(Note: This continues the dialogue begun December 6^th with a post entitled, “Further Afield?”)

JB: I’m very glad you ended your piece with this question of the single player of the sonatas versus the multiple players of the quartets, and whether that accounts for the fundamental difference between them. Very glad because as I was reading your piece, I felt – subject by subject – that you made a compelling case for the two bodies of work being more-or-less equal in terms of innovation, and yet I could not get away from my gut feeling that the quartets have a kind of impenetrability that I don’t associate with the sonatas, at least not to the same extent. And as it got more and more difficult for me to justify the feeling in the face of all the compelling evidence you were providing, I started asking myself where it was coming from.

So to answer your question briefly: yes, I think the solitude involved in performing the sonatas is a very fundamental ingredient in their nature, and I think the way in which the quartets are shared experiences for the performers is equally significant. (It’s probably worth pointing out that the quartets are by a substantial margin Beethoven’s largest body of chamber music, and the only chamber works from his late period, so for the purposes of this discussion, they are pretty well unique; the sense of communion between players of orchestral music strikes me as being a very different animal.)

Part of my argument is going to based on a premise about the quartets you might well disagree with, so I should probably state it upfront: compared to works in the same genre by other composers – and perhaps even compared to other chamber music by Beethoven – Beethoven’s quartets are not particular conversational in nature. What I mean by this is that while there are obviously moments of dialogue between the instruments, the message of the music tends be extremely unified among them, and the individuality of the voices is not really the point. Obviously there is plenty of music in these pieces which is argumentative, but because that is the voice of the music, not because the instruments are in argument with each other. Even in the Grosse Fuge – probably the most relentless and bloody-minded piece of counterpoint ever written – I always have the feeling that here are four people engaged in the same violent struggle with the universe, not with one another.

I think this is significant. To me, the central aspect – the central affect – of Beethoven’s music is its idealism. When the music is unsettled, the restlessness typically takes the form of raging – I don’t think this is too strong a word – against an unsatisfactory world. The first movement of Opus 111 among the sonatas, and the last movement of Opus 131 and first movement of Opus 132 among the quartets are obvious examples of this, though dozens of other would apply. When the music is at peace, it is utopian, a vision of the cosmos in sound. Most of the slow movements fit this description, but the second movement of Opus 111, the second movement of Opus 127, and the Heilige Dankgesang from Opus 132 make me particularly googly-eyed.

To my ears, anyway, these pieces – the sonatas and quartets both – go substantially farther than any music written before or since in this direction. “Spirituality” is a hopelessly vague word, but lacking a better one, I’m going to say that that is the very essence of these works. Given that, I think that the difference between going on these journeys alone and having three partners in them is absolutely enormous. Of course, it’s an important difference between solo piano music and string quartets in general, but I think this case is something special. When I think of Schubert’s posthumous sonatas and the G Major string quartet – music no less astonishing than late Beethoven – I’m less fixated on this difference, because however extraordinary the pieces are, Schubert does not strike me as a man on a mission the way Beethoven does.  It’s this sense of “I will do what must be done” in Beethoven – or, much better, to quote the man himself, “Es muss sein!” – that makes the prospect of going it alone uniquely problematic, or exciting, or perhaps both.

Let me go back to that same quote about the 1820s piano being “most unsatisfactory” – I’m always struck by it not because it seems ridiculous that it could have accompanied the creation of some of greatest works written for that instrument, but because the sense that the instrument is not quite equal to the task of realizing those works seems terribly important.  One of Beethoven’s favorite modes of composition (in the sense of painting) for the piano involves placing the two hands at the extremes of the keyboard. This very often happens at climactic moments – the end of Opus 110 is one spectacular instance of this, but there are many others throughout the late sonatas. This is a very literal manifestation of what Beethoven is constantly doing in every sense – testing the limits of the piano. In such moments, the piano is meant to roar, or shake, or emanate light, in a way that seems to be on the edge of its capacities; if the sound seems easily produced, something is fundamentally off.

And this sense of near-impossibility is not restricted to the instrument, of course; the audible struggle of the player is one of the most crucial elements in a successful performance of any of the last works. And I do think this sense of struggle is uniquely moving when it comes from an individual. Perhaps it is because I am so much more familiar with the piano and its limitations than I am with string instruments and theirs, but nothing in the quartets – not even the Grosse Fuge, which tends to sound and even look like a battle scene – sounds to me as much like an effort to say the impossible as the final variation of Opus 109, with its trills which act as eternal vibrations, and the main line at the very top of the piano, straining to be heard above them. Or the modulation into E flat Major in the second movement of Opus 111, where a series of trills of ever-greater urgency leads to an extremely bare-bones – and unbearably moving – restatement of a portion of the theme which demands a degree of sustaining power that the piano simply does not have. There is something, I think, about the image of a single person with gritted teeth and an open heart trying to make these things happen which cuts to the core of what the late sonatas are about, and which thus makes them different from the quartets.

And so the power of the quartets, to my ears at least, is drawn from different sources. The clarity of the counterpoint in the strings is something the piano simply can’t match – listen to the Grosse Fuge once in the piano 4-hands version and you’ll realize how huge this gap is – and it somehow makes the intensity of the music seem even more distilled, and thus more harrowing. (I’m thinking of the opening – “Number 1”, as you pointed out – of Opus 131 as much as anything.) And then there is the way in which the sound of a string quartet can shine, or glow – the Heilige Dankgesang and slow movement of Opus 135, respectively, often sound to me like the fulfillment of what the piano aspires to but cannot really achieve in the last movements of Opus 109 and 111.

But most of all, what I cherish about the quartets and feel is specific to them is the sense of communion, of shared idealism. Perhaps there’s a personal bias here: I am both envious and in awe of the way in which string quartets spend their lives working towards a shared musical goal. And that’s not specifically about Beethoven. But whenever I hear a performance of Opus 127, the very first thing that strikes me is the unanimity of purpose, the way in which the four people on stage seem joined in their energies. Of course, that opening phrase brims with optimism and determination anyway, but when it gives way to the mysticism of the slow movement, or even the riddles of the last, I still find myself marveling at that impression of singularity, of an extraordinary statement made jointly by four people. The sense of effort is, inevitably, not quite the same as in the piano sonatas, but the sense that something so rarefied could be collectively imagined – and collectively realized – is fantastically moving.

I have a bit of a bad conscience, as your essay went into enormous musical detail, addressing each major aspect of music methodically, whereas I’ve yammered on about the psychology of the music – about feeling, really. But while I tried to focus more on specific questions of timbre and register and articulation, I kept coming back to this same question of what it means to be (or not be) alone with music. I’d be very interested to hear if you think it is a question of as much significance as I do, and if so, if the reasons or similar.

And/or, another question I’m interested in: I’m pretty sure that we could agree that all these late works are extraordinary for their architecture (in addition to everything else). And yet, Beethoven obviously could be persuaded to make changes in the name of accessibility. I’m thinking first of all of the alternate last movement of Opus 130, but there’s also this remarkable letter wherein he tells his publisher that the middle two movements of the Hammerklavier can be flipped, and the introduction to the last movement omitted!

Do you think that we, as performers, are perhaps more fixated on the “big picture” of these pieces than Beethoven was? Was he perhaps more interested in moment-to-moment beauty than we tend to think? And is there any difference between the sonatas and the quartets in this area? Certainly, with the exception of the Hammerklavier (and on the other side of things, Opus 135), the quartets are much larger edifices than the sonatas. Your move!

From June through September I took a hiatus from playing concerts and called it,
a bit grandly, my “sabbatical”. My activities during this time included but were
not limited to: (re-?)acquainting myself with life at home, trying (and failing,
emphatically) to learn German, staring wonderingly at my empty calendar,
throwing myself mercilessly at a selection of previously unlearned Beethoven
sonatas, and finally — the only tangible result of my time off –writing
Beethoven’s Shadow, part confession, part manifesto, an attempt to express what
Beethoven’s music means, spiritually and practically, in my life.

This essay is available here in the US and here in the UK as a Kindle Single. You can read more about it here.
Writing it made my head spin a great deal; I leave it to readers to decide
whether it is a coincidence that the Beethoven sonatas have much the same effect
on me.

As I work on the Beethoven sonatas I spend a huge amount of time inside my own head (while attempting to inch my way closer to his!). And so it’s incredibly valuable – for reasons relating to musical perspective and sanity alike – for me to hear the viewpoints of other musicians who are engaged with his music.

To that end, I’ve invited Misha Amory, violist of the truly wonderful Brentano String Quartet (brentanoquartet.com), to have a dialogue about the late piano sonatas and string quartets. (The Brentanos are currently in the midst of recording the last five quartets.) Since each of us is inevitably more intimately familiar with one or the other, I was really curious to see where the perspectives would differ.

Below is the first installment. It’s probably not a great idea to invite a better writer/more knowledgeable person to be a contributor on your website, but nevertheless, I’m very grateful that Misha has agreed to take part in this project.

JB: I’ve always found it fascinating that shortly after Beethoven sent the final three piano sonatas off to his publisher, he wrote him a letter saying that the piano was a “most unsatisfactory instrument” and that he wouldn’t write for it any longer. Of course, then he went on to write two sets of bagatelles and the Diabelli Variations, so one can’t take the statement too seriously, but obviously the piano was his instrument and his relationship with it was complex. However much of an idealist he was, and however much he wanted to express his ideas purely, Beethoven understood the physical nature of the piano very well, and I wonder if it might have inhibited him, if only ever so slightly. Whenever I hear one of the last quartets, I feel that the language is even more unprecedented, and that his deepest nature comes through in any even more uncompromised way than in the last sonatas.

Obviously, you’re seeing this from the reverse angle. Do you agree that the late quartets go further than the sonatas in leaving behind standard musical language, in their abstractness? And if so, do you think this question of instrumentation plays into it, or that whatever difference there is between Opus 111 and, say, Opus 127 is attributable only to the three year gap between them?

MA: First of all, I have to thank you for initiating this conversation.  It gives me the incentive to revisit and re-examine the last piano sonatas, and be astounded all over again by their greatness.  As a result, I end up wanting to write only about them, and ignore the string quartets, which I know is not the idea here, so I’ll try to restrain myself.

As I listened to them, however, your quotation of Beethoven as “unsatisfied” with the piano was on my mind, and I was trying to assess what he would have found unsatisfactory as he wrote these masterpieces.  For my part, I was inclined to wonder how, after this achievement, he would ever want to write another piece for anything else.  Certainly the 1820s were a period of metamorphosis for the instrument.  On the one hand, you have Beethoven and Schubert writing some of the greatest solo pieces ever, for any instrument; on the other hand piano composition was about to be transformed utterly, at the hands of Chopin and Liszt.  I sometimes wonder what a pianist thinks when turning from Chopin’s piano writing to Beethoven’s late piano music — is there anything like “huh…how dated”?  Or is Beethoven held to be as great a master of pianism as the later composers, in his own way?

But to return to your main questions: I was struck by your choice of the very general term “musical language”.  This covers pretty much anything having to do with the compositional process, and I am invited to compare the piano sonatas to the string quartets across the boards: harmonic language, rhythmic and metric concepts, form within movements, form across an entire work, allusion to genres outside of instrumental composition, etc.  And, inevitably, I was forced to ask myself a question that is central to this entire comparison: what are the essential psychological/expressive differences between music performed by a single person, and music performed by a group?  This question is so big that I don’t feel able to engage with it more than in passing; but it would be impossible to ignore it altogether in this context.

HARMONY

To speak of the most immediate and obvious areas that are implied by “musical language”: is it possible to state that Beethoven broke new ground in his late quartets in terms of harmony, modulation, rhythmic or metric innovation?  To me, not really.  The late piano sonatas contain so much that is astonishing in these musical categories, as do the quartets, and it’s difficult to say which body of music is the more revolutionary in this regard.  Look at a few examples of modulation.  In the quartets, the most extraordinary moments of modulation are often absolute unisons.  Especially memorable is the transition from the first to the second movement of opus 131, where we are brought to a C-sharp tonic unison to close the first movement, and then we are lifted just a half-step to the parallel universe of D major to open the second movement: so close but so infinitely far, and surrounded with a kind of wonder as the first violin “discovers” the new theme.  Two other unison “moments” (among many) deserve mention as well: the drop from E-natural to E-flat in the slow movement of opus 127, coming out of the E major variation, and the magical E-flat triplets in the middle of the Cavatina, which transport us to C-flat major for the famous “beklemmt” passage.  Passages like these seem to mark a new era — how does the earth seem to move in the midst of such stillness?  But there are such moments in opus 109, 110 and 111 as well.  The first movement of opus 110 is, on the face of it, perhaps the most conventional and “well-behaved” movement of the entire cycle; but then you have the brain-rearranging moment of modulation at bars 77-78, wherein the entire solar system shudders for just a second, and then proceeds without a backward glance.  How about the completely inexplicable second ending of the first movement of opus 111?  Or what of bars 12-14 in the opening movement of opus 109, surely the most bizarre set of modulations that ever went nowhere: after the dust settles, the music is back in B major where it started.  

There is nothing in the late quartets quite like this.  Much is made of the “modern” impact of the Grosse Fuge; many are fond of pointing out that it sounds in places like 20th-century music.  This may be so; but the harmonic motion underlying the work is absolutely Classical in its logic, as any Roman-numeral-wielding theorist could demonstrate.  It is the overlay that makes the music so thorny — the contrapuntal density, the embellishment of the voice-leading, the rapidity of the harmonic progress, and the sheer ferocity of affect.

RHYTHMIC AND METER

What of rhythm and meter?  Again, we can pick the oddest moments from the late quartets.  The 9/4 variation from opus 131, where the absence of a downbeat, bar after bar, keeps the music hovering and disembodied.  The quirky scherzo of 135, which starts off balance, and by its stillest point (the unison just before the return) has become even more disoriented.  The furious rhythmic twistings and distortions in the first large section of the Grosse Fuge, which near its end pits jagged, leaping triplets against duple 8ths that are slurred against the beat, a centripetal world that threatens to fly apart completely.  Or the aforementioned “beklemmt” section from the Cavatina of opus 130, wherein drifting but constant triplets in the lower voices cannot be reconciled with the gasping, hopeless offbeat 8ths and 16ths in the first violin.

These are arresting, envelope-pushing passages.  In the piano sonatas, we have some counterexamples.  The modulatory passage that leads up to the final, fifth variation in opus 111 offers a counterpart to the Cavatina, with its offbeat murmurings.  Or consider the opening of opus 111′s fourth variation: like the 9/4 variation of opus 131, it is the still point at the movement’s center, the moment when we feel that the deepest truth is about to be revealed.  And yet this moment, in all its eloquence, is almost inarticulate: the theme, reduced to its most basic form, is a hushed, almost stammering whisper.  Turning to opus 110, we encounter entirely different, but equally startling, examples of rhythmic and metric misdirection.  One of these is the entire second movement.  How is it possible for a movement whose phrase lengths sound so irregular to be actually composed in regular 8-bar periods, with hardly a deviation — an overlap at the second ending, and one little 3-bar wrinkle in the middle of the trio?  Then we have the finale.  Start with the repeated G major chords just before the inversione return.  These could be monumental, triumphal, unshakeable; to have them occur on offbeats, though, with empty space in between, makes them terrifying and alien, like a bad dream.  And then exactly what is going on during the following thirty or forty bars?  Beethoven’s use of rhythm and pulse here is mind-blowing; we feel we are beholding the evolution of a single-cell organism, miraculously sped up.

Really this is a very long-winded way of saying that I find the last three piano sonatas every bit as revolutionary as the late quartets, in terms of small-scale musical categories like harmony and rhythm.  I could have just said so, but it sure is fun to visit my favorite spots.

WHOLE-WORK ARCHITECTURE

The comparison becomes more interesting when we consider the subversions that Beethoven visited on the usual architecture of a work.  The concept of a sonata — or a string quartet — in 1820 lay, fairly dependably, along the lines of a big first movement in sonata-allegro form, followed by a second and third movement, and usually a fourth, of shorter length and lighter heft.  Every quartet Beethoven wrote, until opus 130, 131 and 132, clove to this pattern, although a few later ones (opus 59 #3, opus 95) showed signs of becoming more finale-centric.  Among the late quartets, Beethoven honors the four-movement form for three of the quartets, but in each of those — 127, 132 and 135 — the primacy of the first movement is usurped by a later movement.  In opus 127, the first movement is gentle, sun-dappled, and rather succinct; inevitably the extraordinary slow movement becomes the center of gravity for the work as a whole, a 15-minute odyssey through an entire world of emotions and psychological states.  Opus 132 has a monumental opening movement, but after all is said and done, who would argue that this piece’s raison d’être isn’t the Heilige Dankgesang?  And in opus 135, inevitably the 3rd and 4th movements are the work’s substantive anchor.

In opus 130 and 131, of course, Beethoven jettisons the conventional organization of movements altogether.  Opus 130 needs to be considered in its original incarnation, with the Grosse Fuge as the last movement.  In this version, we have two enormous bookends, a sonata form and a fugal form, surrounding four much slighter character pieces.  In a way it is a kind of distortion of a Baroque suite, except that the fugue is at the end instead of following directly after the opening sinfonia.  In a sense, this new layout of movements makes for a less formal presentation: the piece is not submitted to us tied with ribbons, but rather we are invited to wander through it, and discover its design by degrees.  The fugue, when it does come, seems like the inevitable outward explosion that must follow the almost crushingly interior world of the Cavatina, with its unbearable intimacy.

Opus 131 is even stranger in this regard.  Beethoven designated the movements “no. 1″, “no. 2″ etc, which evokes an opera score rather than an instrumental work; and without a doubt, this is a kind of opera in quartet form.  There are no real pauses between “numbers”, so that we have the impression of a drama set to continuous music.  We have fugue – rondo – recitative – variations – scherzo – aria – finale, a seven movement work.  The composer delays the use of sonata-allegro form until the last movement, whose role (a brutal answer to six movements of questions) seems to require this more substantial structure.

Clearly, whatever dramatic or psychological truths Beethoven was seeking to express would not fit into conventional movement-architectures as exemplified by earlier quartets.  It is interesting to note how a similar need played out in the last five piano sonatas.  Opp. 101 and 106 are, at any rate, in four movements apiece; but the feathery impact 101′s first movement, and the immense gravity and eccentricity of the Hammerklavier’s fugue show that conventionally proportioned layouts are already no longer the point for him.  Then in opus 109 the whole thing is turned on its head.  We are given two movements in sonata form whose brevity is almost their main character, lasting perhaps 3 and 2 minutes respectively; and then the extraordinary variations movement, more than twice the length of the others combined.  Perhaps I’m exaggerating in my own mind, and I certainly don’t want to belittle the first two movements of this piece, but I can’t think of another Beethoven work where it feels as if one movement is the piece, with everything else providing the merest scaffolding.  In opp. 110 and 111, less obviously, the end again outweighs the beginning, opus 110 with its epic dialogue between the Lied and the Fugue, and opus 111 with another variations masterpiece.

Maybe I should stop here.  So far, I have been looking at surface details of harmony, rhythm and architecture, and in those categories I do not see the late quartets as “going beyond” the piano sonatas, in any significant way.  But looking at other, perhaps deeper areas, I wonder what you think of the following questions:

In what sense do the last piano sonatas owe their nature to being music for one performer?  Same question for the quartets: to what extent are these works different from the sonatas because they are for a group of performers?  And the (probably unanswerable) chicken-and-egg question: did Beethoven’s inspiration dictate that this music must be chamber music, or did his choice of genre lead to this different, non-piano-sonata-like music?

[Big, big questions, that could be deferred another exchange or two: comparing the two bodies of work in their exploration of forms normally outside their genres, particularly operatic forms and fugue.  Also, and this may relate to the questions in the preceding paragraph: each body of work examined in terms of what aspect of the human condition it explores?]

The following are the notes which will accompany the first recording, to be released January 9th, 2012.

The 32 Beethoven piano sonatas are often referred to as one of the greatest – if not the greatest – bodies of music ever composed. True enough. But to refer to them as such is to obscure the brilliance and individuality of each work, for what is perhaps most remarkable about the sonatas is that they really aren’t a ‘body of music’ at all: they are 32 masterpieces, 32 distinct structures, 32 fully realized, often awe-inspiring, always unique emotional universes. As individual works, each is endlessly compelling on its own merits; as a cycle, it moves from transcendence to transcendence, the basic concerns always the same, but the language impossibly varied.

In the end, I think, it is the nature of these concerns – which could crudely be described as being of the ‘man versus universe’ variety – which unites this music, in spite of the incredible amount of ground it covers both formally and stylistically. A favourite cliché about Beethoven is that he moved from thumbing his nose at the traditionalists in his first period, to magnificence in the middle one, to spirituality in the late. (Even the idea of three periods is a cliché, in fact – a figure as complex as Beethoven will probably always be vulnerable to over-simplification, and his compositional style was in a perpetual state of evolution.) But in fact, the last sonatas betray no lessening in his gruffness, or desire to shock, and the earliest ones have slow movements which already seem to stop time. (And this is to say nothing of the moments of extraordinary tenderness in the middle works.) And so it is with op.10 no.1. The middle movement forms an oasis of profound beauty, always searching, yet with a deep stillness grounding it. ‘Oasis’, because the music which surrounds it is among the most restless Beethoven wrote. This is one of the first of Beethoven’s many works in C minor, and the qualities one associates with this composer in this key – anxiety, rage, the shaking of the fist – are fully in evidence here. Beethoven was, throughout his life, attracted to opposition, to dichotomy, of character and feeling – in no other composer’s music do the tender and the furious coexist so closely – and in this sonata that idea is extended to tempo: where the outer movements are meant to quicken the pulse not only of the player, but the listener, life itself slows down for the second movement. Or: if the fast movements grapple with a world which infuriated Beethoven, the slow one imagines a different, more perfect one.

Where op.10 no.1, like so many of its neighbours, shows Beethoven inventing, op.22 feels very much like a summation. Despite the early opus number, Beethoven had by this point written more than a third of his piano sonatas, and in this work – a particular favourite of his – he demonstrates an enormous ease and confidence with the form; the sonata’s ideas sound as if they had simply flown from the composer’s pen. Beethoven surely had as restless an imagination as any great artist, but in this sonata we find him looking more backwards than forwards; the last two movements in particular adhere closely to a model he had established, and throughout the piece, one is reminded of one or another of the previous sonatas. But while the sonata is revolutionary neither in form nor in content, it is no less marvellous for it: the impish wit of the work’s opening, for example, or the never-ending, heaven-directed song of the second movement are indicative of a master revelling in his own mastery.

It may be that this mastery came slightly too easily for Beethoven’s liking, for the next four sonatas find him experimenting with form as boldly and as variously as any group of works he wrote. It is astonishing that the first of these, the Opus 26, was written within a year of op.22, its immediate predecessor; the only thing the two works have in common is that they are unjustly neglected – one hardly ever hears either, other than in the context of a complete cycle of the sonatas. While the 20th and 21st centuries may not have taken notice of this lovely and slightly peculiar masterpiece, the 19th certainly did: it was the funeral march from this sonata, not the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, which was played at Beethoven’s own funeral, and Chopin – almost alone among great musicians in his general indifference to Beethoven – admired it greatly, and was surely influenced by it. The aforementioned funeral march is the most obvious manifestation of that influence, but one imagines that Chopin was equally struck by the almost total absence of grand gesture, of rhetoric, throughout the work. The sonata opens with a theme of disarming simplicity and beauty, which – unprecedented in Beethoven’s output – becomes the basis not of a sonata movement, but a set of variations. So instead of developing – not to say manipulating – the theme, he embroiders it, allowing it to expand and contract, to unfold of its own accord. So often in Beethoven, one feels the composer attempting (and virtually always succeeding) to bend the material to his will; in this work, even in the funeral march, dedicated to ‘A Hero’, nothing ever feels imposed on the motives. The form of the op.26 may be unprecedented, but after the brilliance and bluster of the early sonatas, its quiet confidence and utter absence of any attempt to ingratiate may be its most striking features.

Being ingratiating, of course, dropped ever lower on Beethoven’s list of priorities as he aged, and while there is no shortage of beauty in the works of his last two decades, it is increasingly a rugged, even gnarled beauty, and one always at the service of the idea at hand. And the ideas themselves grow ever bolder – less and less reliant on any convention of musical language. This sort of innovation did not come easily: Beethoven’s first 20 sonatas were composed in the space of seven years, from 1795 to early 1802; the subsequent seven years saw the composition of only five, and it was not until 1810 that the ‘Les Adieux’ Sonata (Lebewohl in German, no.26) was completed. Conventional wisdom says that Beethoven’s late style was still several years away, but this work, despite the almost reckless exuberance of its finale, has an interiority which is a hallmark of every subsequent sonata he composed. (The ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata’s magnificently impenetrable slow movement is enough to make it qualify, despite the grandness of the rest of the piece.)

And accordingly, nothing about the sonata is business as usual. Its most obviously unique feature is its programmatic nature: whereas the Pastoral Symphony is programmatic only in the sense that it attempts to evoke the feelings attached to certain events, the ‘Les Adieux’ first movement is permeated with a three-note motif – actually marked Le–be–wohl at the sonata’s opening – obviously intended to mimic a horn call, a formal gesture of parting. While nothing in the second or third movements conveys in such a literal way the absence and return, respectively, of Archduke Rudolph, the sonata’s dedicatee and inspiration, the idea of a formal narrative has been planted so firmly in our heads by this point that we can supply the imagery ourselves.

More significant are the sonata’s formal innovations. What is so striking about the first movement is that while its body – its exposition, development and recapitulation – is perhaps the most compact of any of Beethoven’s movements in sonata form, it is flanked by an introduction and coda of extreme spaciousness. While this might in theory make the movement ungainly – think gigantic limbs attached to a modest torso – in reality, these appendages, in being far longer than one would expect, prove enormously effective in illustrating the pain of parting. This is the genius of Beethoven: his formal innovations are never theoretical, or merely ‘ideas’; his forms become maps of the works’ emotional content, of their truest nature.

There is one final way in which the ‘Les Adieux’ sonata points the way towards Beethoven’s last works. Early in his compositional career, Beethoven was content for his last movements to round the works off; this rounding off might be graceful (op.22), or brash (op.10 no.1), but there is nothing in these movements to alter the general course of the works. As Beethoven grew older, his conception of the multi-movement work changed so that ultimately he viewed them as emotional trajectories which were not resolved until the final notes were played. This is very much in evidence in ‘Les Adieux’. The last movement provides the work with a resolution not only because a movement called ‘The Absence’ must inevitably be followed by a return, but because the emotional ambiguity which permeates the first two movements absolutely demands the uncomplicated joy of the last.

Perhaps it is these two qualities – the complexity and ambiguity on the one hand, the optimism and occasionally even euphoria on the other – which best define what the Beethoven sonatas represent. To embark on this journey is thus both awe-inducing, and pure delight.

© Jonathan Biss, 2011

As I’ve mentioned, exhaustively (exhaustingly?), I’m in the midst of a year during which Beethoven is never far away. I’m often playing him, constantly practicing and thinking about him, and in general finding that he is taking up so much space in my head and in my life, there’s little room for much else.

Last week, amid this sea of Beethoven, was an island of Mozart: the Concerto K. 467, which I played in France. I’ve always felt that despite their status as Classical Era Icons, the distance between these two composers, in argument, in effect, and in affect, is immense. This time, playing the Mozart concerto while Beethoven was oozing from my every pore, the feeling was stronger than ever – it struck me as amazing that works which are unquestionably masterpieces could be so profoundly unalike.

I remember a remark Richard Goode made in an interview, to the effect that playing the 32 Beethoven sonatas in one year – presumably to the exclusion of much else – was a kind of sensory deprivation. (I am taking this statement grossly out of context – the larger message was that the immersion in Beethoven was one of the most extraordinary experiences of his life.) It’s a feeling that I’ve come to understand; it’s not that Beethoven’s music is lacking in sigh-making beauty or innovation, that it fails to give tactile pleasure to the performer, or that it is in any way grim, dour, or lacking in color. Rather, it is that in spite of his music’s beauty, its warmth, and its endless storehouse of ideas, it is above all the indomitable will of the composer – the will to say what must be said – that makes Beethoven’s music moving, that makes it Beethoven.

One of the works that I recorded and have been playing a lot of is the Sonata Opus 28 – the “Pastoral” sonata (not a name I’m fond of). Midway through the development of the first movement, we find ourselves in F# Major – a highly unlikely, not to say inappropriate, place to find oneself in the middle of a movement which is in D Major.

(*Brief musicological aside, which can be ignored by anyone not interested, without any serious deleterious effect on his/her understanding/appreciation of the rest of this essay: in fairness, this chord is actually approached as V of b minor [vi], making it somewhat less surprising, but through repetition, its function becomes increasingly unclear.*)

Now, composers before and after Beethoven wrote music with surprising harmonic twists and turns, so this chord, while immediately exotic, is not all that shocking. What Beethoven does next, however, decidedly is: he repeats the chord, over and over again, for twenty eight measures. For the first few measures, while the harmony remains unchanged, we at least still have a motive from earlier in the movement. Gradually, though, all other elements dissipate, and by the end, there is nothing else: no melody, not even a rhythm, just this chord, this harmonic visitor from a foreign country, desperate in its quiet insistence. By bar twenty eight of this, when Beethoven asks the performer to hold the chord – very quiet by now – indefinitely, we no longer have any sense of home whatsoever. The sheer repetition has forced our ears to rethink – even if only subconsciously – everything they had assumed about what they had been listening to. And all this done with one chord, stubbornly repeated, over and over, until Beethoven decides he’s finished with it, and in three short phrases, modulates us back home, as if it were nothing, the F# Major merely a mirage: this is Beethoven’s force of will.

The effect that this force of will has on the listener is so profound, it becomes difficult to imagine that music could ever be powerful or moving for any other reason. And that is why there have been times in the past where I’ve found it very strange to move from Beethoven to Mozart – the latter’s lack of a will of steel, heard in that context, can seem like a defect. This time, however, playing K. 467 was a joy and a delight, in equal measure, and it occurred to me that Mozart’s lack of will – his emotional malleability – may be not only not a defect, but in fact a defining feature, the quality that makes his music remarkable, much as the opposite is true with Beethoven.

Busoni referred to music as “sonorous air,” in which case one could call Beethoven’s music sonorous idealism. We sense in his music not only what he feels, but what he wishes he felt – not just his world (and ours), but the world he wished he lived in. Mozart, to put it mildly, is not like this. The greatest ever composer of opera, Mozart’s music is dramatic simply because life is dramatic. His music changes character and mood with such astonishing speed and frequency because that is how people behave. Nothing in Mozart’s brief biography suggests a particularly happy life, but the subject of his music is very definitely things as they are – not as they might be.

For the first seven bars of this concerto’s slow movement – an aria for the piano which could have just as easily been for the Countess instead – the emotional soundscape of the music is clear: wistful and poignant, but simultaneously noble, and very, very proud. In bar eight, however, comes a question which is asked with some urgency. When it is reiterated, two bars later, the question is asked in a voice far more stricken. By now, the defining characteristics of the opening of themovement – which occurred just seconds earlier – have vanished. The music has gone from major to minor, and more important, the nostalgia has been replaced with a sadness which is unmistakably raw.

And then, five bars later, after a harmonic sequence astonishing enough to give the lie to those who say that Mozart was not inventive, we are back in F Major, and the pain – which briefly seemed to be all-encompassing – morphs again, this time into something far closer to resignation. Not acceptance, perhaps, but the understanding that life must go on. And so it does: everything just described takes approximately one minute to play, and occurs prior to the first entrance of the piano! This is, thus, stage-setting, in a sense, and yet a whole emotional universe has already been revealed. In the same amount of time, Beethoven might have restricted us to one chord…

It was a very happy hiatus from Beethoven for me. While it might have been a rude shock, it instead was very wonderful to be reminded just how diverse is the music that I love. Now it’s back to Beethoven; despite his immense and immensely powerful personality, this time I’m reserving a corner of the room for myself. And for Mozart.

After three consecutive weeks of playing with orchestras, I’m now beginning a week of recitals. While the give-and-take of playing concerti can be a tremendous pleasure, in some way, I find recitals even more satisfying. I think this has something to with the fact that when I play with an orchestra, I am a guest – one piece of a programming puzzle that has been put together primarily by others. When I play recitals, however, it’s not just that the amount of playing makes it possible for me to show more facets of myself – it’s that I have put the program together, which means that I am responsible for the emotional arc of the experience.

Inspired by an extremely thoughtful and inquisitive comment on a previous post, I thought I would try to explain the thought process that went into the planning of this particular program. It’s difficult, because “thought process” is an inexact term in this case – sometimes planning programs is more about an instinct for the alchemy through which certain pieces mesh well together than it is about any sort of formula which dictates how successful the program will be.

Perhaps this goes without saying, but my first selection criterion for any piece of music I play is that I must love it. I feel absolutely sure that if a performer lacks conviction in what he is doing, the audience will know it. And frankly, since I already see that life won’t be long enough to play all the pieces I do love, why on earth would I spend time playing those that I don’t?

This is the second time this fall that I play a program devoted to two composers: in September it was Brahms and Bartok, and now it’s Beethoven and Janacek. I love these kinds of programs: single-composer evenings can be wonderful – I’ve done all-Mozart, all-Beethoven, and will do all-Schubert later this year – but there is always the danger of a stylistic sameness, or rather a lack of confrontation between the pieces. Concerts of works of two composers are great because they still offer enough music of each to create a sense of immersion in the composers’ sonic worlds, and yet the concert becomes a dialogue between the two, which often moves in surprising directions.

The question of which composers work well together (and which don’t) is particularly alchemical, and I think it is one of both similarity and difference. The success of Beethoven and Janacek as a pairing relies in part on the terrific intensity that characterizes both, which is why Ravel, for example, is a much less natural partner for Beethoven. But what I think makes the combination really interesting is that the intensity may be similar, but the language is utterly different. One facet of this, as an example: Beethoven’s sonatas are incredibly tightly – one might say relentlessly – argued, giving the listener the feeling that from the first note, he is being inexorably led towards the last. Janacek, by contrast, is perhaps the greatest master of the musical non-sequitur. (These seeming non-sequiturs are, of course, actually connected to the material they surround on a deep level; on the surface however, they seem to come out of the blue.) This is just one example of many – really, the building blocks in Beethoven and Janacek could not be more different, which makes the similarities in temperament between the two all the more fascinating.

The great composer Leon Kirchner once wrote, “Poetry responds to poetry, no matter its time or chronology,” and much the same could be said of music: what is wonderful in juxtaposing Beethoven and Janacek is that Beethoven becomes not just the foundation – as he nearly always is, when juxtaposed with a composer who came after him – but the respondent. The deep nostalgia in Janacek’s In the Mists is, I feel sure, a longing for a lost musical world — the very world that Beethoven inhabited. (And, interestingly, played a large role in dismantling – but that is a subject for another essay…) But equally, when I play Beethoven’s Opus 109 after the Janacek Sonata – a gut-wrenching lament for a murdered Czech worker – it carries the feeling of consolation to a far greater extent than it might otherwise. This is one of the most wonderful things about great music: while its affects are in a sense unchanging, it is never impervious to its surroundings. Beethoven could not have predicted the events which inspired Janacek to compose his Sonata – and given his own political predilections, he may not have been interested anyway – but his music addresses every aspect of the human experience, and therefore is moving – differently moving – in any context.

So in a sense, I feel that in playing this program, I become the conduit through which a conversation between two great masters takes place: a very exciting notion.

“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…”     – Ludwig van Beethoven, from the Heiligenstadt Testament, 1802

I think this explains, far better than I ever could, why playing Beethoven – doing him justice, or at least coming as close as one can – feels like a matter of life-or-death.

Or perhaps even his words are unecessary: the force of his personality, the intensity of his need to say what must be said — these are made plain in his music.

My Beethoven CD was released earlier this month. Just my most recent attempt, in a series which I hope will last a lifetime, to come to terms with the most life-affirming, yet unfathomable music I know to exist.

(A further attempt to explain what this music means to me can be found here.)

In April, I spent four days making a recording of Beethoven Sonatas; on the third day, at around 4:30 in the afternoon, I lost my mind.

(Lest this sound melodramatic, I should say that I don’t actually think it was all that remarkable under the circumstances. In fact, going a little crazy may be an essential element of the recording process. It is, I think, nearly impossible to be happy with a record after you have made it: your relationship with a piece of music does not exist in a vacuum – it is a living, evolving thing, touched by your life experiences, the context it is given by other music, and the way your Cheerios tasted that morning. A recording, however, does exist in a vacuum – it will never acknowledge the way your feelings about the piece have changed. So all a recording can do, really, is serve as a snapshot of your relationship with that piece, on that day. This is, in one way, a relief; in another, it makes the whole process hugely fraught with pressure – you want the snapshot to be simultaneously as pure and [more important] as vivid as possible. Separately, each of those desires implies a great responsibility; together, they represent an unattainable ideal. Does losing one’s mind seem as extreme as it did one very long parenthetical paragraph ago?)

I was in the process of recording one of the variations in the last movement of the Sonata Op. 109. This variation, on the most fundamental level, is not difficult – if making music were merely a question of playing the right notes at the right times, the first take probably would have been perfectly adequate. But it is one of those late-Beethoven moments where the composer, more than anyone before or after him, conjures an image of the infinite, and it is this sort of thing that is most difficult of all to record: if you smudge a passage, your course of action is clear – you play it again, and usually the problem is solved. But can simply repeating something bring you closer to that which exists only in your inner ear? It is in moments such as these that I find myself desperately missing the response of an audience – a silent response, the way the air in the room is made different by everyone ceasing to breathe it – and the recording studio becomes a very lonely place.

I had begun the afternoon by playing the movement several times in its entirety, after which I went into the booth to listen. On top of the intangibles, this revealed a number of all-too-tangibles that I wasn’t pleased with, so I went back to the piano to try that variation again. The first take, post-listening, is often very strange: having been just made aware of the discrepancies between what I thought I was doing and what was actually coming out, the result tends to be an improvement in some ways, but also overly self-conscious. So I played it again – a bit more natural, I thought, and yet…

My producer chimed in from the booth, “That one was very good. We definitely have it.”

(This phrase was used, conservatively speaking, 300 times over the course of the four days. On the one hand, it’s an awfully important phrase – there’s probably nothing more important when recording than feeling that you can trust the producer. At the same time, however, I’m not sure I have the faintest idea what it means. No wrong notes? No hideous rhythmic disfigurements? The absence of anything identifiably wrong, in my view, does little to compensate for the absence of something inexorably right. And in music such as this, the feeling of not having it – of searching for something unattainable – is an essential part of the music’s expressive DNA.)

And so, I replied, “I need to play it again.”

It’s difficult to say how many more times I played it after that. I’m quite sure that it was more than three, and less than one hundred. It was quite a remarkable experience, in one way, to play this music, which is so intensely spiritual, over and over again. It was also physically, mentally, and emotionally draining in a way I could never begin to describe. Playing Op. 109 once, in a concert, spends the whole body and soul. Over and over again, in an empty room, with a red light as the audience?

Finally, my producer, who has the patience of a saint, and if he were not so unusually good at what he does, should have been a psychologist, said, “I think that’s come very far – we should leave it.”

Through gritted teeth, I replied, “It’s just not good enough.”

A silence from the booth. Then, in measured tones, “Do you think you could identify any particular element you aren’t happy with?”

It was not a good time for me to vent my frustration, given what I’d just put the poor man through, but I couldn’t help it. With just a touch of derision in my tone, I replied, “You wouldn’t understand. It’s ineffable.”

The silence in the booth was crisper this time, and at its end, it was the producer, not the psychologist, who spoke. “Well, until it becomes effable, let’s move on.”

And we did. To say that I recovered my sanity at that moment would be imprecise: I returned to that neither-nor state, between reality and fantasy, that one lives in while recording. Just over a day later, I walked out of the studio for the final time. Four sonatas had been recorded: four photographs, with my smudgy fingerprints on the fronts, and my name and the date on the backs.