for the Chicago Symphony as an example, you then walk along a carpeted path on the stage. It's carpeted so that the orchestra audition committee that's listening to you, cannot tell if you're a male or female by your gait. There is a screen erected across the front of the stage so that the audition committee cannot recognize you. Trying to eliminate favoritism, sexism, nepotism, ageism, or other isms is very important these days and rightly so. You are then asked to perform a couple of concerto movements followed by excerpts from the orchestra repertory followed by reading of orchestra excerpts that you might not have seen before. This process only takes 15 minutes or so for they are trying to whittle down the number of applicants to a manageable level. Once again, in my case there were 200 applicants for the one position in the viola section that was vacant. In my case, it was narrowed down to two candidates. Finalists are then asked to return for another round of playing. This round is much longer. They listen to more of the concertos and they demand more difficult excerpts from the orchestra literature. So what does this all have to do with the Eroica Symphony? Well, one orchestra excerpt that is invariably asked on viola auditions is the opening of the Eroica Symphony’s Third Movement, the Scherzo. Why would this be asked for? Beethoven marks the opening as pianissimo, very soft. There are also dots above every note meaning very short. It's also very fast, three notes to a bar, Allegro Vivace very fast. It's difficult to do all this and it's difficult to control your bow, especially when you're nervous. As you play along, all of a sudden you’re asked by Beethoven to go from pianissimo to fortissimo, the extremes of the dynamic range of an instrument, in the space of one bar or three notes - very difficult to do. Beethoven was very demanding. He didn't care if it was difficult; he knew what he wanted musically and therefore you had to do it. There are many more reasons why this excerpt would be included. The rhythm isn't always the easiest thing to accomplish, e.g. there's a place where it changes from three to a bar to four to a bar and it feels very unnatural if you haven't played it before. All the while, great delicacy juxtaposed with power and intensity, must be shown while under great pressure. This is what the great Beethoven required of us. We must live up to him with all we have.
The Trio section of this 3rd movement is on every French Horn player’s audition. One listen and you’ll hear why,
As in the past two weeks, let’s turn to Leonard Bernstein for his wonderful explanation of these two final movements. I hope you’ve enjoyed exploring this monumental and extraordinary Third Symphony of Beethoven.
3rd Movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBvDefnCCek&t=118s from 5:00
4th movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBvDefnCCek&t=118s from 10:18
4th movement continued https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQchH5Bkqb0
Week 16
Triple Concerto Opus 56, the Appasionata Sonata Opus 57, and the 4th Piano Concerto in G Major Opus 58
The Eroica Symphony was a piece of tremendous emotional and energetic output. Subsequent to it, Beethoven turned to three pieces that revolved around the piano.
The Triple Concerto Opus 56, the Appasionata Sonata Opus 57, and the 4th Piano Concerto in G Major Opus 58. While they are all very serious pieces, I don’t think they have the same psychological heft of the Eroica. How would it be possible for a composer to sustain that kind of effort work after work? Am I trivializing the pieces under discussion here? Not at all! They are masterpieces that all serious listeners should know, but in a different category as it were.
I must say that, in some quarters, the Triple Concerto is devalued. I am not in that camp. I love this piece, especially the incredibly beautiful and inspired 2nd movement. BTW, this concerto strikes terror into cellists everywhere due to the fiendish difficulty of the solo cello part. The legendary recording below is wonderful! It features Sviatislav Richter piano, David Oistrakh violin, and Mstislav Rostropovich cello.
Concerto for Piano, Violin, Cello, and Orchestra in C Major Opus 56
The Appasionata Sonata is a favorite of classical music lovers everywhere. Its opening alternating between the subdued and fiery in the deeply emotional key of f minor stirs the heart. You’ll enjoy this beautiful performance by Murray Perahia one of our generation’s most stellar pianists.
Sonata #23 in f minor Opus 57
Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto churned aggressively in c minor (the same key of his 5th symphony) and the Eroica symphony exulted in power and drama. But in his 4th piano concerto, he turns much more reflective and gentle. The first movement even begins without the orchestra. That didn’t happen before in the world of concertos. Beethoven once again the radical. The music must serve the needs of the heart and mind, not tradition. While there are a great many technical demands on the pianist, the overall feeling is repose and serenity, however the second moment is another story. A strange dialogue between forte strings and the piano playing piano ensues. It’s a profoundly personal piece of music that seems to go right to Beethoven’s soul. It elides then into a wonderfully graceful finale. I hope you’ll be interested in Barenboim’s, not only playing the solo piano part, but also conducting from the keyboard. No mean feat.
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G Major Opus 58
Please enjoy these three pieces from Beethoven’s incredibly fertile 2nd style period.
Week 17
Rasoumovsky String Quartets
Opus 59 String Quartets: No 1 in F Major, No 2 in E minor, and No. 3 in C Major
Count Andrey Kirillovich Razumovsky (1752 - 1836) was the son of Kirill Razumovsky, the last Hetman of Zaporizhian Host, kind of a Grand Poobah, of Imperial Russia. Being born to the privileged class in St Petersburg, he developed a refined taste for the exquisite in art, architecture, and thankfully for us, music. In 1792, he was appointed the Tsar's diplomatic representative to the Habsburg court in Vienna. It was no surprise then that a man of his sensitivities would come to know Beethoven the pianist, improviser, and composer who so intrigued musical Vienna. Many, if not most, musicians’ livelihoods depended on the largesse of wealthy merchants, publishers, but especially the nobility. Curiously and perhaps hypocritically, Beethoven was not above accepting support from these quarters, while at the same time pronouncing to the world that the nobility should be bowing down to artists like his buddy Goethe and himself, rather than the other way around, something he refused to do. However, he would take their money. In 1806 Beethoven published his Opus 59 String Quartets - No. 1 in F Major, No. 2 in E minor, and No. 3 in C Major. These were dedicated to and paid for by the Count. Forever after they have been known as the Rasoumovsky String Quartets. They continue on in the incredibly fecund period we’ve been looking at lately, starting with the second symphony, continuing through the mighty Eroica, and all of the works in last week’s chapter.
These three string quartets are so different from each other. Op. 59 No. 1 is so wonderfully welcoming, but with a feeling of great importance in its opening movement. The next movement seems to be a minor masterpiece created out of the most minimal and simplistic material, while the third is tragically elegiac (one of my favorites in all of Beethoven), and the finale rouses with the inclusion of a Russian, or more accurately Ukrainian, folk song feature, shared by the 2nd quartet. The Count had asked Beethoven to add this feature as part of the commission.
The E minor Quartet 59 No. 2 is much more austere and abstract. In some ways, while incredibly beautiful, it is less approachable for the listener. I must say I believe it is the most difficult to perform. It feels more fragmented and harder to sustain. That could just be me but I think not. I’ve heard murmurings from some great quartet players that they share the thought.
Opus 59 No. 3 opens with a somewhat strange, harmonically vague slow introduction followed by a cheerful, sunny Allegro that shows off the virtuosity of the first violinist especially. Our Count Rasoumovsky had a resident string quartet in his Vienna palace headed by Ignaz Schupannzigh, one of Beethoven’s favorite violinists. He also was one of Beethoven’s teachers of violin. The second movement is a haunting A minor 6/8, followed by a radiant minuet, gentle and sweet with a rather frolicking trio. This movement slitheringly elides into an absolutely spectacular C Major fugue! The faster the better as long as the faster doesn’t ruin the better! On a personal history note, during my last year in graduate school, I was in a string quartet with three other wonderful colleagues whom I love to this day. We worked on this piece, the Op. 59 No. 3, and the Bartok String Quartet No. 4. We entered and won the prestigious Coleman Chamber Music Competition in Los Angeles, California. We repeated the concert when we came back to Indiana University. When we got to the Finale/Fugue, which begins with the viola playing solo unaccompanied, I was so hopped up on adrenaline that I played it so fast that my colleagues had all the blood drain from their faces as they sat there knowing they would have to play it that fast also. William Primrose, the greatest viola player that ever lived, was on my faculty committee and was in attendance. He said he had never heard it that fast in his life. We got through it and we all lived to tell about it.
My favorite recordings of the Beethoven Quartets are by the Guarneri String Quartet. Their complete Beethoven cycle is available for purchase on Apple Music and on other sources I’m sure.
If you go to YouTube you will find links to individual movements. I’m including here a link to the first movement of Opus 59 No. 1. Once you’ve finished listening, look for a link to the second movement in the sidebar, etc. It would be far too cumbersome for me to list all the single movements here.
Opus 59 No. 1 - first movement
Or:
Opus 59 No. 1 F Major
Opus 59 No. 2 E minor
Opus 59 No. 3 C Major
Listen well and enjoy! These are important pieces to have in your musical quiver.
Week 18
Beethoven Violin Concerto Op. 61 in D Major
Vivaldi wrote 230.
Tartini 135
JS Bach wrote 2,
Nardini 4
Mozart 5
and Louis Spohr wrote 18.
Beethoven only wrote one but what a violin concerto it is.
Norwalk High School was a beautiful old Georgian building and it had the best auditorium in town, well, the only auditorium in town. So I, a young teenage boy and my best friend David sneaked into that auditorium to hear the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra play one of their concerts. Of course fearing the long arm of the law we sat and cowered in the last row of the balcony. We figured it might be harder to locate us there. This was part of my first exposure to the Beethoven violin concerto. Little known to me the soloist was one of the most famous violinists in the world, the great Hungarian Josef Szigeti. Actually his star was fading. His intonation was shaky and his tone less pure. He had been known for decades for his insightful interpretations of the classics. I didn’t know all of this then, it’s something I’ve learned during the course of my career as a musician. Nonetheless, I was captured that night by the Beethoven Violin Concerto Op. 61 in D Major. To this day that piece resonates in me stronger than any other. It is not only my favorite violin concerto but my favorite concerto of any kind. Interestingly not everyone is taken by this piece of music. I’ve known some wonderful violinists in my time who thought that the concerto didn’t hold much for them. That it was merely a collection of scales and arpeggios and almost exercise-like features. They wondered where were the gutsy emotional melodies that you find in Brahms or Tchaikovsky. Where were the technical fireworks? Or where was the elegance and refinement of Mozart concertos. The critics of Beethoven’s day didn’t like the piece so much or at least they were lukewarm to it for all the reasons listed above. However the public really liked it and was quite enthusiastic. The public seemed to have a greater connection and understanding with the piece than the music critics did. A situation that unfortunately continues to this day.
While at Indiana University I heard KW play this piece on her recital. She studied with the wonderful Joseph King called. Her performance was flawless and inspired and unforgettable. And then over the years I was so fortunate to be able to play in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with world famous violinists playing the Beethoven concerto with us. I’ve always been so touched by this piece and especially by the second movement, the slow movement. There is a something about it that is so noble and pure that shows Beethoven’s heart. It contains a march- like rhythm in 4/4 time in G major, a very beautiful and settled key. The violin seems to play obbligato lines or interjections above the orchestra. Simple and singing. You’ll hear in the first version below by Fritz Kreisler at 27:45 a beautiful statement in the violin that never fails to bring me to tears. To use the word again it is so noble and unembarrassed showing Beethoven’s love of existence, his soul. I also love the Fritz Kreisler cadenzas in the first and third movements. Violinists through history have written their own cadenzas to the concerto since Beethoven didn’t leave us any. I’ve always just adored Fritz Kreisler’s above them all. The great contemporary violinist Gidon Kremer commissioned the contemporary composer Alfred Schnittke to write a cadenza which I’ll include here. You decide if you like it. (BTW, I like the Schnittke.)
Please enjoy these different versions which I’ve included below. I truly hope you will come to love this concerto as much as I do. I think it’s one of the most important pieces in all of music.
Here is the famous 1926 recording by Fritz Kreisler with hissown cadenzas. This YouTube was taken from the 78rpm discs, thus the scratchy quality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhfZEjw9roM&t=1396s
Jascha Heifitz’s 1950 recording of the concerto with Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra is legendary. https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?
fr=aaplw&p=beethoven+violin+concerto+heifitz#id=4&vid=0c4508f77f1fb0bc5b7f42a98aab85c5&action=view
The story goes that Pinchas Zuckerman filled in at the last moment for an ill soloist. This was a live concert recording. It’s one of my favorites. I just love his playing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfX_6Z5zzEo&t=2156s
Here’s an example of thoroughly modern violin playing. Absolutely perfect. Every note is in place, perfectly in tune, etc. but some would say without some of the personal music making and charm of the older nerations. Hilliary Hahn in this brilliant performance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cg_0jepxow
And finally here’s the modern cadenza by Schnittke I mentioned earlier. It’s a 2:45 on this recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0upniIs7qSs
Week 19
Beethoven Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
The four most famous notes in the world! Thus begins Beethoven’s immortal Symphony No 5 in C minor Opus 67. Masterpiece after masterpiece has led up to this masterpiece and incredibly more of them follow, such was the fertility of Beethoven’s genius.
I found a link included below of Leonard Bernstein’s 1954 Omnibus Theater lecture for the American public, which appeared on the very new medium - television. I think you’ll also find it interesting to watch the forward to his actual lecture describing the history of the series. Bernstein’s explanation of the first movement and a little bit of the second is wonderful. As a composer himself, he understands the creative process and is able to examine the struggle that Beethoven went through as he composed.
Leonard Bernstein on Beethoven 5th first movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrDyvxSnqb0&t=21s
The second movement is a set of variations on two seemingly different themes, the first - a gentle one in A flat major, and the second a more boisterous martial one in C major. The second theme however, to my ear, seems to grow out of the first theme opening material. As you listen, try to be carried away by the different characters of the variations. This is one of my favorite movements in Beethoven’s orchestral works.
The third movement begins with a very mysterious, almost eerie theme, played by the cellos and bases. Curiously, if you transposed this theme into the key of G minor rather than the key of C minor in which it’s written, you would have the exact opening theme of the last movement of Mozart’s 40th Symphony. Homage I’m sure. This movement has all the features of a very expanded scherzo movement, although Beethoven doesn’t mark it as such. It brings back as a main motive the four note rhythm of the opening of the symphony, the most famous four notes in music as we have observed. This section alternates between the eerie opening and this powerful four note motive. It eventually seems to dissolve until it melts into a very raucous trio section once again begun by the cellos and basses. The opening section then repeats and at the end of it begins one of the most remarkable transitions in music. Over a very long suspended C in the lower instruments are hints of our four note motive. It’s so suspenseful with the violins seemingly playing or toying with the harmony until it finally hits the dominant chord and a great crescendo begins and we gloriously enter the last movement, a brilliant celebration in C major. Just revel in its glory! And then all of a sudden Beethoven reintroduces quietly our four note theme that we heard in the third movement that reminds us of the opening of the symphony. Remember? This provides an incredible unity to the entire symphony. There’s nothing that can be said about how this piece ends. It’s magnificent, glorious, inspirational, and full of hope for all of us. Beethoven, our guide!
Beethoven Symphony No 5 in C minor Opus 67 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lHOYvIhLxo&t=104s
Week 20
Beethoven Symphony No. 6, in F Major, Op.68
Beethoven’s Symphony No 6 in F Major Opus 68. What a dramatic difference between the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony and his sixth. The fifth so portentous and fiery and the sixth so serene and gentle. Many scholars say that he worked on the fifth from 1804 through 1808 and the sixth from 1807 through 1808. Someday, take a look at the list of Beethoven’s compositions (I’m including a link). You’ll see that he worked on many compositions simultaneously, even many of the great masterpieces. Imagine holding in your mind as he did the opening of the furious fifth alongside the caressingly calm sixth. A wonder! A look at the indications Beethoven includes in the score at the beginning of each of the five movements, suggests why this symphony is nicknamed the “Pastorale”.
1.Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the country: Allegro ma non troppo
2.Scene by the Brook: Andante molto moto
3.Merry gathering of the country folk: Allegro
4.Thunderstorm: Allegro
5.Shepherd’s song. Happy and grateful feelings after the storm: Allegretto
Reflect on Beethoven’s characterizations as you listen. They are perfect of course since he is the one who wrote both the music and the notes! However, musicologists have argued whether or not this is program music. What is that? Very simply put, it is music that tells a story or tries to evoke a picture or scenario in the listener’s mind. Beethoven said that this music evokes feelings, his feelings. I think it’s a little bit of both, or maybe a lot. You decide.
Many consider this their favorite symphony. Not just of Beethoven but of all composers. It’s full of grace, elegance, and beauty. Fodder for the dilettante or the connoisseur. Using the link below, you’ll be able to both listen to and follow the score to this wonderful Beethoven Symphony No 6!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4CCU2-AFZE
List of Beethoven’s Compositions
https://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Ludwig_van_Beethoven
Week 21
Beethoven Sonata in A Major for Cello and Piano
Derived from Latin, Cantata is a piece to be sung. Sonata is a piece to be sounded or played. These terms reach far back to the second half of the 16th century with music by Giovanni Gabrieli, a figure who bridged the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The sonata flourished during the baroque period, especially in Italy with composers such as Corelli, Vivaldi, Veracini, etc. Baroque sonatas were typically written for one or two solo instruments, a keyboard (harpsichord), and a bass line instrument that would support the bass of the keyboard. For instance, that instrument could be a cello, bass viol, theorbo, lute, etc.
As we gradually moved into the Classical period (c.1750-1800), the sonata became more formalized, typically for a single solo instrument with keyboard or even just a solo instrument, usually piano in that case. (Beethoven wrote 32 sonatas for piano alone that are monuments in the pianist’s repertory.) Early sonatas from this period relied heavily on the virtuosity of the keyboard player with the other instrument, violin, or flute perhaps, playing a supporting role. But as time moved on, more of a balance between the two voices was achieved, especially in the hands of our hero, Ludwig van Beethoven. Do you recall the week we spent looking at Beethoven’s Op. 47, his Kreutzer sonata for violin and piano? There is no question at all that by then, in Beethoven’s mind, the two instrumentalists were equal in importance. Such it is also with Beethoven’s monumental Op. 69 Sonata in A Major for cello and piano.
I have asked Marina Hoover, wonderful cellist and friend of the White Lake Music Society, to offer a few thoughts on this piece from a cellist’s perspective. Many of you will remember her participation in last year’s White Lake Chamber Music Festival as she played three concerts with the Avalon String Quartet. She and Andrea Swan were scheduled to perform this very sonata on the 2020 White Lake Chamber Music Festival that so sadly, had to be canceled due to the virus. The following are some of her thoughts paraphrased by me at times.
"The A Major possesses an overt optimism and lyricism, even with the occasional outbursts, there is always a certain regalness.”
"The first two sonatas (Opus 5 No’s 1,2) were more like piano concerti with the cello commenting. Beethoven sonatas were the first example of the piano part fully written out. With Beethoven’s meticulous writing, there is no room for the pianist to elaborate on the figured bass that was traditionally written.”
“In the A major sonata each part has equal responsibility and music making, total equality.” Therefore, “The challenge is finding a partner that speaks the same musical language and has the same musical approach. The parts are so interwoven that it is really the melding of two voices into one.”
“The last movement has to be played with a certain ease and facility.”
Thank you Marina! As an instrumentalist myself let me say that, playing Beethoven with a certain ease and facility, is as the saying goes, much easier said than done. I’ve always been struck by this sonata being so sunny in its first and last movements. Then the incredibly whimsical second movement where Beethoven likes to play with us with the rhythmical tricks he uses. Just where is the beat? I’m always touched by that short little slow movement going into the finale. It has to be in the right hands however, to achieve the kind of emotional impact that Beethoven demands.
I am including links to two recordings of very different character. The first by Jacqueline Du Pre, so heartfelt and personal. The second by Paul Tortelier, very patrician and perfectly played.
Jaquiline Du Pre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyAfZuI-8r8&t=1248s
Paul Tortelier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hnAQA8DWj4&t=1279s
I hope you all enjoy this brilliant sonata by Beethoven!
Week 22
Beethoven Trios Opus 70, No 1 in D Major the “Ghost” and No 2 in Eb Major
Remember Blog #1? It featured Beethoven's Opus 1 Piano Trios, a set of three. This medium (violin, cello, and piano) was very dear to Beethoven, having written seven of them during his Vienna years. There exists one or two others from his very early years, plus a couple of sets of variations, and a trio for piano, flute, and bassoon. This week we are concerned with the very important trios of Opus 70, No 1 in D Major the “Ghost” and No 2 in Eb Major.
I have asked Andrea Swan to offer her thoughts on these two trios and she has graciously agreed to do so. You will remember her as guest piano recitalist at last year’s White Lake Chamber Music Festival. In her professional life she has performed many times, all of Beethoven’s chamber music that includes piano. Please enjoy her thoughts.
“The Opus 70 Trios stand in the center of the Beethoven Trio output. The Opus 1 Trios are definitely “piano heavy” and the Archduke Trio, Opus, 97 is regarded by musicians as one of the masterpieces of the Trio literature.
The two Opus 70 Trios share an opus number but are totally different in character. No. 1, nicknamed “The Ghost” because of its mysterious, eerie 2nd movement filled with tremolos and shocking dynamics, contrasts with the outer movements that are delightfully upbeat and carefree.
No. 2 is probably the least played of all of Beethoven’s trios, although many historians regard it as the most original. It has 4 movements, including a Theme and Variation 2nd movement that ping pongs between C Major and C Minor, a 3rd movement called Allegretto that has the sweetest theme (and the weirdest 4 measures I have ever encountered in all of Beethoven - if you listen, you can’t miss them!), and a very long, very demanding Finale.
As a pianist, I find the D major much easier technically. It lies in a comfortable key for both the pianist and the string players. There’s lots of interplay and “joking around” between the 3 instruments and the outer movements are both joyous romps.The 2nd movement is so completely different - very somber and mysterious, and its length and slow tempo require enormous concentration to pull off successfully.
The Opus 70, No. 2 Trio is much more difficult, technically and musically. There are some passages for the pianist, especially in the outer movements, that are challenging and demand good fingerings and a lot of practice! The first two movements are quite serious - then Beethoven changes to a much lighter mood in the 3rd movement and the 4th movement takes the listener on a wild ride of jubilation and boundless energy.”
Thank you, Andrea. Wonderfully said. I’m including below links to two performances, one of each trio. The pianist in the Opus 70 No 2 is Menahem Pressler with whom Andrea studied.
Opus 70 No 1 Barenboim, Zuckerman, Du Prez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReZeyI8Z5wk&t=105s
Opus 70 No 2 Beaux Arts Trio Pressler, Coen, Greenhouse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FMBO1LE4xM&t=352s
Week 23
Beethoven Fidelio Overture
Fidelio is Beethoven’s only opera, however he wrote four different overtures for it. The numbering and titles of those overtures are somewhat confusing. Here’s why: The opera was premiered in 1805 under the title Leonore, Oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe (“Leonore, or The Triumph of Married Love”). The overture for that performance is believed to be what is known as the Leonora Overture No 2, Opus 72a.
When the opera was presented again in 1806, Beethoven tightened up No 2 and wrote the Leonora Overture No 3, Opus 72b. This is the overture that is most often heard in concert halls as a stand-alone piece.
There was a planned performance of the opera in Prague and for some reason, scholars call the overture for this performance Opus 138. I don’t think I’ve ever played or heard this version.
Finally, for the 1814 revival and reworking of the opera, he wrote a completely new Overture entitled Fidelio. I love this piece and how it plays with alternating C major and E major. Wonderful.
I’m including links to all four overtures. Please enjoy this wonderful outpouring of music by the master. More on the opera next week.
Leonora Overture No 2 Opus 72a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egp07RjNlQI
Leonora Overture No 3 Opus 72b https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZzwA_dntCM
Leonora Overture No 1 Opus 138 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THyZq67bkXk
Fidelio Overture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMPJl_qzlTc
Week 24
Beethoven Fidelio
Fidelio was Beethoven’s only opera. This doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a lover of opera. He grew up with it in Bonn where was lucky enough to sneak into performances at the local opera house. He was a great fan of Italian opera and became a fan of what was kind of a rage, the “rescue opera”. Brought on by the spirit of revolution that was sweeping both the Old World and the New World, the theme was that somehow a person was unjustly captured and imprisoned for political reasons and what was through the force of good able to see the light of day once again. As you know by now, this fits in perfectly with Beethoven’s vision of the nobility and its relationship to the common man. As was mentioned once before here, Beethoven once commented to someone, I believe Goethe, that “we should never step aside for nobility to pass, they should step aside for us for we are artists; they were merely born to their position where as we achieved ours.”
Fidelio originally titled Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe (Leonore, or The Triumph of Marital Love) is such a “rescue opera”. Let me insert here a link to an excellent synopsis of the plot:
https://www.metopera.org/user-information/synopses-archive/fidelio
As we mentioned last week in our discussions of the overtures, Beethoven labored with the opera from its first performance in 1805 to its first revision in 1806 to his final version in 1814. But how wonderful it is! Perhaps the section that moves me the most occurs at the end of Act 1 when the prisoners are let out of their dungeon to the courtyard where they see daylight for the first time since their long imprisonment. The symbolism of that moment aligns perfectly with Beethoven’s soul and sensibilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdB0roPqg7Q&feature=share
I will include a couple of links to complete performances of yet another one of our Maestro’s masterpieces.
Fidelio Bernstein, Vienna State Opera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI-CF_rOApI&feature=share
Fidelio Furtwangler, Vienna State Opera (1953)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uapL7hImOY&feature=share
Week 25
Piano Concerto in Eb Major, Opus 73 “The Emperor”
Beethoven’s concerto in Eb Major, Opus 73 “The Emperor” is, along with the Tchaikovsky Bb minor (the second most famous four notes in music) and the Grieg A minor concerto, among the most well-known and beloved piano concertos in the literature. It’s a remarkable combination of power, exuberance, sensitivity, and virtuosity. It also has some unusual formal features. For instance, it begins with majestic orchestral chords outlining music’s most basic chord progression, I - IV - V - I. Between these mighty statements, the piano’s wildly virtuosic expressions of these chords lead to the next chord. There is a definite cadenza-like feel to these interpolations. Cadenzas were traditionally placed near the end of the movement in Beethoven’s time. It must have ruffled a few musical feathers back when listeners first heard this. It wasn’t until later in the Romantic period when such liberties with the form of music were taken, a good example being the placement of the cadenza of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in the middle of the movement. Also, Beethoven wrote these “cadenzas” out whereas soloists typically improvised their own.
Another jolt to the very early 19th century listener, it’s being composed in 1809, must have been the key of the second movement - B Major. He moved from 3 flats to 5 sharps in the key signatures, a relationship of a major third, not seen too often in classical period music. I can think of one other right now, Haydn Opus 76 #5 in D Major where the slow movement is a major third away in F# Major. These are relationships that one doesn’t hear with regularity until the full-blown romantic period. Think Schubert. (Ah Schubert!) Such a gentle comforting melody with piano embroidery entwined! I love the recapitulation of the theme with the wonderful orchestration of flute, clarinet, and bassoon singing the tune with the strings providing a soothing rocking accompaniment. The movement cadences in B and the simply slithers down a half step to Bb. The piano quietly and slowly foreshadows the theme of the last movement and then virtually explodes with abandon and exuberance into one of the greatest finales in the piano concerto literature.
I thought it would be interesting to include performances from three different generations. First, the great Arthur Rubenstein whose recording is the favorite of many to this day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhJjCScsOn4
Next the great Glenn Gould - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpz_U8wHpa8
And lastly Maurizio Pollini - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTLOQGF-c1E
Week 26
Thayer Biography of Beethoven
Alexander Wheelock Thayer (1817 - 1897) was born in Massachusetts and died in Trieste, Italy. He was a journalist and professional librarian. A lover of music and scholarship, he was dismayed by the lack of an accurate biography of Beethoven, the musical giant who dominated the musical world at that time. So he decided to write his own. His story is told much better in a couple of articles I’ve found. I suggest you music lovers peruse these. I’ve admired and looked up to Thayer for so long for his commitment and scholarship. I’ve read that some don’t enjoy reading his Life of Beethoven because of his dated writing style. What?! Are Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens dated? Should a modern day author be intimidated by what a reader 150 years hence might think? Ridiculous. So dear friends, consider buying a copy and enjoy! In the meanwhile I’m sure you’ll find these very interesting. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/01/alexander-wheelock-thaye.html
https://www.jstor.org/stable/737995?seq=1#mobileBookmark
Those incredible nine symphonies! The concertos and chamber music! The sonatas! What a treasure trove of monumental instrumental music. We tend to overlook some beautiful vocal works of his. Soon we will examine some of Beethoven’s songs and where they fit in to his musical output. As a little teaser I’d like to offer this stunningly beautiful song Adelaide sung by the great tenor Fritz Wunderlich. https://youtu.be/e4SaCYgxze8
Week 27
Beethoven’s String Quartet #10 Opus 74 in Eb Major
Beethoven’s String Quartet No.10 Opus 74 in E-flat Major has always been one of my favorites. By now you all know how important this key is to Beethoven. Piano trios, sonatas, the “Emperor” concerto, the “Eroica” symphony! Masterpieces all. The Opus 74 measures up. It begins with a fairly short slow introduction gentle in character. After roaming through a few strange harmonies, the main body of the first movement begins Allegro. After a short while the violins alternate pizzicato (plucking the strings) for four bars, an idea that is expanded in the development section. Here the pizzicatos are passed through all the instruments starting with the cello. The rhythm accelerates giving a harp like quality, thus the nickname “the Harp” quartet. Near the end of this movement is one of the most thrilling passages in all of chamber music. The first violin plays an extended passage of bariolage, the rapid crossing of the strings back and forth, either 2, 3, or all 4 of them. Underneath, the other instruments first replay the harp idea and then the second violin and viola engage in a canon. They play the same notes an octave apart but the viola copies the violin exactly one bar later. They sing! Amazing result. Absolutely joyous!
A wonderfully serene and sensitive Adagio second movement is followed by and absolutely furious third movement scherzo. The contrast of these inner moments is remarkable.
Some critics, I like to call them the “Great Unwashed”, say that the finale is weak compared to the rest of the quartet. How wrong they are. I adore this set of variations. They are consistent with the other three movements; they maintain the overall calm and inner looking aspects of the others (excluding the wild third). They come to an exuberant close. Please enjoy this wonderful quartet. I’m attaching links to two performances. The first by the legendary Budapest String Quartet. This group first established the high standard of quartet playing that has carried forward to this day. The second is by the Alban Berg Quartet, an excellent modern-day group.
Budapest String Quartet
The Alban Berg Quartet
Week 28
“Choral Fantasy” Opus 80 in C minor
In 1808, Beethoven needed money so he decided to put on a benefit concert for himself. Included on this grand concert were the premieres of his wonderful piano concerto, #4 in G Major, and his fifth and sixth symphonies, along with selections from his Mass in C Major. He decided to write a piece that would include all the participants in a glorious finale to the concert, thus, the birth of the Choral Fantasy Opus 80 in C minor. The fantasy is scored for solo piano, vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra. A truly monumental piece. Can you imagine a concert of that length in the present day? Theirs was a time with no TV, internet, or even radio. I imagine people then welcomed such events.
A fantasy in music is typically a sectionalized composition and this piece is very much that way. Do you remember that Beethoven came to Vienna renowned as a great virtuoso and improviser on the keyboard? Well that’s just how this piece begins, an extended improvisatory section with Beethoven himself at the piano for the premiere. It’s said that he did improvise at that concert and only later did he write the opening down. Next, we have a sequence of variations, some involving the piano and some not. We travel through some different keys - A Major, F Major, C Minor again, and finally C Major when the voices enter. I’m inserting the text below for you to follow. Scholars aren’t in agreement as to the authorship of the text.
Flatteringly sweet and lovely ring out
our lives' harmonies,
and from our sense of beauty arise
flowers that eternally bloom.
Peace and joy move together,
like the alternating play of waves;
that which seemed harsh and hostile,
transforms itself into inspiration.
When music's magic holds sway,
and poetry's sacredness speaks out,
magnificent things must take form,
night and storms turn into light.
Outer calm, inner joy,
prevail for the happy person;
indeed, the arts' spring sunshine
lets, from sorrow, light come into being.
Greatness, that was deep in the heart,
blooms anew then, reaching up beautifully;
if a spirit rises up,
it is always echoed by a chorus of spirits.
Therefore accept, you lovely souls,
happily, the gifts of beautiful art.
If love and power join together,
humanity is rewarded by the gods' favor.
The shape of the melody of the vocal soloists and choir is very similar to the “Ode to Joy”, the famous tune in the finale of his ninth symphony. This has led many musicologists to claim that this was kind of a trial piece, an experiment for working things out for later on. Who knows for sure but I think it’s just a wonderful piece! I found it thrilling every time I played it or listened to it. I hope you will enjoy it too. I’m including two performances for you. One with the great Seiji Ozawa conducting with the equally great Martha Argerich playing piano. The other performance has the score presented as the piece is played. Have fun listening!
Ozawa/Argerich https://youtu.be/cSfMH9Y5bi8
The Score https://youtu.be/mN1R6T7m6NE
Week 28
Beethoven Sonata in Eb Major Opus 81a “Les Adieux”
Beethoven’s great sonata for piano in Eb Major Opus 81a “les adieux” was written on the departure from Vienna of the Archduke Rudolph, one of his dearest friends. The publisher, Breitkopf and Haertel came out with a French edition, thus the nickname. Beethoven had titled it in German “Lebewohl” a much more intimate expression than the generic French word. The opening three notes follow the shape of the words in both languages however. It is one of my favorites as it is for many. It has some very interesting structural elements.
This is an excellent time to introduce to all of you the great Hungarian pianist, Andras Schiff, who can explain them better than I. Not only is he a beautiful player, but an extraordinary teacher and lecturer on music. One of his great accomplishments is a series of lectures on the Beethoven piano sonatas, one for each of the 32 masterpieces. They are grounded in his profound experience with them as he has performed the complete cycle of sonatas 27 times!! He is a great communicator who has saturated himself, not only with music, but with art, literature, and the great thoughts of mankind. Therefore, this week, I’m including a link to his talk on Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 81a in Eb “les adieux”. I’m sure you’ll be delighted and perhaps encouraged to explore some of his others. May I suggest Opus 13 “Pathetique”, Opus 27#2 “Moonlight” to start.
Andras Schiff lecture on Beethoven Opus 81a https://youtu.be/3jpiqAbpojA
Barenboim plays Beethoven Sonata in Eb Major Opus 81a “les adieux” https://youtu.be/gEpeKi5R1Wo
Week 30
With last week’s blog we’ve reached the year 1810. Beethoven is 40 years old and at the height of his artistry. He has achieved great fame and by now is acknowledged as the greatest composer alive. He loves nature and his God and is hopeful for marriage. However, he is very deaf, frustrated in love, suffering from various health issues, has an irascible and difficult personality, etc. As we have seen through the course of these weeks his music reflects these conflicts, anguish and despair alongside a beautiful optimism. I have asked a longtime friend, Elizabeth Morrison, writer and cellist, to share her insights on the element of joy in Beethoven’s music.. In a few weeks Foley Schuler will comment on the other side of Beethoven - pain, disappointment, anguish. Elizabeth’s thoughts follow here along with included musical examples.
Beethoven’s Joy
By Elizabeth Morrison
Do you know the novel Howard’s End, by E.M. Forster? An elegant dissection of love and class in early-20th-century England, it’s one of my favorite books. Early on there is a scene set in a London concert hall, where a family group, the Schlegels, are taking in a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Forster uses each character’s reaction to the music to suggest something about them: Aunt Juley, “wanting to tap surreptitiously when the tunes come,” Margaret, who can “see only the music,” her younger brother Tibby, “profoundly versed in counterpoint, holding the full score open on his knee,” and their German cousin Fraulein Mosebach, who “remembers all the time that Beethoven is ‘echt Deutch’”–really German.
The one I always recall, though, is Margaret’s sister Helen, the young woman at the center of Forster’s story. She alone “can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood.” When the third movement begins, Helen feels that “a goblin was walking quietly over the universe. Goblins were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. Helen could not contradict them, for she had felt the same, and seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right.”
As the third movement gives way to the fourth, it seems to Helen that “Beethoven appears in person. He gives the goblins a little push, and they begin to walk in a major key, and then–he blows with his mouth, and they are scattered! …Amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he leads his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven, when he says other things.”
You can hear all this for yourself in a 1990 recording by the Chicago Symphony. When the third movement begins, at 28.11, there are the goblins. They are followed by an interlude that Helen calls “elephants dancing” (actually it’s just the cellos and basses); and then the goblins again. The enormous breath that blows them away is unmistakable too, at 33.18. This is certainly joy, fully realized in a symphonic masterpiece.
But exhilarating as it is, triumphal joy is only one of the many sorts of joy to be found in Beethoven’s music. In his piano sonatas, for example, there are more intimate expressions. There, too, joy is highlighted by contrast, but it need not be to “panic and emptiness.” In one of his most beautiful sonatas, Opus 53, the “Waldstein,” joy emerges from high seriousness and profound inner concentration.
I hope you’ll listen to all of this wonderful recording by Daniel Barenboim, but please start paying special attention at the start of the second movement, marked Adagio molto (very slow), at 11:30. After an exciting and forward-leaning first movement, Beethoven takes us into a sound world that is as much meditation as music. The notes are distinct and vital, like words spoken quietly by someone we love, or perhaps whispered to ourselves. Throughout the four short minutes of the movement, the bass line stays very low, reaching down to a low F, very deep on the piano. Our thoughts are drawn into the depth with them. All is hushed and dark. Then, at 15:50, Beethoven places a high G, four octaves above the F, repeats it, and lets it hang in the air until, as the third movement opens, we look up and see the stars.
The theme here, very simple and pure, gives us four of these high Gs, then four high Fs; they make me think of the stars appearing, one after another, in the night sky. From the inner focus of the Adagio, joy comes as we feel their unbroken perfection over all. Oh, and there’s joy too in watching Barenboim’s left hand cross over his right to play the high notes. From the depth to the heights–literally!
I promise I am not trying to turn you into Helen Schlegel, who can’t listen to music without a picture in her mind. You may be more like Tibby, immersed in the details of how it is done; you might prefer me to describe joy as being structured in major keys, brighter tempos, or the sound of the trumpet. And there’s nothing wrong if, like Aunt Juley, you just want to tap. But I am a bit of a Helen myself, and a picture helps me put my thoughts about music into words. So I’m happy to find words by Beethoven himself in my final example, the unavoidable one in any discussion of Beethoven’s joy, the Ninth Symphony.
This enormous work, his last symphony, is almost synonymous with joy. In the fourth and final movement he brings in four vocal soloists and a chorus, the first time a major composer brought voices into a symphony, to sing the words of a poem by Friedrich Schiller, the famous “Ode to Joy.” But the first words we hear, from the baritone soloist, are not by Schiller. Beethoven wrote them himself, as an introduction to the poem. In this famous recording, made by an international group of musicians led by Leonard Bernstein in Berlin in 1989 to celebrate the fall of the Wall, we hear them at 1:06:09. Yes, that’s one hour and six minutes in; there has been a lot of music before we get there! The words Beethoven wrote are,
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere!
Freude! Freude!
(Oh friends, not these notes!
Let us strike up more pleasing, more joyful ones!
Joy! Joy!).
It takes the baritone, Jan-Hendrik Rootering, a full minute to sing words we could speak in a few seconds. Just as he begins, a row of little girls of the chorus, who have been waiting quietly behind the timpani player for over an hour, get to their feet. It is a matchless moment, in history and in music. And yes, Rootering substitutes Freiheit, freedom, for Freude. Even so, it’s all about joy.
But what does Beethoven mean, “Not these notes?” It is an extraordinary statement, after the three incredible movements that have preceded it. Amazingly, he seems to be telling us to leave it all behind. He wants more joyful sounds–and here they are. Nothing I can say could possibly add to the experience of listening to the Ode to Joy. Just do it, and feel it all for yourself.
So here we have three distinct facets of Beethoven’s joy: triumphant in the Fifth Symphony, contemplative in the Waldstein Sonata, transcendent in the Ninth. And they are just the beginning. Beethoven, our romantic hero, who constantly finds beauty in anguish and superhuman striving, who suffered greatly in his own life, has left us joy that is simply inexhaustible. Here are a few more pieces for you; and with all the music Bob has presented in his blog, I’m sure you can find many more.
Piano Sonata Opus 78, “à Thérèse”, in a performance with the score. Joy in tenderness.
Symphony Number 6, the “Pastoral”, Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Joy in nature.
Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Opus 11, Camerata Pacifica. Joy in playful humor. The last movement, based on a song, “Before I go to work, I must have something to eat,” begins at 14.56. Be sure to watch to the end for a rare instance of classical musicians joking around.
Howard’s End was made into a Merchant-Ivory movie in 1989, with Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, and Helen Bonham Carter as Helen Schlegel. It is available on Netflix. Unfortunately, the scene where the Schlegels hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a shambles. For whatever reason, the producer chose not to hire an orchestra, substituted a pianist and a lecturer, and disrespected the goblins. You’ll see what I mean. It’s a good movie anyway.
Week 31
Egmont Overture, Op. 84
Ludwig van Beethoven and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe were two of the dominant intellectual forces of the early 1800s in Europe. They were well acquainted with each other with much mutual admiration. However, they were friends with reservations. Goethe thought that Beethoven was somewhat of a sans culotte, a ruffian, ill-mannered and crude, but a tremendous genius. Beethoven appreciated Goethe’s work, especially those with noble and aspirational themes for the common man, however, he was put off by his deference to nobility and in that sense - a lack of spine. There is a famous anecdote about the two of them walking along, perhaps in the Stadt Park in Vienna, when a group of the nobility approached them from the opposite direction. Goethe stepped aside and bowed deeply as they passed whereas Beethoven just marched right through them without so much as nodding his head. He reproached Goethe afterwards and said, “You must understand that they should be bowing to us!” Such was Beethoven.
Inspired by Goethe’s play, Beethoven wrote an overture and nine incidental pieces to it. It includes pieces for soprano, male narrator, and full symphony orchestra. The play deals with a Spanish nobleman of the 16th century who stood up to oppression and died for that cause. Of course, this is a theme close to Beethoven’s heart. Remember Fidelio?
The Egmont overture is the first piece of Beethoven that I ever played or ever heard. It opens in the key of F minor and is very powerful in its slow, heavy, portentous rhythmic statement. As a youth, I remember being so stirred by playing it. I hated when the piece ended. I’m sure all of you will recognize it. I just love the rest of the incidental music also. The soprano aria is so beautiful and the narrator lends a wonderful feeling to it. Here is an interesting aside I found from an old Chicago Symphony Orchestra program:
Beethoven met Bettina Brentano in May 1810, when he was hard at work on his incidental music for Goethe’s Egmont. He sang and played two of his recent settings of poems by Goethe for her, because he knew that she was a good friend of the great poet. Bettina wrote to Goethe about the composer with such enthusiasm that he answered her at once, suggesting that Beethoven meet him that summer in Karlsbad. In letter after letter that month, Bettina boasted to Goethe about Beethoven’s remarkable talent and, in particular, of the way he had uncovered a “new sensuous basis in the intellectual life.” On May 28 she even quoted Beethoven: “Music, verily, is the mediator between the life of the mind and the senses.” Nice!!
I so hope that you will enjoy listening to this beautiful and powerful music, wonderfully performed by Claudio Abbado and the Vienna Philharmonic. I will also include a translation of the text.
Beethoven Overture and Incidental Music to Goethe’s Egmont
https://youtu.be/G7J0SvmhScM
THE DRUM IS RESOUNDING!
Die Trommel gerühret! Das Pfeifchen gespielt! Mein Liebster gewaffnet Dem Haufen befiehlt, Die Lanze hoch führet, Die Leute regieret.
Wie klopf mit das Herz! Wie wallt mir das Blut!
O hätt’ ich ein Wämslein, Und Hosen und Hut.
Ich folgt’ ihm zum Tor ’haus Mit mutigem Schritt,
Ging’ durch die Provinzen, Ging’ überall mit.
Die Feinde schon weichen, Wir schiessen da drein— Welch Glück sondergleichen, Ein Mannsbild zu sein.
The drum is resounding, And shrill the fife plays; My love, for the battle, His brave troop arrays; He lifts his lance high, And the people he sways. My blood it is boiling!
My heart throbs pit-pat! Oh, had I a jacket,
With hose and with hat!
How boldly I’d follow,
And march through the gate; Through all the wide province I’d follow him straight.
The foe yield, we capture
Or shoot them! Ah me!
What heart-thrilling rapture
A soldier to be!
BLISSFUL AND TEARFUL
Freudvoll und leidvoll, Gedankenvoll sein; Langen und bangen
In schwebender Pein; Himmelhoch jauchzend, Zum Tode betrübt; Glücklich allein
Ist die Seele, die liebt.
Blissful and tearful,
With thought-teeming brain; Hoping and fearing
In passionate pain;
Now shouting in triumph, Now sunk in despair;
With love’s thrilling rapture What joy can compare!
Translations from The Harvard Classic, vol. 19 (New York: P.F. Collier & Sons, 1909)
Week 32
Piano Sonata No.27 in E minor, Op.90
We are now entering Beethoven’s final style period. As you know by now his music is generally divided into three of them, appropriately named early, middle, and late. There are no bright red lines between them however. With his sonata In E minor Op. 90 we begin to enter his late period. Soon we will look at some other pieces in this transition - the Op. 95 string Quartet and the Seventh Symphony opus 92. He starts to enter a different world, a very personal, emotional yet abstract world. Extraordinarily personal with little regard to how the music will be accepted but only thinking of reaching inside of himself to show, perhaps to him, who he is and what he is about and what he believes. This is some of that the most extraordinary music ever penned by man. It is not always easy to understand nor to write about it. It’s almost impossible to put into words where Beethoven was going.
As we enter this world we are going to use the aforementioned sonata for piano in E minor Op. 90. Once again I’m going to ask that you listen to the incomparable Andras Schiff in his wonderful lecture series on the Beethoven piano sonatas speak on this particular piece. As I’ve said before he can do a much better job examining it and describing it than I can. I’m including a performance by the legendary Alfred Brendel. Also one by the amazingly talented yet controversial Ivo Pogorelich.
Andras Schiff lecture on Beethoven opus 90: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztADv0Zn_Cc&feature=share
A performance by Alfred Brendel: https://youtu.be/uDzQnkIvCcg
Ivo Pogorelich rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4OG1-biycs&feature=share
Week 33
Symphony No. 7
With his 7th Symphony in A Major Opus 92, as with last week’s E minor Sonata for Piano Opus 90, Beethoven continues to move into his late style period. For many, the 7th is their favorite Beethoven symphony. It would be mine too if it weren’t for the 9th and its powerful message. Richard Wagner thought the 7th evoked feelings of the dance, thus a nickname that has stuck. For me it’s once again the juxtaposition of the tragic seriousness of life and its joy. Isn’t that one of the wonders of great art - that it is so personal on different levels? That’s such a simplistic thing to say maybe, but true.It begins with a fairly simple quiet statement that develops through the piling up of instrumental layers to a very powerful reiteration of the opening theme. Some E octaves lead to an ostinato rhythm that is the key idea of the first movement. Perhaps this is where Wagner first got his notion of the dance. The movement drives to the end where it cadences on an A major chord. Suddenly the second movement begins in A minor! An A minor chord with a E in the bass lends a suspended, haunting and foreboding air. A funeral march ensues with variations. An incredible counter theme appears over the march motive, one of the most powerful themes in music, I think. It develops through the addition of instruments, rhythmic acceleration, and emotional density. All of a sudden, A Major! Sunshine and tranquility! Remarkable. Then the dirge returns more complicated, even with a fugato. The sun reappears in major then the minor again. Even in the major key, listen for the rhythm of the dirge in the basses. It ends with the same chord it began with, an A minor in the 2nd inversion. What a powerful movement! Next a brilliant F Major very fast scherzo. Its trio section is in D Major, a third relation from F Major, a scheme Schubert used often. Then the fiery finale. (*see the Oscar Levant anecdote below.)
The movement begins with a chord on E, a chord over an E, and then a A chord. To my ear, this gives the whole symphony a feeling of moving from A to E to F to E to A.
*There is a wonderful story I remember hearing where the great pianist and comedian, yes, comedian, Oscar Levant related a story germane to this piece. He said he was driving on the New Jersey Turnpike when he was pulled over by a state policeman. The policeman asked if he realized how fast he was going. Levant replied no and the policeman told him he was going at least 20 miles an hour over the speed limit. He asked what possible explanation he could have. Levant said, “Have you ever tried not to speed when listening to the last movement of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony?” Apocryphally the policeman let him off.
I’ve included two different recordings below. The Toscanini is legendary.
Toscanini https://youtu.be/8AuFNGCVsgg
Solti https://youtu.be/DMUhKV4oMsM
Between Op.19 and opus 92 lies - guess what? Op. 91. Wellington’s Victory, a piece by Beethoven commemorating the defeat of Napoleon at a particular battle. You will hear all sorts of drum rolls, trumpet fanfares, and familiar tunes that will make you smile. It’s kind of enjoyable listening. It’s certainly nothing profound. It’s a short piece that’s worth listening to a couple of times. It’s not regarded as one of Beethoven’s better pieces however. So, whenever anyone mentions it, you should wrinkle your nose and haughtily harrumph. Here it is:
Wellington's Victory https://youtu.be/R_ibES7i-HU
Week 34
String Quartet No.11 in F minor, Op.95
Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, Op. 96
“Archduke” Piano Trio, Op.97
Three great works of chamber music usher out Beethoven’s middle style period and look forward to his late powerful yet austere period to come. These are the tumultuous Opus 95 String Quartet in F minor, the graceful and elegant Opus 96 Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, and the beautiful soaring Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano Opus 97 in Bb Major.
You will hear the fast and furious opening of the quartet and its gentler contrasting theme in the major key of Db. This movement is dense and very compact and concise. Next, listen and contrast that movement with the opening of the violin sonata. Do you hear how gentle it is? Even as the movement develops, we continue to see the softer side of Beethoven, don’t we? The “Archduke” piano trio has always been one of my favorite pieces since I played in high school. The melodies in the first movement are unforgettable. There are some virtuoso fireworks to follow of course.
The Emerson Quartet’s rendition of Op. 95 is excellent. Don’t be fooled by their apparently cool collective exterior. They are wonderful players and they play this piece beautifully, bringing out all the contrasting elements.
String Quartet No. 11, Opus 95, in F minor https://youtu.be/dSb86IJdrHs
This video of Yehudi Menuhin and Glenn Gould performing the Beethoven Op. 96, G major Sonata is compelling, not only for their music making but also for the conversation that begins the video. I think you will be interested in hearing these two incomparable masters discuss music making. Glenn Gould is such a wonderful and interesting musician and the glowing sound that Yehudi Menuhin gets from his “Lord Wilton” Guarnerius violin is stunning.
Sonata for Violin and Piano Opus 96 in G Major https://youtu.be/jzJLqvXlMWI
I find it difficult to listen to the opening of the “Archduke” trio without coming to tears. Certainly, that’s the case with this beautiful recording by three incredible musical geniuses. Listen to how the music soars at the beginning and how tender it is.
"Archduke" Piano Trio, Op 97 https://youtu.be/LUwTwQTXG8E
If you’ve had to deal with some ads in these YouTube links, please accept my apologies. It is an imperfect technology, isn’t it?
Week 35
An die ferne Geliebte, (to the distant beloved) Opus 98
Der Mann von Wort Opus 99
Merkenstein Opus 100
We leave the three great masterpieces of last week’s discussion and now look at some far less known and underappreciated works. They are the songs of Opus 98,99, and 100. Opus 98 is the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, (to the distant beloved) 1816, the Opus 99 song Der Mann von Wort 1816, and the Opus 100 song Merkenstein (re the Merkenstein ruins) 1814. Despite the “Ode to Joy” of the ninth symphony, the Missa Solemnis, and countless songs Beethoven wrote in his lifetime, he is not thought of as a great composer for the voice. Perhaps it is due to the stature of his incredible symphonic writings, his piano works, and his chamber music overshadowing all else but his vocal work is controversial. I have talked to many singers who truly dislike his vocal writing or at least don’t enjoy singing it. They claim that Beethoven didn’t understand the voice and wrote very awkwardly for it. Also, that it didn’t show the voice in it’s most comfortable and flattering range and so forth. Down the road in this blog we are going to be having another guest writer, Thomas Wikman, who is a great expert on the human voice, having taught voice and conducted great vocal works throughout his career. He will be doing a guest blog on the Missa Solemnis, one of Beethoven’s true masterpieces. Perhaps we can get him to comment on this controversial aspect of Beethoven’s writing. Nonetheless, as someone who is not an expert on the voice, let me say that I love listening to Beethoven’s vocal music. I love the songs and I think that you have to take them for what they are supposed to be, a pouring out from the heart. And in the Opus 98, die ferne Geliebte, we find one of the earliest ever song cycles composed. Of course we know that Schubert, Schumann, etc. wrote great song cycles but this one by Beethoven is one of the first, if not the first. It’s about a man’s longing for his distant love and how the separation pains his soul. And in the spirit of the romantic era that we’re entering, here’s an appeal to nature to convey his love to the distant one. I’m sure you will enjoy the recording that’s included with the great Fritz Wunderlich. I found a unique recording of it that has the subtitles embedded. Enjoy! I wasn’t so successful finding translations for the others but I think you’ll enjoy listening to the music anyway as I have. I must confess as a chamber musician and as a symphonic player I was unfamiliar with this music. How delighted and thrilled I am to now see a different part of Beethoven’s soul. Please enjoy As I have.
An die Ferne Geliebte Opus 98 Fritz Wunderlich
https://youtu.be/AMVKKgqrkzs
Der Mann von Wort Opus 99
https://youtu.be/efN_o2tQnwU
Merkenstein Opus 100
https://youtu.be/vQJAiAPdHVY
Week 36
Piano Sonata No.28 Opus 101 in A Major
We now enter Beethoven’s last style period, perhaps his greatest. We remember how he came to Vienna in 1791 or so as a great pianist/improviser and a promising composer. He soon mastered writing symphonies, chamber music, piano and string sonatas, and other incidental pieces. We also remember his Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802 that acknowledged to the world and to himself, his growing deafness. He became very lonely, not only because of his hearing issues, but because of his unsuccessful attempts at love and relationships. In spite of this, from that man’s heart and mind came some of the most glorious music ever. The great Eroica Symphony, the Fifth Symphony, the Seventh Symphony, five piano concertos, 11 string quartets, violin and cello sonatas, and all those great piano sonatas. The list goes on. He became widely acknowledged as the greatest composer alive. But we are now at the year 1816 and our hero is almost completely deaf. He has had some pretty severe financial problems. He has had great difficulty with his nephew Carl and has been in a struggle for guardianship of him. Consequently, there has been about a four-year hiatus in his composing. This is not a total gap but relative to what his usual output was, it was very sparse. When he resumed - what masterpieces he produced! Five monumental piano sonatas and the Diabelli Variations, five incredible string quartets and the Grosse Fugue, the Missa Solemnis, and of course the ninth Symphony!
What is so important about this last style period of his life? Musicians look at this music and have different opinions about it and what it all means, but most agree that Beethoven had chartered new musical waters. He stretched musical forms, expanded instrumental possibilities, created unique textures, challenged interpreters, etc. But far more importantly, it was as if he used music to show us the universe and what he saw in it. He entered another world and allowed us to catch a glimpse of it. This other world seen through his music is not only sublime and surreal but also generous and loving. You can hear longing and despair in it, but also beauty and the gift of life.
When I was much younger, probably in my 20s, I used to cringe and recoil when I would hear some old-timer say something like, “Well Sonny, you would really need to be much older to understand late Beethoven.” I would say, to myself of course because I respected my elders, “Oh come on cut it out. I get it! I played all the notes in tune at the right time and I felt the music.” Well I’m one of those old-timers now and those geezers were absolutely right. Take my word for it please. Please. There is so much in this music. One must listen to it over and over and let it into your soul.
Our first example from this period is the Piano Sonata No.28 Opus 101 in A Major. I love how gentle and welcoming the opening movement is. Next comes a very spirited march, then a very reflective slow movement in a minor, and we finish with a very interesting movement that is fugal in nature. Beethoven was not known as a great writer of fugues but I think this movement can dispute that notion. I will include Andras Schiff’s lecture on this sonata. I will also attach two complete performances, one by Daniel Barenboim the other by the great Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Piano Sonata No. 28 Opus 101 in A Major - Lecture by
Sir Andras Schiff
https://youtu.be/xfXAuP2ugQ0
Piano Sonata No. 28 Opus 101 in A Major - Vladimir Ashkenazy
https://youtu.be/t1obWHQANPk
Piano Sonata no 28 Opus 101 in A Major - Daniel Barenboim
https://youtu.be/lZBkxRy2hoo
Week 37
Books, Quotes, and More
Anyone intrigued by the life of this great man should acquaint themselves with two wonderful books. Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven and Jan Swafford’s Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. In these volumes, not only is there great insight into his music, but you also get a feeling through his daily life just who this great man was.
Thayer was born in 1817 and died in 1897. He studied at Harvard and became a researcher and librarian. He was also a music lover, although he didn’t seem to play an instrument. He was frustrated by the lack of a great biography of Beethoven. There were so many inconsistencies between the ones that existed, the accounts by Schindler, Ries, and even Czerny. So, in a remarkable example of scholarship and dedication, he decided that he would write one. On his own dime so to speak, he moved to Germany and began to learn the German language. Serious publications in musical scholarship were always published in German those days. Back-and-forth to America he came due to financial constraints, finally landing a job with the International Herald Tribune, which afforded him enough money to continue his research. Eventually he became an ambassador to Trieste, a steady position with income and location that allowed him to continue his work. The biography is incomplete for he died in 1897. He only took Beethoven to the year 1817, curiously the year that Thayer was born. His work was completed by some of his fellow researchers, Dieters, Riemann, and Krehbiel. In my opinion, Alexander Wheelock Thayer is a true hero dedicated to Beethoven and true scholarship.
Jan Swofford curiously also was a Harvard graduate, balanced by graduate school at Yale. I urge you to read his Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph for it is not only full of information and insight into his music and life, Swofford also being a composer, but it is also so wonderfully easy to read, almost conversational. As an aside, let me say that it is available for download to a Kindle device for very little money. It’s pretty easy to have it in your library and well worth it.
I’m including here some of my favorite quotes from Beethoven himself. The first I find humorous but also very true. It’s often said that Beethoven wrote what he heard even when he was deaf, without regard for how difficult it would be to sing or to play on an instrument. What he composed was the truth.
“Do you think I give a damn about you and your pathetic violin?”
We’ve mentioned before Beethoven’s disdain for aristocracy:
“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.” (Good for you Beethoven!)
Beethoven on music and his music: “What I have in my heart and soul - must find a way out. That's the reason for music.”
“The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are.”
“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.”
“I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.”
“I haven't a single friend; I must live alone. But well I know that God is nearer to me than to the others of my art; I associate with Him without fear, I have always recognized and understood Him, and I have no fear for my music, -it can meet no evil fate. Those who understand it must become free from all the miseries that the others drag with them.”
“What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is subject to the changes of time, and - more's the pity- the fashions of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock and no wanton hand will ever venture to defile it. Then, let every man do that which is right, strive with all his might towards the goal which can never be obtained, develop to the last breath the gifts with which the gracious Creator has endowed him, and never cease to learn. For life is short, art eternal.”
“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.”
“Music can change the world.”
It is said that these were Beethoven’s last words on his deathbed. Reflect on this how this great man summed up his life with the corners of his lips turned up.
“Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est. (Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.)
I’m including a link below to a symphony by one of Beethoven’s students Ferdinand Ries. It’s interesting that you’ll hear the motive from Beethoven’s great fifth Symphony here quite a bit. You will also hear that while it’s reasonable listening it doesn’t have the depth, cohesion, and message that you hear in the master’s writing.
Ferdinand Reese Symphony No 5 in D Minor
Week 38
Beethoven's Letters by Elizabeth Morrison
Of the many wonders to be found in Beethoven’s letters, the most amazing to me is the simple fact of their existence. Beethoven, our most cherished composer, whose music is now, in 2020, keeping many of us alive, turns out to have dashed off notes–to friends, patrons, relatives, lovers and (above all) publishers–just like anyone else.
Of course, I am here addressing people who have followed Bob Swan’s Beethoven Blog through these many weeks, encountering masterpiece after masterpiece. After reading Week 37’s entry, you may now be immersed in Thayer or Swofford’s biographies. I think you would enjoy an encounter with Beethoven’s letters as well. They will give you another window into his genius, through words written by Beethoven himself.
Though Beethoven often calls himself a “poor, lazy correspondent,” and at times apologizes for having taken months or years to respond to a friend, he was actually quite prolific. I have not been able to find out how many letters he wrote; Google appears not to know; perhaps no one does. Beethoven’s Letters, from the Dover Books on Music series, claims to contain “Four hundred fifty-seven of the most important” ones, but there are thought to be more, hidden away in private collections and curio cabinets, beyond the reach of scholars and music lovers alike.
If this many letters seem daunting, why not start with Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations, edited, translated and introduced by Michael Hamburger? Here you will find about 200 of them, interspersed with letters and journal entries by Beethoven’s contemporaries, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer, the pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and many more. I must admit that I owned this book for years before I dared to open it. I’m not sure what I was afraid of – perhaps that the letters would be elevated beyond my grasp. But once I picked it up, I saw I had been quite wrong. The letters are fascinating, accessible, revealing and entertaining.
The first impression is of spontaneity. Beethoven, unlike composers like Wagner, Berlioz or Schumann, appears not to have his eye on future publication, nor to be trying to burnish his reputation later on. Hamburger calls Beethoven a careless speller and erratic capitalizer (German capitalizes most nouns; Beethoven doesn’t, unless a word should not be capitalized, in which case he does). His handwriting can be elusive, and he is a relentless punster, sometimes making it difficult to make out exactly what he means. But what comes through is startlingly intimate, a “naked thinking heart, that makes no show,” in the words of John Donne.
To give you a sense of what you will find, here are a few examples. First, a letter to his friend Eleonore von Breuning, written when he was 23:
“Only now that I have spent a whole year in the capital do you hear from me, and yet I have preserved you in my memory both vividly and constantly. Very often I conversed with you and with your dear family, only often without the inner calm for which I would have wished. It was then that I remembered the fatal quarrel, during which my behavior appeared so despicable. But it could not be undone…It is true, dear friend, that your noble character assures me of your forgiveness; but it is said that the most sincere repentance is that in which one admits his own faults; this was my intention. Now let us draw the curtain on this whole episode…”
He then goes on to offer Eleonore the dedication to his Variations on the Theme “Se vuol ballare” from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. I, for one, would certainly have forgiven him for whatever it was he did!
In this letter to Franz Hoffmeister, one of his publishers, written in 1802, we see another side of Beethoven. Written two years before Beethoven took back his dedication of the Eroica Symphony from Napoleon, you can see his feelings already beginning to build.
“May the devil ride the whole lot of you, gentlemen–what, suggest to me that I should write a sonata of that sort? As the time of the revolutionary fever–well, at that time it would have been worth considering, but now that everything is trying to get back into the old rut, Buonoparte has made his concordat with the Pope–a sonata of that sort? If at least it were a Missa pro Sancta Maria or a Vespers, etc.–well, in that case I should immediately take hold of the brush and write down a Credo in Unum in enormous notes weighing a pound each.”
The many letters Beethoven wrote to his publishers are especially interesting, as they have references to his compositions, his finances, and his politics. In a single letter to the publisher Nikolaus Simrock, from 1794, he compliments the publisher’s work (“I must congratulate you on the engraving, which is pleasant to look at, clear, and legible, seriously, if you continue in this way, you will soon be the very paragon of engravers.”); deplores business dealings (“I have been looking out for an agent, and have found an extremely decent, efficient man for you. All you need to do now is to write to me or to him, proposing your terms. He asks for a third discount. May the devil understand your bargaining; I wash my hands of it.”); and weighs in on a political question of the day (“Here they have been arresting several persons of importance; they say that a revolution was about to break out–but I believe that as long as the Austrians have brown beer and sausages, they’ll never revolt.”).
On the other hand, you will rarely find Beethoven discussing his music itself. What he wanted to say in his music, he said; he felt no need to explain. This note about the 6th Symphony, the Pastoral, is one of the few times he does drop a hint, and it comes not from a letter but from an 1807 entry in his Sketchbook, which Hamburger includes in his book.
“It is left to the listener to discover the situation. “Sinfonia caracteristica” or a reminiscence of country life. Every kind of painting loses by being carried too far in instrumental music. “Sinfonia pastorella.” Anyone who has the faintest idea of country life will not need many descriptive titles to be able to imagine for himself what the author intends. Even without a description one will be able to recognize it all, for it is a record of sentiments rather than a painting in sounds.”
I hope you can sense from these few examples the way Beethoven’s letters might draw you in. They reflect his daily concerns, yet his unfathomable genius never quite leaves your awareness. The contrast, indeed, is part of their attraction. But there is also the sadness of reading about his struggles with his health and above all his deafness. In a very affectionate 1801 letter to his friend Karl Amenda, he writes,
“I wish you were with me, for your Beethoven lives most unhappily, in discord with Nature and with the Creator. More than once I have cursed the latter for exposing his creatures to the slightest accident, so that often the loveliness blossoms are destroyed and broke by it. You must be told that the finest part of me, my hearing, has deteriorated. Already then, at the time you were with me, I felt signs of this and kept quiet about it; now it has grown progressively worse. Whether it can be cured remains to be seen…”
I found it heartrending to read, in letter after letter, of Beethoven’s many ailments, including abdominal pain, joint pain, eye inflammation, and much more. He died at age 56, having suffered greatly and having been profoundly deaf for at least eleven years.
Which brings us to his most famous letter, the Heiligenstadt Testament, which he wrote in 1802, when he was 31 years old. Bob pointed you to this unique document in Week 7’s blog entry. It is a letter written to his brothers Carl and Johann from the resort town of Heiligenstadt, where his doctor Johann Adam Schmidt had sent him in pursuit of a cure for his deafness. The cure was not to be, but in the period of rest and reflection Beethoven put his feelings on paper openly, as he was never able to do in person.
Perhaps it is not strictly speaking a letter, as it was never sent, and Beethoven guarded it carefully for the rest of his life. It was found among his papers after his death, and published several months later. However, Hamburger includes it in his book, in the same chronological order as other, more conventional letters, and it is very moving to come across it almost casually, between letters to two of his publishers.
As Bob wrote, “Beethoven confessed to his brothers, and subsequently to the world, his despair. He admitted his thoughts of suicide, but felt that he would be betraying his art to do so. This is why he is my hero.” Despite his personal agony, Beethoven chose to go on, and to give us the incomparable masterpieces still to come. Even if you have already read the Testament, I hope you will go back and read through it again. That we can hear these echoes of Beethoven’s thoughts from the distance of 250 years, is a great privilege and a great joy.
Link Here to Heiligenstadt Testament
Link Here to Beethoven’s Letters by Michael Hamburger
Missing Links from previous email:
Se vuol ballere variations - Yehudi Menuhin, violin and Wilhelm Kempff, pianoBeethoven Symphony #6 in F Major Opus 68 - Two historically important performances.
Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic (1978)
Arturo Toscanini (1938)
Elizabeth Morrison and Bob Swan are old friends, having met at Norwalk Youth Symphony, in Norwalk, CT, when they were teenagers. While Bob went on to a distinguished career in the Chicago Symphony, Elizabeth became a professional writer. She is the author of four books on health and nutrition, including the New York Times Bestseller Body Type Diet, two books on Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and a book on telepathic animal communication, Wisdom of the Animals. She has never forgotten her love of cello playing, and has written over 60 articles on music, focusing on chamber music and music by women composers. She is honored to be a guest contributor to Bob’s Beethoven Blog.
Week 39
Beethoven Cello and Piano Sonatas
Beethoven wrote five sonatas for piano and cello. They are: Opus 5 No 1 in F Major and No 2 in G minor both written in 1795; Opus 69 in A Major written in 1808; and Opus 102 No 1 in C Major and No 2 in D Major both written in 1815. You will notice that each grouping falls in a different one of Beethoven’s style periods. The Opus 102 sonatas share most of the characteristics of the last period. Concise use of material, intellect, writing sometimes ethereal and distant, sometimes quite aggressive. There is, however, always that mysterious looking over the emotional and psychological horizon showing us his view of his mind and the universe. Keep your minds open as you listen to these masterpieces and let Beethoven in.
https://youtu.be/k0Mavok879A and https://youtu.be/ifLpGGuoDo4
Please play the above two links one after the other in order to hear the Sonata Op. 102 No 1 played by the great Janos Starker. You will hear in his playing a wonderful purity of approach. His intonation is perfect and he plays with immaculate precision and taste. When I was a student at Indiana University Starker was the primary cello teacher. He had a wonderful class of students who all played with the same musical integrity. He had his notion of what great cello playing was and it didn’t matter to him what was fashionable at the time. He tried to play in the same style as Emmanuel Feuermann and that school. I remember how he used to rail against what he called tonal discrepancies, distortions caused by rash, inattentive or thoughtless playing. In addition, some people preferred a more aggressive, lush, romantic approach. Of course that will be always more popular but Starker would be undeterred. He stuck to his musical guns. While I admired his prowess then I admire it even more now.
https://youtu.be/wfs9WXfJWM4
Listen now to Opus 102 No2 played by the incomparable Mstislav Rostropovich cello and Sviatoslav Richter piano. What a contrast in style from Starker! This Russian style of playing is far more aggressive and out front. Many would say it’s more emotional. Well if that’s what extroverted means then it is. I love his playing as much as I love Starker’s approach. Good is good. Isn’t it fortunate that we don’t have to choose either red wine or white wine? I hope you will enjoy and revel in these two fantastic sonatas as performed by two of the leading virtuosos of the 20th century.
Week 40
The Hammerklavier
In 1817 Thomas Broadwood, one of the sons of the John Broadwood & Sons piano company of London, met Beethoven in Vienna. He told him that he wanted to present him with one of his firm’s best instruments since Beethoven was the greatest musician/composer alive. This piano was grander in scale than what Beethoven had. It had a greater range, a complete octave more. More sophisticated pedals and stringing apparatus also enhanced the sound of the famed Broadwood instruments. Inspired by these prospects, Beethoven began writing a new huge sonata for it well before it even arrived, the Sonata in Bb Major opus 106, the “Hammerklavier”. Hammerklavier (hammer keyboard) is the German term for fortepiano - what we now simply call the piano. The Broadwood piano made its long journey from London by ship through the Straights of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean Sea to Trieste, and then by cart to Vienna. Even though he could barely hear it, the new owner reveled in its possibilities. As you listen to the sonata, you’ll notice Beethoven’s use of the extremes, the louds and softs, the highs and lows (heaven and earth). Here is a link to photos and more of Beethoven’s Broadwood Hammerklavier!
https://www.worldpianonews.com/historical/beethoven-broadwood/
The sonata has long beguiled, challenged, and perplexed pianists and listeners alike. There is its great length, its monstrous technical difficulties, unusual key juxtapositions, and almost strange fugal writing. And then there is that wondrously profound slow movement in F# minor, a key rather remote to the sonata’s home key of Bb. This movement is long! Performances of it alone vary from 13’ to 22’! It is transformative and powerful enough to touch your soul if you’ll let it.
This sonata is regarded by many musicians as one of the most important sonatas, if not pieces of music, ever written! I certainly agree. I love this piece and would be happy to have it be the last music I ever heard.
I’m including links parts 1 and 2 to Andras Schiff’s lecture on the Hammerklavier Sonata below. If you have a score to the piece I recommend following along. Both his playing and verbal insights are revealing.
http://download.guardian.co.uk/sys-audio/Arts/Culture/2006/12/13/03-29_bflatmaj_op106.mp3
http://download.guardian.co.uk/sys-audio/Arts/Culture/2006/12/13/04-29_bflatmaj_106_2.mp3
Here are three wonderful performances of the sonata representing different generations of music making. The first is by the great Solomon (1902-1988). His full name was Solomon Cutner but he was known professionally as Solomon. He must have really arrived I suppose, not unlike present icons such as Tiger or Madonna. But what a wonderful pianist!
https://youtu.be/YKlLPe86Flk
Next the ever-elusive Glenn Gould. Not the slowness of his opening tempo compared to the other two.
https://youtu.be/O09CkVbl4RQ
And finally, the brilliant young Yuja Wang!
The Hammerklavier, Op.106
https://youtu.be/E17EsNWanzQ
Week 41
Beethoven: A Commentary on a Master
Guest Presenter Foley Schuler
I have asked our friend Foley Schuler, the afternoon host on Blue Lake Radio, to share with us his thoughts on the elements of anguish, pain, and despair as heard in Beethoven’s music. Here is his generous essay. - Bob Swan
Beethoven at the Abyss:
Some Meditations in a Minor Key by Foley Schuler
“Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.” ―E.M. Cioran
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” ―William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Beethoven first mentions a “buzzing” in his ears in his letters as early as 1796, when he was about 26 years old. It was the first indication of the hearing difficulties that would leave him totally deaf by the time he was in his mid 40s. One wonders about these first inklings--did he perhaps think it merely his imagination, or convince himself that it was something that would go away? (And later, what was the last sound he heard?) I once saw a photo of all of the various ear trumpets Beethoven used during that slow descent into silence--long, curved and coiled atrocities, laid out in display on a large piece of cloth--a dispiriting and surreal sight to say the least, and one I have never forgotten. By his mid 40s, with 10 years left to live (he would die in 1827 at the age of 56), he was no longer able to converse unless he passed written notes back and forth to his colleagues, visitors and friends. He was also, of course, all the while writing some of his greatest music.
To find oneself engulfed in total deafness is of course the greatest tragedy that can possibly befall someone who lives their life for--and by--music. Yet Beethoven persevered. What could possibly be added to this well-worn cliche? His struggle in the face of deafness is central to Beethoven’s legacy--as well as to the mythic image of composer-as-hero that Beethoven projected onto history, and that would, indeed, become one of the defining motifs of Western civilization. This year, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, he has returned to us in all his glory, profundity and power--and yet does so, as always, clad in the armor of that myth, which, while speaking a truth all its own, fights us at every turn in our attempt to know the man.
For me, however, it is not his heroism, but his humanity, that most deeply appeals. More than any other composer, Beethoven braved the abyss. He not only peered over its edge, but submerged himself--lived there. Indeed, that final decade represented a profound journey inward--right up to that edge and beyond. It is there that we encounter King Lear raging on the heath, where we meet Goya painting his “Black Paintings” and William Blake furiously scribbling his Marriage of Heaven and Hell--and it is there that I find the Beethoven I cherish. (Suddenly now, it strikes me that Beethoven, Goya and Blake--the three great visionaries in their respective arts of the Romantic Age--would die within around a year, in some cases mere months, of one another...a cosmic conjunction to explore, no doubt, another time.)
This is the Beethoven who would write, in the now-legendary letter to his brothers Carl and Johann on October 6, 1802--in a tortured cry of despair over his increasing deafness, known, with reference to the Vienna suburb where he was convalescing, as the Heiligenstadt Testament:
"What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life--only Art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence--truly wretched, an excitable body which a sudden change can throw from the best into the worst state..."
It is the deaf Beethoven, left alone in his silence, after the bombast (however artfully expressed) has died down, after the fist shaken at the heavens has fallen to the side, and then opened to accept one’s head buried in it--it is that Beethoven, who, bolstered by Art (with a capital A), embraces the Abyss (also, capital A), for whom I feel the deepest affection and kinship. I picture us furiously passing notes back and forth, perhaps sitting amongst the ruins of the piano he pounded to pieces trying to hear it--the same one whose legs he sawed off, so as to set it on the floor and feel the sounds he couldn’t hear. (As for that image, I could have sworn that when starting out as a writer, I encountered an old engraving in a book, depicting Beethoven and that shattered piano, though I cannot now seem to find it, or any reference to it, anywhere. Did I imagine it? That engraving even inspired an early poem of mine--also now lost, or at least deeply buried. The Italians have that wonderful saying, “If it’s not true, it should be.”) Let this missive be my side of the conversation, thoughts that, as you might gather, are not in E-flat--key of hunting horns and heroic exploits--but perhaps D Minor, which Nigel Tufnel, of the fictitious rock band Spinal Tap, in the famed film mockumentary about the group, declares to be “the saddest of all keys.”
That abyss had always been there, of course, growing in him, opening wider as his hearing deteriorated. One can hear it in the twin blasts (or perhaps the silence in between, or immediately following) that open the Symphony No. 3, “Eroica”--like great lightning flashes illuminating its contours. That “slender Grecian maiden between two Nordic giants” (as Schumann would refer to the Fourth) fleetingly felt its caress. In Fate’s insistent knocking on the door that so famously opens the Fifth Symphony (indeed, the most familiar four notes now in all of music, and yet still startling), we can certainly hear it trying to get in--or escape. The bucolic walk through the Austrian countryside of his Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” slowed the pace a bit so as to smell the roses, but was still part of that same march to the abyss, not to mention the beguiling Allegretto of the Symphony No. 7--that mesmerizing dirge amid this “apotheosis of the dance”--a turning point in the path perhaps. The mighty Ninth was the last hurrah (and what a hurrah it is) before the leap--not to mention the work that, speaking of abysses, started the superstition that no major composer would write beyond a ninth symphony, a legend furthered by the examples of Schubert and Bruckner, to the point that Mahler would go out of his way to title what would have been his Ninth something other than a symphony, calling it instead “Das Lied von Der Erde”--and sure enough, his “Symphony No. 9” that followed would the last one he completed.
This descent into silence was marked by the ascent in Beethoven’s work of the form the composer would make all his own--a form he would take with him on that journey (or, perhaps more accurately, that would take him on it). I am, of course, speaking of the string quartet. The string quartet was nothing new to Beethoven at this point. His works for quartet span the entire of his musical maturity (his first, the Op. 18, in fact, coincide closely with the onset of his deafness in his 20s). Indeed, together, they form one of the most succinct ways of charting his development as a composer. He had inherited the form from its progenitor, Papa Haydn, who had been his teacher in Vienna--though before long he would infuse it with a rigor and invention that would, ultimately, reinvent the quartet for the ages, and in ways that Haydn and Mozart could scarcely could have imagined. Furthermore, he would, in addition to the composer-as- hero archetype he gave us, also create the template (seen more widely in the 20th Century, most prominently with Shostakovich) of the quartet as vehicle for the composer’s deepest, innermost expression--counterposed with the symphony as the composer’s public face.
In the year following his last great public statement--the epochal Ninth Symphony--Beethoven would return with renewed vigor to the intimate form he had explored so brilliantly and invest it with an all-new intensity, autonomy and profundity, and, with the formal innovation and profound depth, both intellectual and emotional, that characterizes Late Period Beethoven, he would continue this exploration right up to the end. Comprising his String Quartets Nos. 12-16 along with the Grosse Fuge, these six works, collectively known as the Late Quartets, are very much of their time--those times being revolutionary--and at the same time ahead of them (they still seems modern, and even ahead our own time). They would be his last major compositions--his final statement--or, if you prefer, his last will and testament.
With these works, the “conversation between four intelligent individuals” upon which we are privileged to eavesdrop (as Goethe had famously described the string quartet) was turned profoundly inward by this composer who could no longer hear a conversation--which is to say, the conversation was now with himself. Elias Canetti’s memorable phrase “Dialogue with the Cruel Partner”--the name he gave to an essay on the diary as conversation with oneself--seems appropriate here, and this dramatization of the various parts of one’s inner self closely resembles what the pioneering Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, nearly 100 years later, would term active imagination. Beethoven, in his final symphony, with its glorious choral apotheosis, had ascended into the heavens. In the Late Quartets he descended into himself. In both cases, he transcended himself--and, though Beethoven wrote no formal requiem, with the act of sonic individuation brought by these extraordinary works for string quartet, he was, in effect, writing one now--for himself. “A requiem out to be quiet music,” Beethoven once remarked. “Memories of the dead require no hubbub.” This one, however, had it all--everything from heartfelt introspection to profound fury, from deepest melancholy to music that over brims with the fullness of life.
For many out there, it would be the Ninth Symphony, I imagine, they would select as that single work of Beethoven’s to take with them for companionship on the proverbial desert island--and understandably. For me, however, I think it would be--if I might cheat and include a group of works--these Late Quartets, If further forced, though, to narrow it down from there, I might well choose the remarkable work known as the Grosse Fuge, of “Great Fugue.”
Originally written to be the final movement Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130, the Grosse Fuge presents--rather, confronts--the listener with an immense double fugue of staggering depth and volcanic intensity. Though reflecting Beethoven’s immersion during this period in the fugues of Bach, the Great Fugue is, in reality, unlike anything else that had been heard up to that time--and really ever since. It stands alone outside of time, outside of Beethoven’s output, outside the string quartet, perhaps even outside of music itself. It would prove too overwhelming for audiences of Beethoven’s time, and was universally condemned by the critics of the day-- though later assessment would deem it utterly essential, with Stravinsky describing it as "an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever.”
Beethoven’s publisher, fearing the liability posed by the Great Fugue for the quartet’s commercial success, charged Karl Holz--violinist with Schuppanzigh String Quartet, which debuted the Grosse Fuge, and was a confidant of Beethoven in his last years--with the unenviable task of convincing Beethoven to substitute a more conventional alternative ending. Shockingly, Beethoven, with very little resistance or hesitation, agreed to do so--and to assign the Grosse Fuge its own separate opus number, Op. 133. Why the notoriously stubborn composer was so readily persuaded to make the change remains of the many enigmas of this most enigmatic work. It would seem unlikely that concern for the audience's delicate sensibilities drove the decision. Disregard for the conventional tastes of the time is part and parcel of innovation, and, in this case, also a reminder that the appeal, intrigue and power of the string quartet lay in the fact that the first audience for the music is always the players themselves.
Some have suggested that money had something to do with it. Finances were Beethoven’s Achilles’ heel; He was nearly always in dire straits, and his publisher had offered to pay extra for the new ending. Another driving force, of course, was likely the music itself. I would surmise that he already saw the Great Fugue for what it was--another entire world unto itself--and was willing to follow where it may lead. Thus it was entirely natural to have it breaking off from this other mass and floating further out into the unknown...to drift in the abyss and toward (and clearing the way for) what was to come.
In this case, that meant the awe-inspiring String Quartet in C# Minor, Op. 131. This deeply compelling work, in its way also unclassifiable, bursts the traditionally four movement form at the seams with its seven continuous movements, each in a different key, played without pause in what Beethoven would deem his own personal favorite, and indeed, the most perfect of all his compositions. Upon hearing it Schubert remarked, "After this, what is left for us to write?" Schumann said that this quartet, along Op. 127, possessed a "grandeur...which no words can express. They seem to me to stand on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination." Schubert, who served as a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral, only to die the following year, arranged to have the Op. 131 performed at his bedside as he himself was dying, wanting it to be the last music he ever heard. (And if I allow myself this digression, it is because I too have a special love of the work, and admit an ulterior motive in further linking it to the Grosse Fuge--namely that the gods governing such things may look the other way and grant me another desert island work, and that I might take the Op. 131 with me as well.)
Opus numbers and other distinctions aside, these Late Quartets are really one great work, with the Great Fugue at its mysterious heart. Countless analyses have attempted to delve into the structure of the Grosse Fuge, with conflicting results, further revealing the paradoxes at its elusive core. I will leave some sort of note-by-note dissection--the sort so thoroughly resisted by the work--to other hands, more interested in such futile endeavors. Instead, I hope, humbly, that these words may inspire and entice you, with all the struggles you are facing, to join in this journey of a lifetime. One needs to see it as well as hear it--which is precisely why I’ve included a video of its performance here--if only that one may properly experience the element of titanic human struggle involved. Mahler would later say that a symphony “should contain the entire universe,” but here, already, Beethoven has crammed an entire universe into a single 15 minute movement for string quartet. These writhings on the part of the performers--are they death throes, or birth pangs? Or both? Arnold Steinhardt of the Guarneri String Quartet calls it "Armageddon...the chaos out of which life itself evolved.”
This would seem what poet T.S. Eliot was getting at in the famous opening of The Four Quartets--his own late-career masterpiece, and believed by many to be a literary response to Beethoven’s Late Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls
echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.
In Beethoven’s end, was, indeed, his beginning--as it is for all of us. This year, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth--amid a global pandemic, civil unrest, and a bitterly contested presidential election (and, as if that weren’t enough, at the time of this writing, NASA has just announced that an asteroid is heading our way)--we look to this colossal figure, who also lived in and survived tumultuous times, and not only defined them but helped transform them into the modern world we now share.
And in his despair was his joy. It is precisely the depths at which Beethoven so often lived, and for so long, that made possible the profound uplift of his Ninth Symphony--and if the “Ode to Joy” can resound throughout the ages, it is only because he fully lived his despair. One thinks here of the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s reason for declining Freud’s offer of analysis: “I don’t want to get rid of my demons, lest my angels leave with them.”
I picture Beethoven, in that moment when he had just finished “conducting” (conducting, that is, without having been able to hear a thing) the premier of his Ninth Symphony--that moment just before a member of the orchestra (one imagines, the concertmaster) took Beethoven by the shoulders and turned him around to face the thunderous applause he could not hear. I think of him in that moment, as he turned, between facing the orchestra (that world) and facing...the world, between facing history and facing eternity--and in that turning became a giant with the contours of a man, a man driven inward and outward...one who could endure the myth we have made of him. I think of the music he heard in that moment, his last quartets still stretching like a vast sea before him, and I myself struggle to hear the silence he heard then--what in earlier ages might have been referred to as the “music of the spheres”--the deep silence that is the sound of infinite possibility.
_____________________
Here are some links that Foley also wanted to share with you.
The Alban Berg Quartet performs Beethoven’s String Quartet the Grosse Fugue in Bb Major Opus 133
https://youtu.be/13ygvpIg-S0
The Alban Berg Quartet performs Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C# Minor, Op. 131:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA4_FnH49tA&t=12s
Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament, read by Irish actor Ciarán Hinds, with pianist David Quigley performing the Adagio Sostenuto from Sonata in C# Minor, op.27, "Moonlight":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5nprz7d5zQ&t=33s
Actor Alec Guiness reads Four Quartets by T.S. Eliott:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccupYGfiDEw
Week 42
Opus 108: Twenty-Five Scottish Songs
By Elizabeth Morrison
Wait, twenty-five what?
Bob’s Beethoven Blog has now taken us deep into the period we know as “late Beethoven.” Last week, Foley Schuler showed us Beethoven staring into the Abyss. Two weeks ago, Bob described the monumental Hammerklavier Sonata, opus 106, as one that “has long beguiled, challenged, and perplexed pianists and listeners alike.” Now we are looking at a set of folk song settings for voice, piano, violin and cello, that has not so much beguiled or challenged as whizzed right by the heads of Beethoven lovers everywhere. Are we plunging from the sublime to the ridiculous?
No, but we are plunging from the famous to the obscure. Back in Week 35, discussing the songs of Beethoven’s Opus 98, 99, and 100, Bob confessed to being unfamiliar with many of Beethoven’s songs. That goes double for Opus 108. Who would guess that the folk-song arrangement was the single genre where Beethoven was most prolific? Between the years 1809 and 1820, he made an astounding 179 folk-song settings. Granted, it takes a good bit less time to dash off an arrangement of Auld Lang Syne, say, than a symphony or a string quartet. But still.
Even more surprising, these songs are in English, a language Beethoven barely spoke. It all came about through a Scotsman named George Thompson, a resident of Edinburgh, who had jumped belatedly on a craze for folk song collecting. Rather than enlisting local musicians, Thompson hoped to out-do other collectors by soliciting arrangements from the great composers of the day, most notably Haydn. When they ran out of steam, Thompson approached Beethoven himself.
There was much back and forth about bread and butter issues; one of Beethoven’s letters makes clear he knows Haydn had received a payment of one pound per song. But at length a deal was struck, and Thompson began sending Beethoven songs to arrange. One of the odd parts of the arrangement was that he gave Beethoven many tunes without a text attached. Beethoven complained, asking how he was expected to produce an arrangement when he didn’t know what the song was even about. It turned out Thompson was also soliciting poets of the day for new versions of the words, whether to ward off Scottish dialect or to clean up vulgarities in the original is unclear.
If you look through Beethoven’s work by opus number, this set of 25 is the only set of folk songs you will see. What happened to the other 154? They are listed as “WoO,” which stands for “werke ohne Opuszahl,” or works without opus number. Apparently, receiving an opus number from a composer confers a kind of status on a work; it is part of your official oeuvre, not something you wrote for a pound. The complete list of Beethoven’s arrangements includes more Scottish songs, many Welch and Irish songs, six English popular songs, and a few of “diverse nationalities.”
Since they have an opus number, the Opus 108 songs are presumably the ones Beethoven liked best. You can listen to them in many versions on Youtube, and I recommend you do so. A link is below. I hope you find them as delightful as I do. Beethoven took them seriously and called them “compositions.” However, sales were disappointing and Thompson seems to have found them a bit Beethoven-y. “He composes for posterity,” he groused, and asked that they be toned down a little. Beethoven predictably replied, “I am not accustomed to retouching my compositions; I have never done so, certain of the truth that any partial change alters the character of the composition.”
I’m glad he didn’t. For a taste, try this one, Music, Love and Wine. It is the first of the set, and takes up the age-old question of which of these is more vital for our happiness. Here are the words:
O let me Music hear
Night and Day!
Let the voice and let the Lyre
Dissolve my heart, my spirit's fire;
Music and I ask no more,
Night or Day!
Hence with colder world,
Hence, Adieu!
Give me. Give me but the while,
The brighter heav'n of Ellen's smile,
Love and then I ask no more,
Oh, would you?
Hence with this world of care
I say too;
Give me but the blissful dream,
That mingles in the goblet's gleam,
Wine and then I ask no more,
What say you?
Music may gladden Wine,
What say you?
Tendrils of the laughing Vine
Around the Myrtle well may twine,
Both may grace the Lyre divine,
What say you?
What if we all agree,
What say you?
I will list the Lyre with thee,
And he shall dream of Love like me,
Brighter than the wine shall be,
What say you?
Refrain
Love, Music, wine agree,
True, true, true!
Round then round the glass, the glee,
And Ellen in our toast shall be!
Music, wine and Love agree,
True, true, true!
This charming rendition is from an album called Beethoven Folksong Settings. It really is wonderful. Of course you will hear the piano, but if you listen closely you can also hear the violin and cello adding their tones. Beethoven made the arrangements so that they worked without the string instruments, in case they were not available, but were much enhanced if they were.
There is yet another benefit to Opus 108: this is Beethoven we can partake in directly. We may not be able to play his string quartets, or have had the good fortune, like Bob, to have performed the Eroica Symphony 100 times; but we can print these Beethoven songs and try them ourselves. How about Auld Lang Syne? The link is to a website called IMSLP, which stands for the International Music Score Library Project, an incredible resource where you can find almost every piece of music ever written that is in the public domain. Open the link, print out the music, and you can sing Beethoven’s very arrangement (remotely) with your friends on New Year’s Eve! I certainly plan to.
Links:
Beethoven’s 25 Scottish Songs (many choices) YouTube
Music, Love and Wine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erj8-ysJbV0 YouTube
Auld Lang Syne (sheet music) IMSLP
Elizabeth Morrison and Bob Swan are old friends, having met at Norwalk Youth Symphony, in Norwalk, CT, when they were teenagers. While Bob went on to a distinguished career in the Chicago Symphony, Elizabeth became a professional writer. She is the author of four books on health and nutrition, including the New York Times Bestseller Body Type Diet, two books on Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and a book on telepathic animal communication, Wisdom of the Animals. She has never forgotten her love of cello playing, and has written over 60 articles on music, focusing on chamber music and music by women composers. She is honored to be a guest contributor to Bob’s Beethoven Blog.
Week 43
Piano Sonatas
Beethoven considered his sonata in Bb opus 106, the “Hammerklavier” to be his finest. I love all of them but it too is my favorite. But then there are the three sonatas opus 109 in E Major, opus 110 in Ab Major, and opus 111 in c minor! With these masterpieces Beethoven leaves us with 32 brilliant piano sonatas! They have touched us with tragedy, pathos, humor, love, tenderness, and whatever the human heart can hold. Listening to them how could they not be my favorites?!
As is my custom here I will include links to Andras Schiff’s lectures on these wondrous pieces. I must say that his lectures on all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas are a must for anyone, musician or not.
They are replete with historical perspectives, interpretive suggestions, just the right amount of descriptive analysis, and beautiful piano playing. I just can’t say enough about Schiff’s genius.
Opus 109 begins in such a sunny smiling way followed shortly by a rather questioning second subject. There follows a furious scherzo in e minor, Then the most beautiful E Major theme, a sarabande which is a rather ancient Spanish dance form found in many Baroque dance suites. Six variations follow before the movement ends with a simple restatement of that wonderful theme.
Opus 110 starts in feeling much like how op 109 ended. It’s key of Ab Major is a major third away from the previous sonata, the same interval that much of 109 was based on. It is also in the same 3/4 meter. A beautiful love song appears near the beginning. Some say that it was written for Antoinie Brentano, presumably Beethoven’s great “Immortal Beloved”, the woman he loved but couldn’t have. And so it was with women, friends, and most relationships for our hero. A raucous almost sarcastic scherzo follows and then a most profound third movement Adagio. Full of great sadness and resignation there appears a recitative section, a section without rhythm, almost declaratory. It’s “melody” is a quote from the great St John Passion by J.S. Bach where Christ declares “Es Ist Vollbracht” - “It is consummated”. Of course we must ask ourselves what Beethoven was telling us. Then comes a glorious fugue, a form he used more and more in his late style period. Then the recitative returns rhythmically even more ambiguously and tragically followed by another fugue using the earlier fugue subject inverted, turned upside down. Opus 110 is the only one of the final three sonatas that concludes with a powerful, spirited, and glorious ending.
Opus 111 is only two movements long. It begins in C minor, once again a major third it away from the ending of the previous sonata. It begins very seriously and the whole adagio introduction is characterized by diminished seventh chords and dotted rhythms giving it almost the feeling of a French Overture from the baroque era. It’s followed by a very fugal movement whose theme contains a sequence of notes that Beethoven became fascinated with more and more in his life. A sequence of four notes that contained an augmented second. An augmented second is 1/2 step bigger than a major third. This difficult and rather wild movement subsides into a very peaceful conclusion. Then follows one of the great pieces of music ever conceived. He titled it Arietta, little aria or song. Variations follow, more and more intricate. Trills, rumblings in the lowest reaches of the instrument, high notes seemingly touching heaven all quietly bring to a conclusion one of the greatest contributions a single man had ever made to humankind, the 32 Piano Sonatas! Thank you Beethoven.
I do realize just how trivial these précis will seem to some. They do to me. This blog was never intended to offer in-depth analysis of these pieces. I urge you all to go to the Adam Schiff lectures and attentatively listen to them. After that listen to his performances of them which I will also attach. I must confess that I have been so moved by listening to these late sonatas and studying with score in hand and seeing what marvels are held there. They take one on a journey that’s incredibly emotional but also intellectually inspiring. As I’ve said many times Beethoven is my hero.
Schiff Lecture Opus 109 https://youtu.be/I57VVPAaUsI
Schiff Lecture Opus 110 https://youtu.be/L8YZdJK5qLE
Schiff Lecture Opus 111 https://youtu.be/DdYRCOMAqnA
Schiff Performance Opus 109 https://youtu.be/15EFrXnj49Q
Schiff Performance Opus 110 https://youtu.be/f4trghQBzBo
Schiff Performance Opus 111 https://youtu.be/YKwNlP0s4WY
Week 44
The Diabelli Variations, Opus 120
We can wonder if it was just fun, or vanity in wanting to be associated with the best composers alive, or curiosity in seeing what would happen. Nonetheless, in 1819 Anton Diabelli (1781-1858) wrote a waltz theme described by many then and now as banal, cheap, trite, a mere trifling. Diabelli, a publisher and composer of more lightweight musical ditties, then presented it to the greatest composers alive. Schubert, Ries, Czerny, the 11-year-old Franz Liszt, a total of 50 of them including Beethoven. Each was to write a single variation. His idea then was to publish them all together. Our irascible hero wanted nothing to do with the project. He thought that Diabelli’s theme was beneath him and declined. But his mind clearly changed for over the next four years he wrote a set of 33 variations that some have called the greatest of all piano works ever!
A theme with variations is one of the oldest forms in music. The greatest example of the form from the Baroque period, 1600c to 1750c, is the Goldberg Variations of J.S. Bach, a theme with 32 variations with the theme recapitulated at the end. (Remember the last movement of the Beethoven opus 109 piano sonata? It is a theme with 6 variations and the theme restated to close it.) It is a form very much in favor during the Classical period, 1740c to 1800c. Decoration, changes of mode, tempo, character, were all common techniques employed. But in Beethoven’s hands, we explore every tiny component of the theme - the little turn at the beginning, the incessantly repeated notes, rests, accompaniments figures, cascading or ascending passages, etc., but more, he takes us to a different world of emotion and psychology. Especially near the end he shows us his world and how he has seen the universe. He finishes with a charming minuet, a not overly fond form for him. Looking over his shoulder maybe? Waving goodbye to the past?
Beethoven titled this piece Große Veränderungen über einen bekannten Deutschen Tanz ("Grand Variations on a well-known German dance"). The word Veranderungen in German not only means variations, but also transformations which is what these feel like to me. This piece is monstrous, over 50’ long. It’s both fun and difficult to listen to. It is diabolically (inevitable, right?) difficult to play. Prepare to be delighted, dazzled, and moved as you listen to this remarkable masterpiece.
I will attach links to some brilliant interpretations plus a session of Stephen Kovacevich coaching a young pianist on the wondrous Diabelli Variations of Beethoven.
Alfred Brendel https://youtu.be/l3qktiSzwMI
Anderszewski https://youtu.be/Wp59KCg_DC
Gregory Sokolov https://youtu.be/pAI4-9yc6kA
Sviatoslav Richter https://youtu.be/dokkniOwSlQ
Stephen Kovacevich https://youtu.be/PjZsCNT7ocE
Week 45
Missa Solemnis by Thomas Wikman
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, opus 123, is a singular work, unmatched in its scope since Bach’s B minor mass. Scored for full orchestra of the time, plus chorus and a quartet of soloists, it represents an overwhelming challenge to all the performers, and perhaps most of all, the conductor. It’s hard to think of any other piece in the standard repertoire that when played by a great conductor, great orchestra, and chorus, that runs so great a chance of not really succeeding at all. I myself have witnessed such performances. I particularly remember certain movements that touched me greatly; Martinon’s Kyrie, Giulinini’s Crucifixus, Solti’s Et vitam venturi, etc.
What is it about this piece that is so daunting? First of all, the demands on the singers are extraordinary; in the Credo alone, there are 28 high B flats for the sopranos, many of them sustained for measures at a time, and at a high dynamic. All of the other choral parts and the solo parts are equally demanding.
Many have laid these problems to the fact that Beethoven was deaf at the time of writing the Mass. But, in fact, he had been deaf for over 20 years by the time he composed the Missa.
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was described by Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance.” The Missa Solemnis could well be described as “the apotheosis of the fugue.” Because of the nature of the text, Beethoven was deprived of two of his most trusted musical forms; namely, the sonata form and the variation form. However, in his later works, Beethoven turned more and more to the fugue, and no work exploits this more than the Missa.
The Kyrie plunges us immediately into the world of the sublime. After a 21-measure orchestral introduction, the chorus enters with massive chords, answered by the soloists, on the word “Kyrie.” In measure 36, the chorus takes up the word “Eleison, in wonderfully mystic polyphony. This continues until the “Christe,” which introduces a key change, and more importantly a time change to triple meter, in the fashion of Renaissance masses. The “Christe’s” smoothly flowing counterpoint is worthy of a Monteverdi. It begins with the soloists and passes to the chorus, which then produces a double-choir texture. As this winds down, we enter the final “Kyrie,” using the same original themes, but not the same music; new keys are explored. A 15-bar coda brings this wonderful movement to a peaceful conclusion.
The Gloria explodes like a rocket, with both the chorus and orchestra playing ascending themes, eventually settling down to chordal exclamations in the classic style, however heightened by Beethoven’s inspirational magic, culminating in a rugged fugue on the words “glorificamus te.” A short modulatory passage by the orchestra brings us to a new key, and a lovely, gracious motet-like passage for the soloists (Gratias animus tibi), twice interrupted by the full forces quoting the opening thematic material. A quiet orchestral interlude leads us to the poignant Qui tollis, cast as a double choir motet, with the soloists being choir I, and the chorus, choir II. The brief, declamatory Quoniam gives way to a wonderful double fugue on the words, In gloria Dei Patris, Amen. Just when one might think it is going to end, Beethoven returns to the opening words and thematic material, Gloria in excelsis Deo; indeed, the movement ends with three repetitions of the word, Gloria!
The Credo opens with a “head motif” that reappears through the movement, with the chorus singing over a striding orchestral accompaniment. A sudden transition and key change bring us to the hushed, mystical Et incarnates est, with the soloists taking the lead, and the chorus supplying a “second choir.” The mood turns very dark for the Crucifixus. This is the most “operatic” of all the movements in the Missa, with the orchestra supplying tremendous “hammer strokes” over the chorus’s powerful declamation, while the soloists sing a “wailing” motif. A brief a cappella setting (6 measures) on the words, Et resurrect leads to a thrilling setting of Et ascendit in coelum, with the chorus and orchestra rocketing scale-wise to their highest register. The movement continues in propulsive fashion until the words, Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, which returns us to the open musical material, but wholly transformed.This yields to one of the greatest movements in all music, the double fugue on the words Et vitam venturi. It starts at a modest tempo, but when the second theme enters, the tempo doubles and produces a fantastically difficult movement to sing and play. It is followed directly by a tremendous Grave, for full orchestra and chorus. The soloists enter with beautiful scale like passages, with the chorus supplying amens beneath them. This whole section acts as a mighty “exhalation,” after all the stormy music that proceeds it. The Credo ends in a very peaceful manner.
The Sanctus is of fairly conservative classical proportions. However, Beethoven being Beethoven, it has some unusual twists. The opening Adagio is for orchestra and soloists, the latter singing in a very low register. It is very atmospheric. The Pleni sunt Coeli and the following Osanna are fine Bachian fugues, which make a wonderful effect sung by the full chorus. But Beethoven marks these movements to be sung by the soloists! Even with Beethoven-era instruments, this is an almost impossible demand on the human voice. Most conductors opt for using the chorus. I’ve heard many performances of this piece, but have never heard these passages sung by the soloists.
The Benedictus is proceeded by a slow, solemn Prelude. In the 32nd measure, a solo violin enters, representing the descent of the Holy Spirit. As the movement proceeds, the chorus chants the text softly in the background. The soloists take up the thread, their theme being and inversion of the violin melody. This is truly music sent from Heaven! It places enormous demands on the soloists for long, sostenuto lines, which tax the extremes of their vocal compass. However, hearing this music sung by a great quartet is magical! Toward the end of the movement, the chorus takes up the quartet’s musical material and bring the Benedictus to a wonderful end!
The Agnus Dei begins in B minor. It is a grand scene, with the soloists spinning long lines, and the chorus functioning as a soft liturgical choir. It begins with the Bass soloist, singing the theme in a deep, profound register. The same material is then taken up by the Alto and Tenor, then finally by all 4 soloists together. It is music of both great sadness and great majesty. A short modulation brings us back to the key of D Major, where the chorus and orchestra pick up a new theme, sort of in the rhythm of Smetana’s “Moldau,” a barcarolle feeling in the chorus, with rushing 16th notes in the strings. This, in turn, gives way to a martial sound of trumpets and drums, all Haydn. But after repeated iterations of the word “Miserere,” brings the movement to a sudden close. No extended “Beethovian” endings for this piece.
There are really only two pieces like this in the repertoire; Bach’s B minor Mass, and this; both are glorious pieces of music!
An amusing note to end this, e.g. the abrupt ending. Georg Solti conducted this in Carnegie Hall. When he reached the end, no one applauded! After about 5-10 seconds, Solti turned to the audience, threw his hands in the air and said, “Dat’s it!”
Arturo Toscanini
Kyrie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYeYjhSJF64
Gloria I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3Zrz26_Uu8
Gloria II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v6Eq47oKxQ&app=desktop
Credo I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo-U29y3NNQ
Credo II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htvaPxCngAg
Sanctus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad9JWa81rNk
Benedictus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0gYD3Nb-yQ
Agnus I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIy9-xpeUlk
Agnus II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BgZJU5NHV0
Herbert Von Karajan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoYJfGdw8fs
Week 46
Beethoven's Symphony No. 9
I was very young and struggling to earn enough money to continue my studies at music school. I gave music lessons, worked in a factory, and played in a few local orchestras in SW Connecticut. I’ll never forget at a New Haven Symphony rehearsal, seeing the viola part to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony on the music stand. I was humbled, intimidated, and excited! The rehearsals and concerts came and went but I’m still not sure what I got out of it. I played all of the notes and reveled in the wonderful sounds. But the grand message of Joy and Brotherhood was completely lost on me. Even so, there is much more to it than that - secrets that Beethoven shared with us through his genius. Over the weeks we have seen how Beethoven shows himself to us. How unembarrassedly he reveals his soul, his vision of the Universe - what the stars mean. The late piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis have brought us here as this 9th symphony will lead us to that other world of the late string quartets.
Below you will find three links. The first is Leonard Bernstein providing his own sociological take on this great symphony. The second is a very nice piece by Rebecca Schmid, a music writer and annotator. Last is the memorable performance of the 9th by Bernstein celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Please read and listen. We will look further at this masterpiece over the next week or two.
1) Bernstein - https://youtu.be/eCiz9XMW_jA
2) Rebecca Schmid - Why Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Speaks to All People
Yhe composer's great work of humanity transcends politics. listenmusicculture.com.“The history of classical music is littered with monuments. Some stood as temples, guiding the human spirit toward its most elevated potential. Some crumbled under the forces of political turmoil, only to be reassembled with their fissures laid bare. Others looked down sadly above the fray. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony belongs to a category all its own.
At once innocent and ruthless, mythical and mundane, it has raised its glorious head without flinching—accompanying Western history through its greatest losses and triumphs—since its 1824 premiere. Many people associate the symphony with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a symbol of hope and solidarity for the entire Western world. But it was also performed by a children’s choir in Auschwitz, only to be reinvented as the official European Anthem less than thirty years later. A crucial source of inspiration for Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, it inaugurated the Bayreuth Festival in 1872 and returned in 1933 under Richard Strauss’s baton for the first time under Nazi rule. The symphony has been performed every year in Japan since 1940, with singers numbering up to five thousand.
“My Beethoven is not their Beethoven,” as Nietzsche, and later Mahler would say. Already in the nineteenth century—looking toward the aforementioned concert of 1989, in which Bernstein replaced “Freude” (joy) with “Freiheit” (freedom)—the French historian Edgar Quinet understood the symphony as “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1927, the centenary of Beethoven’s death, the composer was heralded as both a “true democrat” by the governor of New York and a “titan of prehistoric times” by Nazi party leader Alfred Rosenberg. In his collection of essays, Blood and Honor: A Struggle for German Rebirth, Rosenberg wrote: “‘Tread your path, brothers/ joyful, like a hero, toward victory!’ That is the climax of the Ninth Symphony…. [T]he German Beethoven towers over all people on the continent.”
Propaganda like this makes it hard to argue with sociologist and critic Theodor Adorno, who believed that the symphony had been distorted by social use. “The Ninth has been interpreted out of existence,” declared musicologist Nicholas Cook in a similar vein. “It has been swallowed by ideology.” Yet it is no coincidence that this single symphony has been appropriated for one political or social statement after another. It conveys a belief—the potential of mankind to create a new world order by sheer force of will—that has spoken as directly to fascists as to technocrats. Beethoven’s late works emerged in a time of great political repression, and the composer had no problem adopting the position of a musical hero who could liberate his listeners from the confines of their reality. After the Napoleonic Wars, Beethoven would write work that could easily be labeled propaganda, such as the cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick (The Glorious Moment) for the Congress of Vienna, which ordained a new German Confederation to replace the Holy Roman Empire in 1814. The previous year he had composed Wellingtons Sieg (Wellington’s Victory)—a creatively barren celebration of the British victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Vitoria, replete with simulated gunshots—for a charity concert in honor of Austrian and Bavarian soldiers.
3) Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra Luis Castilla
And now, in the era of globalization, a worldly Beethoven has risen from the ashes of the politics of the previous two centuries. Daniel Barenboim, in his project Beethoven for All with the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble that brings together young musicians from Israel, Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries, declared that Beethoven’s music “regardless of where [we are] in the world speaks to all people.” He and the orchestra gave a high-profile performance of the Ninth two summers ago in Berlin’s Waldbühne, an arena built by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics, before recording the complete Beethoven Symphonies and embarking on a tour of four different continents. Last spring, the Ninth became the focus of Deutsche Grammophon’s first app with educational software developer Touch Press—a new format that hopes to aid the ailing recording industry. The design allows users to seamlessly compare historic recordings by Leonard Bernstein, John Eliot Gardiner, Ferenc Fricsay and Herbert von Karajan while scrolling through four different versions of the score, from a nineteenth-century manuscript to a graphic display of pulsing dots that map the orchestra’s different sections. Anyone, anywhere can hear the call of brotherly love with a single touch.
In spite of the Ninth’s many appropriations as propagandistic rallying cry, vessel for transcendent pacifism, and untouchable masterpiece, it was actually a deeply personal work: Beethoven’s deep-seated political views are sublimated into its musical fabric. The Ninth was a stroke of fearless modernity, not only in the introduction of text in the final movement—an unprecedented move for symphonic writing that opened the form to infinite possibilities—but in the development of the simplest material to the most extreme ends, which paved the way to the epic sound worlds of Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich and anybody who followed them. Today it is certainly not unusual for a classical work to turn the most basic material into an explicitly political statement by thematizing a current event or integrating electronic samples. Beethoven, however, had the courage to use symphonic form as a vehicle for his own struggle—against physical illness, society (of which politics was a part), and his own fate—and turn it into an allegory for the human race. “Only art held me back,” the composer wrote in his despondent Heiligenstadt Testament. “Almighty God! You look down into my innermost being, you know it, you know that the love of mankind and an inclination to do good dwell therein.”
The Ninth is Beethoven’s testament to humanity, a search for salvation that evolves into its own worldly sermon. The two-note motive of the opening Allegro descends out of a celestial void, as if bearing God’s word through a haze of mountain mist. The clarinet, oboe and flute join the horns one by one to open the way, but less than a minute into the symphony, the timpani and a tutti passage thunder in to bring us back to earth. The winds—which protest ever so slightly—are subsumed into an epic greatness as barbaric as it is uplifting: throughout the course of the first movement, any attempt to bring respite is reversed by the low strings, sweeping it into the militant, dotted rhythms of universal truth. In order for peace to prevail, the individual must cede to the faith of the masses.
But it is a secular faith—one that allows man to triumph above nature and take fate into his own hands. In his unfinished fragments about Beethoven, Adorno describes the symphony as a “ritual of appeasement, on the mountain path of myth, de-mythologicization and mythologicization at once... his music is the inner prayer of the bourgeoisie.” As Europe’s politico-religious structures crumbled, the Ninth emerged as a temple of hope for his fellows. The second movement, with its sleek fugue and clean descending octaves, is certain of victory, even as the timpani seem to stumble in like a drunken man. More than one writer has wondered if Beethoven’s deafness hadn’t gotten the best of him by the time he wrote his last symphony, but that is exactly where its glory lies. A folk-like tune emerges serenely in the horns—setting off cascades of descending pizzicatos and a playful oboe solo—but comes abruptly to an end when the recapitulation bludgeons its way back. It is in the sublime Adagio that Beethoven provides the most unselfconscious bridge into late Romanticism, from the pair of clarinets that voice a Mozartean line into the slow-moving melody of the first violins, which could have come from the pen of a young Mahler. The brutish unisono chords that creep in for two to three measures at a time have no chance in this world of wistful beauty. Until the final movement, that is, when scampering winds and bashing timpani usher in a short recitative for cello and bass, chasing away the operatic drama that came before. Material conjured from previous movements—a brief entrance of primordial mist, two measures of caressing winds—cannot hold their own against the grandeur that is to follow. The low strings interrupt the woodwinds’ initial announcement of the “Ode to Joy” theme to officially usher in the chorale with their funereal timbre.
But who can resist this magnificent march toward happiness? “It was no rude hankering for the sea that had urged the master on to this long voyage,” wrote Wagner in his Artwork of the Future. “Resolutely he threw out his anchor, and this anchor was the word. This word, however, was not that willful, meaningless word which the fashionable singer chews over and over as the mere gristle of the vocal tone; it was the necessary, allpowerful, all-uniting word in which the whole stream of full heartfelt emotion is poured out... this word was ‘Joy.’” The sopranos reach for the heavens, but by the Alla Marcia, the battle has been won. This is a purely human realm, with a male chorus calling beneath the solo tenor to go, in the words later appropriated by Alfred Rosenberg, toward victory. The “starry canopy” is pulled down to earth: “Are you falling down, millions? Do you perceive your Creator, World?” The chorus dominates the orchestra—a triumph above all odds—only to disappear again like a collection of phantoms, dispersed by the percussion of the Turkish march that closes the piece. Only in death, it would seem, can humanity achieve the harmonious unity we strive for in life.
Even if history might teach us that the Elysium on earth so fervently desired in the “Ode to Joy” is an illusion, the Ninth has preserved itself as a place where nature can cede to the voice of human truth—whatever that may be. Rosenberg heard the hope for a will to create new worlds; Leonard Bernstein, the struggle for peace. “Somehow it must be possible for us to learn from [Beethoven’s] music by hearing it: no, not hearing but listening to it, with all our power of attention and concentration,” Bernstein says in a video captured on the Deutsche Grammophon app. Beethoven—sick, deaf, utterly alone and disillusioned by a German empire caught between repression and revolution—found the means to resist despair. The Word was the only way forward. And after the Ninth, in its fusion of poetry, philosophy, and morality with aesthetic revolution, history would never be the same. “What men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and, in their moment of fulfillment, have jubilantly proclaimed—it is not to be,” says the composer Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus as he revokes the Ninth. But it marches on, an “Energizer Bunny,” in the words of Richard Taruskin, carrying an irresistible mix of idealism and nihilism. Only when the citadel is destroyed can the chorus rejoice above its remains. Freude! Freude! is all that is left to sing.
This feature originally appeared on listenmusicculture.com, an award-winning music magazine.
Leonard Bernstein - Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125
This is the famous concert celebrating the falling of the Berlin Wall.
https://youtu.be/Hn0IS-vlwCI