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.)

by Sebastian Ruth

(A quick editorial note: I’m absolutely delighted that Sebastian has written this inaugural guest column for the site – and not because of the very excessive praise I receive in it! Sebastian thoroughly and beautifully explains who he is and what he does in the piece itself, but if you want to know more about his terrific organization, please visit the Community MusicWorks website. I truly believe that the work Sebastian and his colleagues in the Providence String Quartet are doing is as important as anything musicians are doing anywhere today – JB)

Jonathan has asked me to write the first guest column on his website, and I would like to start by saying that I think the world of Jonathan as a human being and a musician, so it’s a great honor to be asked to contribute to this project. This assignment comes with an interesting challenge, however. I’m writing for you, reader of this website, with very little idea of who you are. This is the nature of the web, I suppose, but particularly the nature of a relatively new site of a musician who traverses the globe for concerts. With that disclaimer noted, I carry forth with the assumption that you are, like me, interested in music, the role it plays in the world, and that you’re interested in the career of Jonathan Biss. And I carry forth also with the hope that the musings hereafter provide stimulation to you, whoever and wherever you are.

This summer I’ve been reconsidering the connection between music and social justice, and specifically the role music can play in a community to bring about change.

As a bit of background, I met Jonathan in 2004 when I had the great pleasure of playing Brahms with him. He had been serving on the advisory council for Community MusicWorks, a program I started in 1997 that connects a professional string quartet with several inner-city neighborhoods in Providence, Rhode Island. Jonathan came to Providence to perform two concerts with our quartet—one in a museum for fans of Brahms and one on a basketball court for people who had never heard of Brahms. That second concert was a highlight in the 10-year history of Community MusicWorks, and it is an example of the kind of experience I want to highlight with this column.

A message of excellence—the gym concert

Recently I visited the New York Public Library—the beautiful old research library on 42nd Street with the lions on the steps—and inside inscribed on the floor was a dedication to past library president Vartan Gregorian. The dedication paraphrases an important vision of Gregorian’s that also sums up the significance of the concert with Jonathan in the gym: democracy and excellence need not be mutually exclusive.

The concert in the gym, much like the New York Public Library itself, was an opportunity for everyone—regardless of their means or educational background—to engage in an experience of excellence.

Why is this significant? For starters, kids growing up in the West End of Providence experience the worst of the factors facing kids in cities: the rates of drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, gang violence, and high school dropout are the highest in the city. The daily itinerary of these kids includes attending inferior public schools, playing on inferior playgrounds, and even walking on inferior streets and sidewalks. It’s maddening to on the one hand honor the ideals of equality that people have fought for in this country and then to consider the vast inequities that poor kids face growing up in these kinds of neighborhoods.

Beyond the injustice of inferior schools and streets, there is an injustice in the message this sends to kids: that they are inferior, or that they deserve less. At Community MusicWorks one of the core ingredients in our approach is that we try to offer kids a dramatically different kind of message.

The concert with Jonathan at the gym of the West End Community Center was an opportunity to offer one such message: that the residents of this community deserve to see and hear one of the world’s great pianists, not by leaving the neighborhood, but by coming to its Center.

So that is the basis of the intersection between music and social justice, and indeed of Community MusicWorks’ philosophy. First, let’s change the messages kids are getting about the quality they deserve. Then let’s see how this shift changes the expectations kids have for themselves. Once we start doing this, won’t kids then, as Maxine Greene says, have openings in their lives to realize that they deserve the best not only in music, but from their schools and programs, and indeed that they deserve the opportunity to imagine and pursue the brightest futures?

Music as an essential human experience, or why it is unjust to deny it

In recent years arts advocates and arts organizations have been trying in various ways to articulate the benefits of arts participation so as to justify to legislators that they should not cut arts funding. We’ve seen the myriad of justifications including the idea that arts training improves social interactions and the one that music improves math scores. In 2004 the Rand Corporation published a report surveying the various literature on the subject and concluding that these “instrumental” justifications for arts—justifications based on the premise that the arts are instrumental to achieving other goals –were only capturing a small percentage of the impact arts can have. The authors of the report tried to highlight the “intrinsic” benefits of arts participation—the essential effects on an individual from his/her experiences in the arts. These include awakening of creative thought, pleasure from intense mental focus, and an expanded capacity for empathy. They argue that these key factors of an arts experience lead to individual growth as well as societal benefits.

This summer I met kids from the Baltimore Algebra Project, a branch of Bob Moses’ national Algebra Project that introduces kids to math and social justice issues together. The program combines an ingenious curriculum for teaching math with a tiered tutoring program in which kids teach other kids. And on top of all that, kids learn about why it is they need mathematics and how they can go about taking political action to ensure they get the quality math instruction they deserve. In the terms of the Rand report, these students are learning to demand quality math instruction because they’re taught to understand the instrumental and intrinsic benefits of doing math.

Meeting these math-loving Baltimore teenagers inspired me to think about what experiences and skills—both instrumental (no pun intended) and intrinsic—music gives kids that they don’t get otherwise, and why it is in fact a social injustice that poor kids don’t have access to it.

Here is the list I came up with, moving from the instrumental to the intrinsic:

• Music is part of civilization, and always has been. Kids deserve to know not only contemporary music, but music from various points in history as a way of understanding the history of our civilization, and as a way of putting contemporary music in a historical context.

• Music lessons teach us to how to teach ourselves. In order to practice a musical instrument, we need to be able to be aware of what we’re doing, and we need to develop ways of improving it. This skill is transferable to nearly anything: learning a sport, memorizing biology definitions, improving language skills, to give but a few examples.

• Music develops networks. Playing music with other people forces us to connect in ways which other social interactions simply don’t. These connections lead to strong social networks, which more and more are being shown to be central to our health and success in the world. Much has been written recently about social capital, or the personal benefits in having networks of people connected. Networks can help us find jobs, get help in crises, expand opportunity in business interactions.

• Music develops communication and listening skills. People playing chamber music need to learn how to work together in a group, listen to colleagues, and achieve consensus for performance.

• Music composition and improvisation develop visualization and imagination not just as skills but as habits. This can transfer beyond music to imagining new possibilities for our lives and our communities.

• Playing music teaches us about creativity. Musical performers have the opportunity to be, as the violin pedagogue Carl Flesch said, “re-creators” of works of art. Unlike in the visual arts where a painting or sculpture exists regardless of the observer, music must be performed in order to be heard. We have opportunities as performers to experience great moments of creativity unfold from within the works of art themselves, almost as if we were experiencing the repainting of a Van Gogh each time we saw it.

• Music can connect us to an experience of the infinite—to an experience of something meaningful and much larger than ourselves. Such experiences are of course often associated with religion, and yet having opportunity for spiritual experiences in secular life is increasingly important.

• Music develops a sense of empathy in us, and an expanded understanding of what’s out there in the world of human experience. When we hear a Mahler Symphony or a late Beethoven Quartet we may hear a pain or spiritual longing far more intense than we experience on a daily basis. We get the opportunity to experience new emotional states through the music. How might such knowledge help us in our lives? We may have, for instance, a way to empathize with the experience of refugees of a war-torn Darfur or Somalia because of our emotional experiences with music. Contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum talks about the connection between literature and empathy in her 1995 book Poetic Justice, and she argues that reading literature may in fact generate in lawyers and judges the capacity to understand the lives of the people whose crimes they assess in a courtroom. While Nussbaum herself doesn’t assign the same potential to music, I think there is a very deep empathy that can be developed through our musical experiences.

• Through developing empathy, music can expand people’s definitions of community. When we regularly get exposed to a wider range of human experiences, we begin to see our community not as simply the neighborhood around us or indeed the city or state around us, but in fact as a global human community, and one that spans history as well as distances.

• Music focuses the mind. Practicing or performing a piece of music can get us into a groove—what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”—where we achieve a singularity of mind that enables us to work for long periods of time without getting distracted. The skill of focusing the mind can help us learn, organize our lives, and find mental calm.

Of course music is not the only vehicle through which a young person can acquire the skills and experiences mentioned above. Then again, given the focus that recent legislation has put on testing math and reading skills above all else, it can be argued that music brings kids into experiences and skills they very well may not be getting anywhere else in their educations.

How does this relate to social justice? What we’re talking about is an educational opportunity that develops the whole person, teaching young people empathy and initiating them into the notion that they are citizens of the world. If music is the only place they will have this opportunity, isn’t it in fact an injustice that urban kids aren’t given access? By posing this question, I hope to be pushing hard against the idea, however old, that classical music is an activity for the privileged. With benefits so fundamental to the human experience, we have to realize that the activity of learning music should be a basic element of education.

The economics of musicians working for social justice

I’ve been highlighting this radical idea that music can lead to social justice for urban youth, and you might be thinking to yourself that you haven’t recently seen kids gathering on street corners to demand more classical music in their lives. So what’s the connection? There’s a calculated gamble involved in the following supply and demand analysis.

The classical music world suffers from a substantially higher supply of musicians than there is demand for their music. Although I never attended a conservatory, I know that graduating from one can be a rather bleak prospect given that there are so few available jobs relative to the number of graduates. And among those available jobs, very few enable a musician to play the concerts they most want to. At the same time, many
classical music organizations are worrying about the demand problem: that their audiences are largely made up of older people, and that there isn’t a demand from younger audiences for classical music.

Perhaps, then, it is time to rethink the demand side. Urban communities, as I discussed earlier, lack for experiences of excellence, and lack the educational opportunities that will enable their young people to become citizens of the world. Therefore, in terms of the supply and demand equation, there might be an incredible demand among young people for music if they only knew to demand it

The Algebra Project takes up the idea of demand in this way: young people may not yet know they should demand a better math education, and so part of their curriculum is about showing them how such an education will lead them to have greater success in their lives and in society.

In classical music, therefore, there may indeed be a great demand for the music if we take the opportunity to locate our musical careers in the heart of an urban community so that we can generate the enthusiasm among young people that will lead them to demand more.

At Community MusicWorks we’ve taken a calculated risk with our careers based on this idea. We’ve established, with the advocating support of musicians like Jonathan, a full-time position in this neighborhood for a string quartet to rehearse, teach, perform, and build community around music. The idea was that by playing music in a storefront in their neighborhood, we as musicians have something positive to contribute to the daily itinerary of these kids. And that this career isn’t about sacrifice or even about outreach. This is about building a career full of the kinds of performing we most want to do, within the context of a neighborhood not used to having a string quartet as one of its local features. Through the process of teaching young people and playing Brahms in gyms with great musicians like Jonathan Biss, we’re hopefully changing the expectations young people have of themselves, and of what they deserve.

Closing: the sounds of social justice

I’d like to close this column by invoking ancestors who played music for social action. Casals particularly comes to mind with his efforts for justice during and after the Spanish Civil War. I think also of Vedran Smailovic, the cellist in Sarajevo who played his instrument on the street in the 1990s amid Serbian artillery fire to mourn civilians killed in a bread line there. And then there is Yehudi Menuhin, who called Soviet authorities upon learning that David Oistrakh wasn’t ill as announced, but that he was not being allowed out of the U.S.S.R. to play a concert with Menuhin. In his phone call, Menuhin told the Soviet cultural office in no uncertain terms that unless they allowed Oistrakh to come for the concert, he would announce to the world the lies they were telling about their artists.

The question I close with is how our obligation to humanity impacts the depth of the music we make. I would love to have heard the concert Menuhin and Oistrakh played after the famous phone call, or the tone of Smailovic’s cello. I can’t help but think that their devotion to their causes came through in the music. Perhaps the connection between music and social justice goes beyond how music impacts justice, but in fact how the reverse is also true. That playing cello for victims of war in Spain or Sarajevo, or playing Brahms in a gym brings a depth of humanity and purpose to music that indeed fuels the life of the art itself.

The guest column page has been inactive up to this point, and so I’m posting this just to make sure no one misses the terrific piece Sebastian Ruth has written.

Also, an apology to anyone who has tried to post a comment recently – I’ve been dealing with a rather overzealous spam filter. I’m hoping that’s all straightened out.

in which I am back, with a vengeance. Partially by design, and partially by chance, my busiest-ever season was followed by one of my un-busiest summers: as of August 30th, I had gone a full five weeks without playing a concert – my longest hiatus, if I’m counting correctly, since I was 16 years old. It’s not that I stopped playing – the vast majority of my time was spent learning new pieces and getting reacquainted with old ones. But being off the stage – and in my apartment with some regularity! – allowed me to temporarily live a life quite different from my normal one. Since my return, the pace has been quick – 11 pieces in 4 countries over the last 10 days – allowing me to make a kind of direct comparison between these parallel existences. Some early conclusions:

* Time off is good. Anyone who’s delved this deep into my site probably already realizes that I am, ahem, enthusiastic about what I do; passion is a quality that I tend to value more highly than balance. That said, the benefits of being away from concert-giving life for a while turn out to have been enormous. Most importantly, I’m finding that coming back after a long break, my emotional receptivity is greater – to music, in general, and to the rather extraordinary dynamics of the concert hall. The first thing I performed after my time off was Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, and the meaning of each interval – the way in which each note conversed with its predecessor and its follower – seemed not just stronger but more specific than it ever had to me before. (This is, quite apart from the vicissitudes of my schedule, a quite extraordinary aspect of Schoenberg’s music – but that’s a topic for another post.) And my awareness of the electricity in the room – the silence which follows the initial applause, and the way the first notes of the concert rise out of that silence – was sharper than ever.

* Traveling on a regular basis involves internalizing a great deal of stress. However great the value of having a break may have been, I did miss performing. I also missed visiting familiar and unfamiliar cities, going to museums, seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Things I did not miss: packing my suitcase; unpacking my suitcase; discovering, upon unpacking of said suitcase, that I have forgotten to pack hangers/cufflinks/toiletries; being asked to remove my shoes and belt, in the manner of a patient in a mental institution, in the security line at the airport; phoning everyone I know in the United States when it’s 4:30 a.m. in Europe and I’m up, jet-lagged; asking airline employees why, 45 minutes after the scheduled departure of a flight, no announcement of a delay has been made; airport food; the price of airport food; the gnawing feeling that an airplane has not been cleaned during the last few presidential administrations. I’m ending the list here only because I can feel my blood pressure rising…

* This is not strictly related to my time off and its effects, but it’s been much on my mind the last week: one huge fringe benefit of making a recording is what it does to the experience of playing the piece subsequently. Recording forces you to be remorselessly clear about your musical intentions – any hint of uncertainty about the shape of a piece is magnified by the microphone. In the studio, this can feel a bit constricting, but in the concert hall, it has almost the opposite effect: knowing precisely how a phrase fits into your larger conception of a piece gives you the confidence that no matter what direction you choose to take with it on the spur of the moment, it will retain its inner logic, which in turn gives the feeling of immense freedom. Playing Beethoven sonatas last week, for the first time since recording them, I felt them moving in unexpected and exciting directions, which I’m sure is at least partially the result of the experience of playing them in the studio, and which makes the prospect of playing them – living with them – throughout the coming year all the more thrilling. Which brings me to my last point:

* One of the pieces I played for the first time last week was Beethoven’s strange and wonderful song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved). The opening of the cycle’s final song is quite faithfully and extremely movingly quoted in the first movement of Schumann’s Fantasy. (The words are: “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder/Die ich dir, Geliebte, sang.” Roughly translated: “Take these songs, then, which I sang to you, beloved.”) The first movement of the Schumann begins with a nearly shapeless version of the Beethoven theme – more a searching for it than a rendering of it – and gradually, as the movement progresses, we move increasingly close to it, until the near-quotation comes at the end. Having lived with the Schumann for so long, it was, then, very touching to finally play the Beethoven itself – a sort of reunion with the distant beloved, which I had previously seen only through a dense fog. And given that the last year of my life was heavily tied up with Schumann, and that the one I’m just embarking on is equally centered around Beethoven, the song represented a very apt and very beautiful transition.

All of which is to say: music is wonderful, and it’s very good to be back.

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.

“A young music-teacher once said to him: ‘Mr. Schnabel, to which of the two schools of piano playing do you adhere, the one in which you play in time, or the one in which you play as you feel?’ And his immediate reply was ‘Why not feel in time?’”

Clifford Curzon recounted the story in his memorial tribute to Schnabel.  Not identical to the point I was trying to make, but close enough to make me wish I could take credit for it. I’ll just have to add it to the long list of things Schnabel did that are worth envying…