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Guest post by Jessica Duchen

Beethoven year is over. Well, not quite. In Germany, it’s set to carry on well into 2021, and beyond; one tribute I’m involved with in Berlin is postponed until 2022. Fortunately, to some extent every year is Beethoven year.

When the pandemic struck, I was hard at work on my book Immortal, the story of Beethoven’s (probably) real “Immortal Beloved”. It certainly kept me busy during lockdown, and I often thanked heaven that I had Beethoven, of all composers, for company. If there had to be a major anniversary during this grim year, how lucky it was his. I don’t know any other composer who “gives” quite so much to his listeners and, especially, his players. Sit at your piano and practise Beethoven for an hour: you’ll likely come away with your energy replenished, not drained. There’s a comforting heart in his music large enough for the whole world.

Unlike other composers with anniversaries, Beethoven scarcely needs to be reassessed or re-evaluated. There is simply no getting away from the fact that this is music of genius – adulterated only occasionally, when he had to make ends meet (‘Wellington’s Victory’, anyone?) – and his works continue to influence composers even in the 21st century. Anyone who really thinks it’s a good idea to “cancel” him could light a candle now to the patron saint of lost causes, whose name I forget.

Still, if there’s been a revelation about him in 2020, it’s that his music is sometimes associated with struggle at the expense of his sheer joie de vivre. He was drawn to Schiller’s An die Freude – To Joy – from the start: the poem was published in 1785 and it seems he wanted to set it to music even in the early 1790s. Although he did not manage it until the Ninth Symphony, that doesn’t mean glimmers of its underlying spirit can’t be detected in some of his other works.

Beethoven fills his music with an intergalactic range of emotional experience. In his early works he pushed through the boundaries, sometimes within one piece; try the Piano Sonata Op. 10 No. 3 with its pitch-dark Largo, or the String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1, in which the second movement is said to evoke the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliet – and if he had never written anything else, he would still be revered for these today. At the other end of the spectrum, he was writing odes to joy all his life.

The text of An die Freude in the Ninth Symphony is an extract, heavily edited for public palatability. Read the whole poem and it’s startling, even a bit crazy: ebullience, religious ecstasy, passion, drunkenness, siblinghood, social equality and much else parade through its stanzas in a celebratory carnival. Potentially there’s even more of its spirit in the Seventh Symphony than the Ninth.

Yet, to generalise terribly, the sense of “divine play” that creates Beethoven’s celestial joy is perhaps overlooked too often. Our own preoccupations, preconceptions and insecurities mean that sometimes we sideline joy in favour of reverence to a “towering genius”, the perceived need to be “historically correct” or, heaven help us, an inclination to be “iconoclastic” to evoke a “fresh approach”. If we’re to reach the “real” Beethoven, we need to get out of his way.

Take the Diabelli Variations: it’s full of jokes from start to finish, whether the sideswipe at Don Giovanni, the quirky contrast of hammered octaves and two soft little chords – or even the notion of that daft waltz theme as the basis for such a battalion of ideas in the first place. Once I wrote programme notes for a recital including it, with ample reference to these musical jests, only for a friend who was there to call the next morning and report that not one hint of humour surfaced in the whole performance.

Writing Immortal, I wanted to uncover the human being trapped beneath two centuries of accumulated grime. Behind the hot temper, the anguish, the deafness, the chaotic lifestyle, the self-delusions (there were quite a few) and the impossible – if self-inflicted – situation he faced in attempting to adopt his nephew, I found an individual who could be kind, generous, intelligent, inquisitive, thoughtful and idealistic to an extraordinary degree; one who in his youth could be witty and spirited, and whose self-exclusion from society because of his deafness was an agonising burden.

High-minded, indeed; uncompromising, for sure, as the “Immortal Beloved” herself was to discover. And strong, resilient, overpowering, thanks to his sense of vocation. He wrote in the Heiligenstadt Testament that he felt he could not leave the world until he had brought forth all that was within him. His art kept him alive at a time when he might otherwise have ended his own life; thereafter he lived for that alone.

Sometimes we forget that genius is human: it is a phenomenon found only in human beings. What most of us can’t grasp is the degree of devotion it takes to function at such a level. That would need a chapter of its own – perhaps for the next Beethoven anniversary, in 2027.

Immortal by Jessica Duchen is out now, published by Unbound.

Jessica Duchen writes for and about music. Her work encompasses journalism, fiction, biography and opera/choral librettos. She was a music critic for The Independent from 2004 to 2016 and has written for BBC Music Magazine, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer and The JC, among others.

Her latest novel (2020), IMMORTAL, reveals the epic love story behind Beethoven’s famous ‘Immortal Beloved’ letter. Other novels include GHOST VARIATIONS, based on the bizarre discovery and Nazi propaganda conscription of Schumann’s suppressed violin concerto.

Jessica Duchen’s website

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Guest post by Dr Mark Berry

On 6 October 1802, Beethoven penned one of the most deeply moving letters in the history of music. He never sent it to his brothers Carl and Johann, the intended recipients, nor to anyone else. It was discovered only after his death, in March 1827, and is now known to the world as his ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, after the town in which it was written, now the nineteenth district of Vienna and home to more than one noted Heuriger. Beethoven’s despair, even to the point of suicide, concerning his ‘hopeless case’ of deafness stands in sharp contrast to the spirit of hope so many of us find in his music, to the hope his Leonore/Fidelio bids come in her heart-stopping aria. ‘I was compelled early on to isolate myself, to live in loneliness… how could I possibly admit such an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me in than others’. That Beethoven grew deaf to the world was a personal, if not from the selfish standpoint of posterity, an artistic tragedy.

2020 was to have been Beethoven’s year: 250 years, a quarter of a millennium, since a birth—of unknown date—that transformed the history of Western music like no other. And so it began: in February, I visited his birthplace of Bonn for the first time and heard chamber music in the hall now built to adjoin the house in which Beethoven was born. Lockdown undeniably hit hard. Then came deafness, this time of the world to Beethoven. In April alone, I was due to hear Daniel Barenboim conduct the Staatskapelle Berlin in all nine symphonies, followed by Fidelio from Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic. For many who find solace, inspiration, and necessary struggle in the communion of art and its public performance, 2020 has been a year bleaker than we could have imagined. A recording, however valued, remains a substitute, a compromise: it is the only way we shall hear Wilhelm Furtwängler, but now how we need to hear Barenboim.

And yet, the world’s will to deafness had manifested itself earlier: especially among US liberals who, with typical imperialism, presumed to impose their particular, local concerns on the rest of the world. By 2018 at the latest, one group were falling over themselves to impress on everyone else, at least on Twitter, quite how much they wished not to hear a note of Beethoven’s music this year. (As if we cared!) They might actually have deigned to struggle, as Beethoven would have done, for the causes, many worthy, they claimed to pursue. Instead, in their disingenuous faux-struggle against racism and misogyny—less, be it noted, class struggle—firing off a few anti-Beethoven tweets ensured a volley of mutual congratulation loud enough to drown out the Ivesian cacophony of several simultaneous performances of the Ninth Symphony and Missa solemnis. Anything, of course, to avoid confrontation with the compromises and contradictions of liberalism.

Such narcissistic emoting is not Romanticism; it is barely postmodernism, even in its most debased, late-capitalist sense. If only such people would look to Beethoven or to anyone other than themselves, they might learn to structure and thereby more convincingly express their thoughts and feelings. However, listening, performing, studying, thinking, and even feeling are hard work in any emphatic sense (how old-fashioned!) Why not instead adopt a levelling, free-market-led cynicism, and bask in the oven-ready plaudits?  Enough, however, of that. In a sense, they have had their way. Much, if not quite all, public performance of Beethoven has been silenced. If they feel that has been a good thing, so be it. If ‘their’ Beethoven is nothing more than an accident in consumer ranking, let them have it. Perhaps one day they will listen again and realise there was more to it than that; if not, our Beethoven(s) will remain. Who or what is mine?

My Beethoven has always been there. He has not, of course, always been there, yet it feels that way. I was certainly not playing the piano sonatas as a small child. An early memory, however, of early piano lessons is a poster on my teacher’s wall, displaying ‘The Three Bs: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms’, combined with a piece on the same subject—I remember it involved hammering on Bs in different keyboard registers—in one volume of the John W. Schaum piano course through which I was making my way. Beethoven’s music probably appealed most strongly to me. Bach unquestionably came later, not least as a consequence of having taken up the organ. Brahms I probably associated more with that lullaby than anything else. His is not really music for children, or at least was not music really for this child. Beethoven, however, was exciting, dramatic, Romantic: his biography as well as his music, for who could not respond to the tragedy of his deafness? I even wrote a little story about it for my piano teacher, to go in a display of written work accompanying an end-of-year concert. By then, I had played some of the sonatinas and bagatelles—little did I know quite what musical riches lay within the latter—and a simplified version or two of Für Elise. This, I knew, and not only because people told me so, was ‘real music’.

When, in my teens, the blinding aural light hit me and I realised just how much, both as pianist and listener, music mattered to me, it was perhaps above all via Mozart, but Beethoven more or less stood alongside that music, even offered a necessary contrast. Whatever oppositions I might draw between them could and should readily be deconstructed, but perhaps they offer some insight into my Beethoven, if not necessarily yours. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, I have found myself especially interested this year—whether at home or, at the beginning and, very occasionally since—in what the two composers have in common, in how much Mozart is there not only in ‘early Beethoven’, its challenges and riches still now underestimated, but right up until the end.

However, it is the particular subjectivity of ‘middle-period’ Beethoven—again, a construct to be deconstructed, yet not here—that captures the essence for so many and did for this teenager. Even the holy ground of the late music can seem, not without reason, to be defined in relation to the heroism of the Eroica, the Fifth, the Waldstein, the Razumovsky Quartets, and so on. If this is the Beethoven of which people have tired—it would often seem to be—then perhaps they have tired not only of life, but of the human impulse to create, to nurture, to survive. By all means listen to other music; by all means avoid the deadliness of mediocre performance. Such mediocrity, more of spirit than of execution, is not Beethoven’s fault, however. Its baleful presence does not diminish the human spirit’s need for that archetypal journey from darkness to light, for the portals of heaven to open at the close of the transition from C minor scherzo to C major finale. Listen to Furtwängler (or Barenboim): all will again be revealed.

Should it not be, for whatever reason, then struggle with something else, for struggle is the thing. Take the Mass in D major, op.125: the Missa solemnis. Take to heart Beethoven’s unique formulation, inscribed above the ‘Kyrie’, ‘From the heart – may it return to the heart!’? The thunderbolt of the ‘Gloria’ sounds like nothing we have heard before; we fancy that we hear not a description of the heavenly throng itself singing the Almighty’s praises, but that singing itself. Hints of Mozartian Harmoniemusik are gratefully received, though we are never in doubt that such paradise has been lost forever. Most personal of all is the imploring ‘Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis’. Beethoven kneels—at the name of the one person (Person) before whom or which Beethoven would ever kneel.

Nowhere, however, is Beethoven’s struggle with belief more manifest than in, appropriately enough, his setting of the Creed; here he speaks to and for humanity in a plight recognisably of our time as well as his. Credo quia absurdum (a perennial misquotation of Tertullian)? The plainchant and Renaissance polyphony in which Beethoven had immersed himself come to resound as if through history, if not eternity. Echoes of what we now call ‘early music’ resound on profession of the mystery of the Incarnation, human soloists and flautist differentiating the Holy Trinity’s Second and First Person. One feels, as in a Bach Passion, the unbearable agony of Gethsemane and Golgotha upon the word of suffering, Here, more so than in the oratorio Christus am Ölberge, is Beethoven’s Passion. ‘Passus’: it is compassion expressed for, as much as through, Christ: Christ as man, evoking the humanism of Fidelio. And yet, at the same time passion and compassion extend beyond earthbound confines, pointing to Kant’s ‘starry heavens above’, as noted in an 1820 conversation book. Beethoven’s notoriously difficult vocal writing compels us to ask: does he, do we, believe? Uphill struggle, almost a literal expression of ‘ascendit’ and yet so much more than that, is valiantly, vigorously worked until finally we may return to ‘Credo’: in this case, belief in the Holy Ghost, yet more belief as such. As Mahler would later have it, ‘O glaube, mein Herz, o glaube!’

We travel through the devotion of the most intensely personal devotion of ‘Sanctus’ I know, a purely instrumental evocation of the Elevation of the Host; the descent of the Holy Ghost in the guise of solo violin, a masterstroke that in lesser hands might have sounded sentimental, yet here instantiates sublimity itself; the ‘Benedictus’ section, which, for Theodor Adorno, touchingly called to mind ‘the custom attributed to late mediaeval artists, who included their own image,’ in this case related to a theme in the E-flat major String Quartet, op.127, ‘somewhere on their tabernacle so that they would not be forgotten’; to the ‘Agnus Dei’, in darkest, most despairing dark B minor, permitting eventual, hard-won return to the work’s home key of D, its relative major. What could be more Beethovenian? The sounds of war, trumpets and drums ablaze, heard before in Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli, yet here let loose with modernistic fury, terrifyingly recall for Beethoven the recent experiences of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe and look forward to the terror of our own unstable world, interior and exterior. Beethoven takes us to the abyss. His Mass alienates itself in its fervent attempt to wrest reconciliation from the jaws of despair. And yet, that aura cannot entirely be disrupted, nor should it be.

A lesson, then, for this of all years, in its refusal to yield: as much, if not more so, to trite ‘solutions’ as to despair. In the modern world, our world, contradiction exists, whether we like it or not. We must struggle, even if we know not how. Or, in words, inscribed on a Toledo monastery wall, from which kindred spirit Luigi Nono derived such inspiration for his late music: ‘Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar’ (‘Travellers, there are no roads, there is just travelling’). Like those words and Beethoven’s—whether above the Mass’s ‘Kyrie’ or in his Testament—Beethoven’s music can seem essentially always to have been there. Nowadays, some find that a problem; to an extent, I think I can understand why. That, however, does not mean that I agree, far from it. Rejection is as wrong-headed as it would be for Shakespeare or Michelangelo; so long, that is, as we do not take them for granted.

Yes, let us pay more attention to Beethoven’s contemporaries. Schubert and Rossini can manage perfectly well without, but there is a good deal of music here more or less ignored, some unjustly neglected. My hot tip here is Anton Eberl, whose scores I have recently begun to explore. This music is, by any reasonable standards, the real thing; if Beethoven’s standards are unreasonable, we can afford to suspend them from time to time. We do not always want to listen to the Missa solemnis. Eberl’s E-flat Symphony was premiered at the same concert as Beethoven’s (the Eroica). We can all smile knowingly at contemporary criticism that lauded Eberl’s work while remaining sceptical of Beethoven’s. There is nevertheless music here worth performing in many genres—not least Eberl’s piano concertos. Let us also pay more attention to Beethoven’s predecessors, to his successors, to those who have struggled to escape his shadow, to those who have little or no connection with him at all—perhaps above all to the final group. We do Beethoven no dishonour by that, quite the contrary. Let us not presume, though, that it is for us in seldom acknowledge privilege to bar others from riches we have discovered or disdained. If ‘elitism’ is anything, it is that.

The tragedy of Beethoven’s deafness continues to be repeated, yet never literally, no more so than in any ‘recapitulation’ worthy of the name. Beethoven found his way forward from despair; we must find ours. His music may help us; it may not. Sooner or later, however, we may find that we need it: not only for our sake, but for that of something beyond us: for the music’s own sake, for humanity’s, even for the sake of that which, if like Beethoven, we continue to struggle, we may dare still to call God. Perhaps He will thereby dare once again to call us humans. ‘From the heart – may it return to the heart!’

Mark Berry read History at the University of Cambridge, continuing there to study for an MPhil and PhD, before being elected in 2001 as a Fellow of Peterhouse, where he remained until 2009, upon his appointment as Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway. He has lectured on subjects ranging from political culture at Louis XIV’s Versailles to European Marxism and music after 1945. His research has tended to draw upon his interests in both History and Music, as well as upon other disciplines, such as Philosophy, Theology, Art and Architectural History, Theatre Studies, and Literature.

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Guest post by Rhonda Rizzo

I’m 17 years old, starting my first year of university, and I have strong opinions about music. I embrace the music of Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Liszt—revelling in the tumultuous emotions, lyrical lines, and flashy virtuosity. I love the mysticism of Scriabin, the drama of Prokofiev, and the accessibility of Gershwin. I walk into my college professor’s studio and inform him (with all the arrogance of an outspoken 17-year-old) that I don’t like the Classical era. He councils me to withhold judgment, and then assigns me Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 31, no. 2, commonly known as the Tempest Sonata. He reads me perfectly. I rush headlong into the sonata with all the passion I brought to the Romantics. The mercurial shifts match my dramatic mood swings, the sudden changes keep me from “zoning out” in the development, and the sheer masculine energy of it assures me that it doesn’t sound easy. With this one piece, Beethoven becomes “mine”—music where all the drama of college romance, artistic dreams, and growing up find an auditory home. And through Beethoven, I learn to love an era of piano music I’d ignorantly dismissed as “boring.”

I’m 23 years old and am sitting in my apartment watching Leonard Bernstein conduct Beethoven’s 9th Symphony a month and a half after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A child of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall had felt as permanent as the Great Wall of China until it wasn’t, and when the unbelievable happened, the world got a little smaller and a little more hopeful. In this televised concert, Bernstein, the orchestra, the choir, and most importantly, Beethoven embodies an irrepressible joy and optimism that sweeps me—an American—into a celebration that transcends borders. It’s a party—one that by being a member of humanity I’m invited to join. The music and the celebration goes on and on, as if the joy can’t be contained to a few minutes in time and must erupt over and over again before the Symphony reaches its rousing conclusion and the crowd erupts. I weep through the final notes.

I’m 28 years old, standing backstage, waiting to perform Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The orchestra is playing Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture. As the piece progresses, so do my pre-performance jitters. A woman I don’t know stands beside me and wants to massage my hands in preparation for my performance. Both my nerves and the bizarre hand massage imprint themselves on Beethoven’s Overture, guaranteeing that listening to that piece gives me anxiety for the rest of my life.

I’m 35 years old and working as a piano instructor. At certain stages of their development, most students wants to learn Für Elise, the Moonlight Sonata, and the Pathetique. I shepherd them through the inevitable problem spots and I commiserate with colleagues about how fatigued we all get teaching these chestnuts. Through my students I find new things to appreciate in music I know well—subtle nuances that reflect the interests and enthusiasms of each performer. Through my students’ ears, I learn to hear Beethoven anew.

I’m 39 years old and have been asked to perform Beethoven’s 2nd Piano Concerto with a small chamber orchestra. A conductor-less chamber orchestra. A chamber orchestra who’s concertmaster/artistic director assures me he will conduct from his position in the orchestra. Everything goes well until dress rehearsal when the 2nd movement falls apart because the strings are in one place and the winds are in another. I go home in a panic, am awake half the night with worry, and then call a friend the next day for advice. She tells me to play with the score, color code the orchestra’s parts so I can cue entrances with my head as I perform. I do so vigorously—my concert up-do tossing curls around with every emphatic nod. The orchestra and I make it through the concerto intact. Afterward, many audience members tell me that they enjoyed how passionate my performance was—an assessment made solely on the basis of my head movements and not from the panicked notes that accompanied the unintended theatrics.

I’m 53 years old, looking back over a lifetime’s relationship with Beethoven’s music. I specialize in playing the music of living composers and as such, it has been years since I’ve performed any Beethoven. But I see traces of him everywhere—in the bass lines of some pieces, the melodies of another. Most of all, I find him in my own struggles, personal and musical. Beethoven is so completely and utterly human. Like the old Biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, Beethoven struggled. He worked for every note he wrote. He wrestled with infirmity and loss. Yet somehow, he emerged from these battles and his late compositions transcend notes, form, and perhaps time itself. In Beethoven I find a snapshot of life, purified in the crucible of art, offering a glimpse of the best of humanity.

4200DC39-5E3C-4868-8678-4E894B0C1D9F_1_201_aRhonda Rizzo is a performing and recording pianist and author. She has released four CDs, Made in America, Oregon Impressions: the Piano Music of Dave Deason, 2 to Tango: Music for Piano Duet, and A Spin on It, numerous articles, and a novel, The Waco Variations. She’s devoted to playing (and writing about) the music of living composers on her blog, http://www.nodeadguys.comnodeadguys.com.

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intense, immersive, impassioned, hugely demanding and hugely enriching

Jonathan Biss, pianist

It’s the single most humane music imaginable

Igor Levit, pianist

Somewhere in the world right now, as I write, a pianist is performing or recording the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, maybe just a select handful of them, maybe all 32 in a crazy, Herculean marathon of music and emotion. At London’s Wigmore Hall alone, the past three years have seen cycles by Igor Levit, Llyr Williams and Jonathan Biss (currently). In autumn 2019, Igor Levit released his recording of the complete sonatas; Jonathan Biss’s boxset of was released this month, his personal vision of  these sonatas. These are just a few of the many pianists who feel compelled to perform and record “the 32″, the most comprehensive single body of Beethoven’s output.

Each generation brings a fresh crop of pianists willing to rise to the challenge of this music, from the pre-war recordings by Arthur Schnabel, with their fistfuls of wrong notes, which can give comfort to the keen amateur, to those of Wilhelm Kempff, Friedrich Gulda, Daniel Barenboim, Alfred Brendel, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Maurizio Pollini, Steven Kovacevich, Andras Schiff, Ronald Brautigam (on period instruments), Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Paul Lewis, François-Frédéric Guy, Igor Levit…. the list of illustrious names goes on and on. (As a teenager, my prized possessions, along with a three-volume crimson clothbound edition of the complete sonatas, were my LPs of British pianist John Lill playing these sonatas.)

The compulsion to play and record this music, combined with, more often than not, a fair degree of reverence, is very much alive and well. Yet today it seems a curious, almost anachronistic act, which harks back to the sort of enforced serious music appreciation of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and something which would have probably amused and surprised Beethoven, since hardly a single movement of one his sonatas was performed to a paying audience in the concert format as we understand it today. Felix Mendelssohn performed the entire ‘Moonlight’ Sonata in a public concert in the 1830s, and Franz Liszt, the greatest pianist of his age, played the supposedly unplayable ‘Hammerklavier’ for an invited audience in Paris, but he only played two of the sonata’s four movements when he next performed it, perhaps concluding that the audience did not wish to sit through the entire work!

The pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow was the first to perform Beethoven’s piano sonatas in a single concert (the last five in 1878), declaring that “Berlin must have sunk very low if it cannot listen to my reading of Beethoven’s complete testament”. It was von Bülow who called the 32 Piano Sonatas the “New Testament” of the piano repertoire, thereby setting works, which were originally mostly composed for private study and domestic performance, on a high pedestal of veneration. Von Bülow often used religious rhetoric in relation to music, and his concerts were serious, didactic affairs, proclamations of “musical gospel” to the “congregation” of the audience. This created a quasi-religious veneration of Beethoven’s music, and specifically the 32, and this aura of reverence around the piano sonatas remains today.

Initially hard to sell, by the late 1880s von Bülow had launched and was touring with a four-concert Beethoven cycle. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Artur Schnabel was performing sonata cycles in Europe and the US, and in 1932 HMV launched the Beethoven Sonata Society through which subscribers could purchase Artur Schnabel’s recordings of the piano sonatas. He was the first pianist to record the complete sonatas, a monumental feat in itself given the limitations of the technology at the time. Schnabel was one of the pre-eminent Beethoven interpreters on record, and his performances remain highly prized for their simplicity of approach and his anti-virtuoso nature, which reveal the essence of this music. The American music critic Harold Schonberg called Schnabel “The Man Who Invented Beethoven”, and his recordings and performances brought the piano sonatas to a wider audience at a time when they were not that well-known or admired. It was Schnabel who also described this music as “better than can be played”, thus contributing to the cult, almost mythic status of the 32.

Today, this music continues to enjoy an elevated stature which goes far beyond the notes on the score, and despite some relaxation in the rituals and etiquette of classical concerts, the 32 are still regularly presented in an atmosphere of awed reverence. Any pianist who takes on this colossal challenge enjoys special respect: not only is this music physically and psychologically demanding, but the hand of history, tradition and expectation weighs heavily upon their shoulder.

There’s something seductive about this process of really going to your limit with this music

Jonathan Biss

For the completist – both performer and listener –  the 32 provide a satisfyingly significant opportunity to explore their composer’s output across three distinct periods of his career and to be immersed in repertoire on a grand scale (the complete cycle comes in at around 11 hours of music – a few pianists have performed all 32 sonatas in a single day, a crazy feat of stamina and perhaps a performance stunt too…. it’s more usual to hear a complete cycle over the course of 8 concerts). For any pianist embarking on this great journey, the experience is fascinating, frustrating, uplifting, intense and absorbing. This is music which places one face to face not only with Beethoven’s genius but also the sheer force of his personality. He’s stubborn, explosive, intimate, witty, rhetorical, angry, forbidding, despairing, anxious, joyful, his humanity evident in every phrase, his innermost feelings expressed with a startling lucidity. It is this, amongst other things, which makes his music so remarkable, inspiring and shocking. It is this too which allows so many pianists to bring their personality to this music, presenting his emotions through the prism of their own life experience and throwing a fresh perspective on this music every time it is performed or recorded.

He’s also incredibly precise in his writing and every marking and direction must be understood in its context: why, for example, does he differentiate between different kinds of staccato, or place a crescendo over a single note (a physical impossibility for the pianist!)? Yet he also leaves plenty open to one’s own interpretation and personal vision. In this respect, his music embodies the maxim “through discipline comes freedom”: it demands both a laser-like focus and also total abandon.

Beethoven never wants us to be in any doubt about what he is saying. Even when he asks the pianist to create an illusion……….the intention behind the sound, and the message it conveys, remains clear.

Paul Lewis, pianist

Playing the 32, your ego is constantly being tested because this is music which is bigger than you are. To meet a Beethoven sonata head-on, it stops being about you, how fast you can play, how technically accomplished you are. It is about getting beyond yourself, becoming ego-less, humble before the greatness of the music, trying to get so far under the composer’s skin that Beethoven’s ideas became your own. As one layer is uncovered, so another presents itself; the summit of this music is always just out of reach. There is no sense of a final arrival, an end to the journey with this music, and this is what makes it so endlessly fascinating for players and audiences alike.

These sonatas speak of fundamentals: the meaning of life and shared values. And so when sharing the music with others, you are debating, with the audience, what it means to be alive, to be human – those basic philosophical questions of Beethoven’s time which remain with us today.

With Beethoven there is always a life beyond the mundane – the whole universe could be contained in a single sonata.

whatever your connection with these works, their infinite scope will never fail to reward, overwhelm and inspire

Paul Lewis

 

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For American pianist Jonathan Biss, Beethoven has been a near-constant companion for almost his entire life. He has been playing and writing about the 32 Piano Sonatas, has spent nearly ten years recording Beethoven’s sonatas and has embarked on a cycle of concerts performing all the sonatas at London’s Wigmore Hall and in the US (and let us hope this wonderful series will be able to resume….).

the intensity of my current immersion with his music has become one of the most profound experiences of my life.

Jonathan Biss

This handsomely-produced boxset of the complete Piano Sonatas (Orchid Classics) presents the sonatas not in chronological order, as many sets do, but rather with a cross-section of sonatas on each disc, to demonstrate Biss’s conviction that each one stands as a brilliant masterpiece in its own right. This approach – one which he is also taking in his concert cycle – allows the listener to appreciate the individual qualities and distinct structures of each sonata, and the extraordinary development in Beethoven’s piano writing. Thus, the final sonatas, usually presented as a trilogy, in concert and on disc, are placed on separate discs within the context of sonatas from different periods of Beethoven’s compositional life. Biss refutes the notion that Beethoven had three distinct compositional periods as an over-simplification and instead urges the listener to view Beethoven’s compositional style in “a perpetual state of evolution”; even the final sonatas still betray some of his gruffness and a desire to shock, while the slow movements of the early sonatas look forward to later ones in their heart-stopping beauty and eloquence.

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

Jonathan Biss

As mentioned in my review of his most recent Beethoven sonatas concert at the Wigmore, Biss is a “thinking pianist”, with an acute intellectual curiosity and an ability to articulate the exigencies of learning, maintaining and performing this music, its challenges and its joys, offering remarkable insights, “behind the notes”, as it were, from the point of view of the performer. “Here was vivid expression, vitality and flamboyance; no standing back from the music as if in modest reverence but rather a deep dive into its every nook and cranny to winkle out and reveal details afresh.”

So does Biss achieve a similar spontaneity, vitality and expressivity in the recording? I think so – and the set gets off to an energetic start with the Sonata in C minor, No 5, Op 10/1, its first movement dramatic and commanding, the finale a throbbing, quickfire rondo bookending a slow movement of immense elegance.

Biss also appreciates Beethoven’s humour and wit, and selects pacing, particularly in the up-tempo movements, to highlight this. He often finds the humour in the music which others often gloss over: quirky ritardandos and accelerandos, which may irritate purists, and laugh-out-loud fermatas. 

Purists may also baulk at shifts in pace which are not always marked in the score, but I like the often dizzying, sometimes unruly tempi, as if Beethoven couldn’t get his ideas down fast enough. There’s a strong sense of storytelling here too, with dramatic bursts of narrative presented with a gripping immediacy – the finale of ‘Les Adieux’, for example, overflows with heartfelt joy. Slow movements, meanwhile, become transcendent poetic interludes infused with grace, tenderness and warmth; and these often reveal the true depths of Beethoven’s imagination.

The famous opening movement of the ‘Moonlight’ sonata (too often the subject of rather lugubriously clichéd readings) is hushed and haunting, just teetering on the edge of tragedy, but always eloquent. Biss’s sound is luminous (“moonlit”?!) and liquid, his pace a gently rippling moderato. This is contrasted by a finale of almost unrelenting restlessness, occasionally bordering on a comic hysteria. It’s this kind of playing, combined with airy passagework, dramatic tempi, crisp articulation, and a vivid aural imagination that can harness the breadth of the piano’s sonorities (listen to his pedalling in the finale of the Waldstein and the kaleidoscopic sound effects he achieves), that had me on the edge of my seat for much of Biss’s recent Wigmore concert.

But it’s not all about fleet fingers. Biss gives us thoughtful long-spun melodic lines, well-balanced harmonies, taut, driving rhythms, rumbling tremolandos, dramatic fermatas, carefully-considered voicing, subito dynamic swerves, and colourful orchestration – all devices Beethoven employs to express an amazing range of emotions from joy to despair, wit and uproarious humour, stubbornness and rage, passionate ardour and transcendent serenity. The sheer force of Beethoven’s personality, his capriciousness and inventiveness, is illustrated by Biss with clarity and proportion, beauty and commitment. His Beethoven is direct, lively and spontaneous, ever alert to Beethoven’s shifting moods. And while he undoubtedly respects the composer and his music, Biss does not allow reverence to get in the way of telling an entertaining story (certain other Beethoven pianists would have us believe that because this is “great music”, it must also be Very Serious). Instead, Biss’s approach is delightfully optimistic – one senses his constant curiosity and open-mindedness about this music – and refreshingly liberated from more mainstream interpretative choices. One also has the sense of a pianist with a profound affection for this music which comes from a long association with it, but also an ongoing fascination; for Jonathan Biss, the journey is far from over.

This is, in short, beautiful, thoughtful and incredibly vivid playing, and because of the organisation of the sonatas, each disc feels complete and satisfying in its own right, like a recital. An invigorating addition to the catalogue of Beethoven piano sonatas.

Recommended

Jonathan Biss | Beethoven: The Complete Piano Sonatas is available on the Orchid Classics label.

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St Martin-in-the-Fields welcomes the Piccadilly Sinfonia for five concerts that celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. Featuring British concert pianist, Warren Mailley-Smith, acclaimed by Classic FM as “stunning”, the concert series will take audiences through a journey of all five of Beethoven’s masterful piano concertos, alongside selections of Beethoven’s famous symphonic works and music of composers who influenced and were influenced by Beethoven.

The concert series will be conducted by British conductor, Tom Fetherstonhaugh, who has been described as “a spark to watch” by BBC Radio 3. Explore the fate of a man who composed for princes and kings, who ushered in a new era in classical music becoming its hero, and is remembered today as an emperor among men, one of the greatest composers of all time.

Born in 1770, a point in history wrought by tumult and great change, Beethoven composed music that began a new era. The first concert in the series, Fate, features Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto and his Fifth Symphony, a work known worldwide by only four simple notes. Prince and King explore the works composed for and associated with royalty. Showing the intensity of Beethoven’s earlier works, Hero begins with his First Piano Concerto, a work composed when Beethoven was only 25, paired with his Eroica Symphony. The series concludes in a complete celebration of Beethoven’s life with Emperor, commemorating Haydn’s influence on a young Beethoven and ending with Beethoven’s final piano concerto, the Emperor Concerto.

TICKETS PRICES £29/£25/£18/£13/£9

Save 25% and see all 5 concerts

CONCERT 1
​Fate: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Third Piano Concerto
Tuesday, 28 January, 2020 7.30pm

CONCERT 2
​Prince: Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto
Tuesday, 17 March, 2020 7:30pm

CONCERT 3
​King: Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Second Piano Concerto
Tuesday, 28 April, 2020 7:30pm

CONCERT 4
​Hero: Beethoven’s Third Symphony and First Piano Concerto
Tuesday, 30 June, 2020 7.30pm

CONCERT 5
​Emperor: Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony and Fifth Piano Concerto
Tuesday, 29 September, 2020 7:30pm

To buy tickets/further information please visit or learn more about our season, visit www.piccadillysinfonia.com/beethoven250, or call St Martin-in-the-Fields’s Box Office Services at 020 7766 1100

Launched under the artistic direction of British concert pianist Warren Mailley-Smith, the Piccadilly Sinfonia is formed from some the UK’s leading young professional talent, with notable guest soloists so far having included violinists Zoey Beyers, Fenella Humphreys, Martyn Jackson, and Harriet Mackenzie. Their repertoire draws largely from a wide range of baroque and classical works for chamber orchestra including a number of virtuoso concerti.

Warren Mailley-Smith recently became the first British pianist to perform Chopin’s complete works for solo piano from memory in a series of 11 recitals at St John’s Smith Square. Hailed by the critics as an “epic achievement”, Mailley-Smith will repeat the series at several venues in 2020. He has given acclaimed solo recitals at Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall and has performed for the British Royal Family on numerous occasions. One of the busiest concert pianists of his generation, he regularly gives over 100 solo performances a year. His career has taken him all over the world, with solo performances in Australia, Europe and most recently solo tours in China and the USA. He has 30 piano concertos in his repertoire, having made his concerto debut with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Tom Fetherstonhaugh is a British conductor. Described as ‘a spark to watch’ by BBC Radio 3, his recent projects include a concert for peace in the Korean Demilitarised Zone, the development of a new piano concerto with players from the Ulster Orchestra and assisting Sir Mark Elder at the Royal Academy of Music. Tom made his debut in Asia in 2019, performing in the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) with the Lindenbaum Festival Orchestra. Entitled ‘One Harmony’, the festival promotes peace between the Koreas through music, and the performance included a collaboration with the National Children’s Chorus of America. As well as the Fantasia Orchestra, Lindenbaum Festival Orchestra, Oxford University Sinfonietta and the orchestra of the Oxford Chamber Music Festival, Tom has conducted players from the Ulster Orchestra, the Southbank Sinfonia, Leicester Symphony Orchestra, Hereford Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, the Junior Royal Academy of Music Sinfonia, Senior Orchestra and Main Choir, the orchestra of the Pro Corda Senior Course, the choir of Merton College, Oxford, and, aged 13, the choristers of Westminster Abbey on their tour to Russia. Tom is also active as an organist and pianist; he was organ scholar at Merton College, Oxford, and is a prizewinning Associate of the Royal College of Organists. He has played for live BBC Radio 3 broadcasts, and in 2017 played for the first Anglican Evensong at St Peter’s Basilica, Rome. He has appeared as soloist in the UK, Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore, including the Oxford Chamber Music and Oxford Lieder Festivals. On the piano, Tom has recently performed the complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas with violinist Athena Hawksley-Walker in the Holywell Music Room; the duo played live on Radio3’s In Tune as part of the project.

source: press release