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ILL-TEMPERED CLAVIER
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Arc of continuity
Jonathan Biss’s landmark Beethoven cycle gives equal weight to all 32 sonatas while revealing some surprising connections with other pieces by the composer. The result, says Stephen Wigler, builds on the illustrious discographies of great pianists of the past
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When Artur Schnabel was only a few years older than Jonathan Biss is now (39), the Austrian pianist embarked on the odyssey that resulted, roughly 10 years later, in what is arguably his crowning achievement: the rst recorded cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. Schnabel completed this mammoth project in 1935, following his performances of four cycles of the sonatas in Berlin (1927 and 1932), London (1933) and New York (1934).
Biss has recently accomplished a similar feat in roughly the same amount of time. His project to record the complete Beethoven piano sonatas over the course of nine years has culminated in the release of Volume 9 (Opp 10/3, 31/3 and 111), and the box set is due out this spring. When I ask Biss to name the pianist who most in uenced his Beethoven recordings, the answer is prompt. While he admires the Beethoven playing of several other pianists – among them, Rudolf Serkin and Leon Fleisher, with whom Biss began studying when he was 17 – ‘it was,’ he says, ‘the Schnabel recordings that continue to have the most impact upon me.’ He is more hesitant when pressed to say what has been the most di cult part of his Beethoven journey. Although keen to avoid appearing immodest, he admits that at some level he found it easy. ‘Life with Beethoven is not a matter of choice,’ he tells me, speaking by telephone from Philadelphia, where he teaches at the Curtis Institute. ‘ e personality [of Beethoven] is so overwhelming that you cannot help but be drawn into it. I knew I wanted to record Beethoven before I was four – when I heard my mother [the celebrated Romanian-born, Israeli violinist, Miriam Freed] rehearse one of Beethoven’s Opus 23 sonatas. Being engaged with Beethoven has always made me feel more alive. Engagement with his art leads to ever greater engagement.’ By the time he reached his early twenties, Biss had scored major successes with some of the most important pieces by Beethoven’s predecessors (Mozart’s nal concertos) and successors (Chopin’s late masterpieces, Schumann’s Fantasy and Debussy’s Estampes.) Nevertheless, he recognises that his decision to devote so much time to Beethoven has made him ‘miss a lot of pieces’ by other composers he might otherwise have played. ‘But what I’ve missed is
nothing compared to what I’ve gained,’ he says. ‘Everything before him leads to Beethoven and – with the possible exceptions of Chopin and Debussy – he leads to every composer who follows him. Beethoven’s music demands laser-like focus and total abandon, which prove useful in nearly everything in the [piano’s] repertory.’
Beethoven’s sonatas are generally thought to become harder as the opus numbers increase, but Biss disagrees: ‘Most people would argue that the nal sonata triptych [Opp 109, 110 and 111] is much greater and more di cult music than the rst triptych [the F minor, A major and C major sonatas of Op 2] and, therefore, a greater interpretive challenge. But I never would say that. In fact, the Opus 2 sonatas are as remarkable and innovative in their way as Opus 109, 110 and 111.’ Without doubt, he adds, ‘the last movement of 111 takes listeners to heights no composer before or after Beethoven has ascended, but that it is greater than the four movements of Opus 2 No 2 is not a position I would ever take. Beethoven’s greatest challenge is his unceasing energy in pursuing diverse directions throughout his entire compositional career.’ Even what seem like lacunae to other interpreters are things Biss nds fascinating. ‘Consider,’ he says, ‘what comes before and after 1805. In the three years leading up to and including 1805, Beethoven con dently writes six sonatas, including some of the most celebrated – not only the Appassionata (1805), but also the Tempest (1802) and Waldstein (1804).’ By comparison, the subsequent ve years saw Beethoven complete only three sonatas, just one of which gets performed frequently – Les Adieux
(1810). e other two – Nos 24 and 25 (both 1809) – are scarcely ever played.
‘What is going on?’ asks Biss, launching at once into his own pet theory: ‘After the successfully heroic forms of the Waldstein and Appassionata, Beethoven found himself at a loose end. He spent time searching to nd a new form – experimenting with the two-movement Opus 78 and the somewhat miniaturised Opus 79. It’s only in 1814 – nine years after the Appassionata, in the two-movement Opus 90 – that Beethoven begins to nd his way. e insistently hammering rst movement of this piece anticipates the opening movement of the Hammerklavier, while its twomovement structure (the second movement especially) looks forward to Opus 111.’
Considerations like these inform Biss’s performances throughout his cycle, giving the 32 sonatas an arc of continuity that other interpretations rarely achieve. Make no mistake, Biss plays the familiar sonatas in the cycle superbly: his trills in the Waldstein and second movement of Op 111 are impeccable; his voicing in the fugues of Opp 101, 106 and 110 is invariably intelligent; the explosions of drama in the Appassionata are always governed by subtlety and timing; his stamina in the unprecedented, near 50-minute duration of the Hammerklavier is never strained. But other pianists do just as well in these pieces. It is because Biss nds Beethoven so endlessly fascinating that makes his interpretations special. He has a knack for making less familiar works such as Sonata No 25 sound ‘great’ (‘It’s because they are great,’ Biss declares) and nding connections which other pianists either neglect or
fail to see. For example, his recording of Sonata No 24 in F-sharp major Op 78 is preceded on the same CD by the Fantasy in G minor Op 77.
‘Beethoven was one of music’s greatest improvisers and Opus 77 is an example of that quality,’ says Biss. ‘But if you look at the rst page of the manuscript, it clearly suggests Opus 77 was intended as a partner piece to Opus 78 – not only because they were published together, but because when you perform them sequentially, you understand how the formal properties of the Sonata emerge from the improvisational qualities of the Fantasy.’
‘I think Beethoven was aiming for a fantasy-and-sonata format like those occasionally found in Mozart, such as the Fantasy in C minor (K475) and the Sonata in the same minor key (K457),’ he continues. ‘It’s an experiment in form that is not repeated in the 32 sonatas. Yet if you look at Opus 80 [the Choral Fantasy for solo piano, orchestra and chorus], you hear the same idea brought to fruition. e form of the second part, which combines the forces of the solo instrument, the orchestra and the chorus, clearly emerges out of the gigantic, improvisatory solo cadenza for the solo piano that opens the piece.’
Very little in Beethoven’s 32 sonatas seems to have escaped Biss’s notice. His cycle, for example, is one of the few recent ones in which the so-called Sonatas Nos 19 and 20 (Op 49 Nos 1 and 2) are taken seriously. ere is general scholarly agreement that these two pieces, which were written in the mid-1790s and published by Beethoven around 10 years later as his Op 49, are often ignored in performances of the cycle, not only on record, but also in the concert hall – as they were, for example, by Maurizio Pollini in his well-known cycles.
is is not, however, Biss’s practice. He has joined the ranks of such illustrious predecessors as Samuil Feinberg, Sviatoslav Richter and Daniel Barenboim, all of whom have performed and recorded the two sonatas. ‘If Beethoven consented to having them published as his Opus 49, then we are obliged to consider them as such,’ says Biss. Such considerations are among the distinctions that make Biss’s cycle essential listening for music lovers. Important recorded cycles appear approximately every 25 years or so. e rst was Schnabel’s in 1935 and his should have been succeeded in the mid-1950s by Solomon’s, which was cut short in 1956 by two devastating strokes that left the British pianist without the use of his left arm. Roughly 20 years after Solomon’s career-ending strokes, the second and most signi cant of Alfred Brendel’s three recorded cycles appeared, and was succeeded, after another 20 years, by Richard Goode’s. Now, called into existence almost as if it was scheduled, comes that of Biss.
is is not to say Biss’s cycle is superior to those by Claudio Arrau, Maria Grinberg, Maurizio Pollini, or any of the more than two dozen distinguished recordings since Schnabel’s, only that I suspect it will come to be heard as a landmark akin to those of Solomon, Brendel and Goode. Aside from performing and recording Beethoven, Biss has done other things over the past decade too. ere
COURSERA
is his important teaching career at his alma mater, the Curtis Institute, whose faculty he joined in 2011. He holds the Neubauer Family Chair in Piano Studies at Curtis, where his students include Eric Lu, winner of the 2018 Leeds International Piano Competition. Since 2018 he has also served as co-artistic director (with Mitsuko Uchida) of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. And then – as an extension of his teaching career – there’s his celebrated (and free) online video course, Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, which has reached almost 200,000 students in more than 185 countries.
‘Teaching is a privilege for many reasons,’ says Biss. ‘For one thing, you learn as much from doing it – or probably even more – than your students. Moreover, because it forces you to become aware of and to nurture the talents of young people, I think it’s the highest calling in music.’ Now that his Beethoven odyssey has ended, what else does Biss have in the pipeline? ‘It’s always hard to predict the future,’ he says. ‘I’ll certainly return to the other composers I love. But I’m also hopeful that I have at least one more Beethoven sonata cycle left in me. at’s a body of work in which I’ll always nd more to say.’ IP
‘Teaching is the highest calling in music’
Volume 9 of Jonathan Biss’s Beethoven sonatas cycle is available from Orchid Classics (ORC100109). e 9-disc box set will be released in spring 2020. jonathanbiss.com
Biss’s free online masterclass series, Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, can be viewed at coursera.org/learn/ beethoven-piano-sonatas
Piano Professor Keyboard
Job reference number: 322-19 Closing date: 9am Friday 31 January 2020 Interview date: Friday 21 February 2020 Salary: Grade 8, £51.38 per hour. The Royal College of Music (RCM) is one of the world’s greatest conservatoires. Our excellence was recognised by the 2019 QS World University Rankings, in which we ranked as the top institution for performing arts in the UK for the fourth consecutive year. The RCM also achieved an overall rating of gold for its outstanding teaching and learning provision for undergraduates in the first ever Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). To cope with growing demand and our increasingly global perspective, the Royal College of Music is seeking to engage a distinguished piano professor to join its international team. We are looking for candidates with the following attributes: • You should be a widely recognised and highly respected practitioner, either as a performer or teacher. Piano Professor Keyboard Job reference number: 322-19 Closing date: 9am Friday 31 January 2020 Interview date: Friday 21 February 2020 Salary: Grade 8, £51.38 per hour. The Royal College of Music (RCM) is one of the world's greatest conservatoires. Our excellence was recognised by the 2019 QS World University Rankings, in which we ranked as the top institution for performing arts in the UK for the fourth consecutive year. The RCM also achieved an overall rating of gold for its outstanding teaching and learning provision for undergraduates in t he first ever Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).
• You will be teaching, to an exceptionally high level of technical and musical proficiency, students at undergraduate, postgraduate and, in some cases, doctoral level, so relevant teaching experience at this level is required. To cope with growing demand and our increasingly global perspective, the Royal College of Music is seeking to engage a distinguished piano professor to join its international team. We are looking for candidates with the following attributes:
• You should have a global perspective and significant international contacts. • You should be a widely recognised and highly respected practitioner, either as a performer or teacher.
• You should understand the particular demands of the music profession whilst striving to help each student reach the fullness of their own potential. This post is offered on a part-time, hourly basis and is available from September 2020 For full details of this position please read the Applicant Information Pack, available to download from the RCM website: www.rcm.ac.uk/jobs To apply, please complete our 1) Application form and 2) Equal Opportunities form (available to download from the RCM website) and submit in Word or PDF format by email to recruitment@rcm.ac.uk • You will be teaching, to an exceptionally high level of technical and musical proficiency, students at undergraduate, postgraduate and, in some cases, doctoral level, so relevant teaching experience at this level is required. • You should have a global perspective and significant international contacts. • You should understand the particular demands of the music profession whilst striving to help each student reach the fullness of their own potential. This post is offered on a part-time, hourly basis and is available from September 2020
CVs without an application form will not be accepted. Please ensure that you include the Job Reference Number when submitting your application. For full details of this position please read the Applicant Information Pack, available to download from the RCM website: www.rcm.ac.uk/jobs
The RCM is committed to being an equal opportunities employer and to promoting a diverse and inclusive environment for all our staff, students and visitors. To apply, please complete our 1 ) Application form and 2) Equal Opportunities form (available to download from the RCM website) and submit in Word or PDF format by email to recruitment@rcm.ac.uk
CVs without an application form will not be accepted. Please ensure that you include the Job Reference Number when submitting your application.
The RCM is committed to being an equal opportunities employer and to promoting a diverse and inclusive environment for all our staff, students and visitors.
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Path of discovery
%eethovenps relationship to the Neyboard is central to understanding his career. 'issatisfied with the pianos of his own day, he campaigned tirelessly for richer and more robust instruments. Jan Swafford traces his journey from dazzling virtuoso to towering composer
The musical repertoire is so saturated with the presence of Ludwig van Beethoven that history has tended to neglect the signi cance of the piano in his career both as composer and performer. ough he played harpsichord and clavichord in childhood, he was essentially one of the rst generation of musicians to grow up as pure pianists. From his prodigy childhood onwards he intended to be a composer/pianist. When he left his hometown of Bonn for Vienna in 1792 at age 21, he was already one of the leading virtuosos in the world, and it was on keyboard that he rst established his reputation in the European capital of music.
When Beethoven was 10, Christian Neefe, his new teacher in Bonn, announced this sullen, grubby, nearly friendless child as a potential successor to Mozart, though Neefe was mostly thinking of his precocious keyboard skills. at year Beethoven produced his rst known work, a little set of variations for piano on a theme by Dressler, charming and e ective but nothing like what Mozart was doing at that age. In general, in his teens Beethoven was neither as proli c nor ambitious a composer as the young Mozart. e reason is that in those years he was concentrating more on piano playing than composing. He recalled that in his teens he practised ‘prodigiously,’ often far into the night.
His teacher Neefe was largely an organist and harpsichord player rather than a pianist. Piano technique requires a di erent touch than either of those instruments, and since there were no real piano teachers available, Beethoven essentially had to teach himself. During a tour with the Bonn court orchestra when he was 20, a connoisseur heard him and wrote, ‘His style of treating his instrument is so di erent from that usually adopted, that it impresses one with the idea that by a path of his own discovery he has attained that height of excellence whereon he now stands.’
In Vienna, Beethoven quickly established himself as one of the stars of local musical salons, presided over by aristocrats who were sophisticated cognoscenti. Above all, he dazzled listeners with the unprecedented re and imagination of his improvising, which could leave audiences gasping and weeping. As an example, in 1804
Beethoven in his study, from a painting by Carl Schlösser the painter Joseph Willibrord Mähler was brought to meet Beethoven at his at. Beethoven told him that he had just nished a new symphony and began to play the nale on piano. It was the Eroica, the movement a series of variations not on a theme as usual, but on a bare bass line. Mähler recalled that Beethoven played through the movement and then kept going, improvising variations on the bass line for two hours with un agging imagination. Improvisation was Beethoven’s prime creative engine, music owing directly from his imagination into his ngers. Much of his work began that way, then was re ned on the page and in his head. His student Carl Czerny said that Beethoven had two modes of improvisation. One was laid out in a standard genre, like variations or a sonata, in which his extempore playing sounded like a published piece. e other style was a free-form fantasia, in which he produced an astonishing variety of ideas. e quasi-improvisation that opens the Choral Fantasy (which
24 January 2020 International Piano Beethoven improvised at the premiere) is a surviving example of his rhapsodic style.
Czerny is relevant to Beethoven and the future in another sense. For all Beethoven's power as a pianist, observers said that he sat still at the keyboard and did not throw himself around, that his ngers seemed to rest on the keys, barely moving. at is to say that Beethoven had found for himself a quite modern keyboard technique, and he taught it to his students including Czerny, who went on to create the nger exercises that have trained generations of students ever since.
So, Beethoven established himself in his early 20s as one of the handful of supreme pianists in Vienna. Only then did he begin to issue his rst opus numbers, most of them involving the piano either as solo or part of a chamber work, such as the Op 1 Piano Trios and Op 2 Piano Sonatas. In the course of his career, Beethoven produced three synoptic bodies of work, each of them an enormous technical and emotional journey that seems to examine the full depth and breadth of what a medium can do, and beyond that, the depth and breadth of what music itself can do. ose bodies of work are, of course, the nine symphonies, 16 string quartets and 32 piano sonatas. e sonatas have a remarkable variety of colour and texture, from the sombre harmonies that announce the Pathétique, to the pounding intensity and concluding ecstasies of the Waldstein, the kaleidoscopic colours of the Appassionata, and the throbbing chords that open the Op 31/3 Sonata in E- at. Each time Beethoven began a piano sonata, it is as if he were not just looking for new themes – he was rethinking the instrument itself. He did not get going on a sonata until he had found a colour and texture unique to that piece.
Beethoven's relationship to the piano was steady through his career beginning to end – but with a caveat. In 1802 he had a breakdown captured in an unsent letter to his brothers that we call the Heiligenstadt Testament. It had nally come down on him that the growing deafness that had already aicted him for years was only going to get worse, and that his chronic and painful digestive disorders were never going away. In the Testament he wrote that he had contemplated suicide, but ‘It was only my art that held me back. Oh, it seemed impossible to me to leave this world before I had produced all that I felt capable of producing, and so I prolonged this wretched existence.’ He vowed to defy fate and physical su ering for the sake of his art, which at that point took a leap into what we call his Second Period. Yet there is one element of Beethoven's despair that he does not mention in the letter, but was certainly on his mind: deafness was going to end his playing career. Piano was half his identity as a musician and more than half his income, because then as now, you could make money far more readily by playing music than writing it.
Beethoven understood that before long he was going to be entirely a composer, no longer a virtuoso. To that disaster he responded with the force of his enormous
courage and determination. In the next six years his output was stupendous, an outpouring of great works surely unprecedented in history in such a short period. But if he was no longer a virtuoso in public, he continued to improvise on his own, because that was ingrained in his creativity. ere are few sadder images in music than Beethoven in his later years improvising for hours on an out-of-tune keyboard, playing music he could hear only in his head. In regard to Beethoven as a pianist, there is another dimension: in his time the instrument was in a period of transition from early towards modern instruments. Today there are a few leading manufacturers who have a recognised quality and sound, Steinway the most familiar. But over the past century, expectations have led to standardisation. is was not the case in Beethoven's time. It is not accurate to say the piano was ‘evolving’ because there was nothing uni ed about its development. Rather each region had its preferred styles in terms of touch and sound, as did each maker. In general, British pianos were noted for being robust and rich-sounding instruments, Viennese pianos for a lighter touch and sound, French keyboards roughly in between.
Beethoven was intensely involved in the piano and followed every new development in its design, colours, technique and manufacture. Being Beethoven, he tended to be dissatis ed with all of it. He pressed piano makers for louder and more robust instruments, with a wider range. During a tour in 1796 he wrote to the manufacturer Streicher: ‘ ere is no doubt that so far as the manner of playing it is concerned, the fortepiano is still the least studied and developed of all instruments; often one thinks that one is merely listening to a harp.’
at is a good description of the light-sounding AustroGerman pianos of the time, on which Beethoven wrote his rst mature works. For that kind of piano he wrote the Moonlight Sonata. e score directs the murmuring rst movement to be played with the sustain pedal down the whole time. at is impossible on modern pianos, with their far longer sustain, but on the keyboards of Beethoven's time it is a subtle and haunting e ect.
en in 1803 he received a French Erard, louder than any he had encountered, with a sti er touch. e e ect on his piano writing was dramatic: soon followed two of the supreme works in the repertoire, the Waldstein and Appassionata Sonatas, the rst dynamic and exciting, the second darkly tragic, both of them unprecedented explorations of piano colour. e Appassionata, in particular, explores the qualities of each register on instruments of those days. With their wooden frames, the bass tended to be rich and a little boomy, the middle mild, the high register quite bright. e registers of today’s pianos are more homogenised, so that e ect is partly lost. On a period piano, the manic end of the Appassionata sounds almost like it is tearing the instrument apart. On a modern piano, which is elegantly loud in all registers, it is hard to create the intended violence.
Still, being Beethoven, he was not satis ed with his Erard and had the keyboard redone twice. He wanted the
DAVID ERTL
light touch of Viennese pianos with a big French sound. It never worked, but he continued to compose at the Erard for around a decade. Towards the end of his life he owned some bigger, louder instruments from Graf and the British maker Broadwood, but by then he could hardly hear them. Nevertheless, they in uenced the still-evolving colours of the late piano music. All this is to say that in terms of his relationship to the piano, Beethoven wrote idiomatically for the instruments of his time even as he campaigned for richer and more robust models.
e presence of the piano in Beethoven's art began at the fundamental level of his creative imagination, leading to the rst great body of piano music in the sonatas. is in turn contributed to his historic in uence on the development of the instrument and the technique of playing it. Beethoven was not just a towering composer, he was a supreme musician in every aspect of the art, and in all those respects he changed music once and for all. IP
Composer and writer Jan Swa ord is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (Faber & Faber 2014). janswa ord.com Beethoven’s 1825 Graf piano, pictured at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn
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2020 Faculty Nelson Freire Richard Goode Alain Lefèvre Elisabeth Leonskaja Paul Lewis Nikolai Lugansky Marios Papadopoulos Menahem Pressler
Heightened clarity
Piano transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies and string quartets give listeners intimate access to the composer’s processes by laying bare the intricacies of his music, writes Jonathon Brown
Beethoven was undoubtedly one of the most innovative artists of all time, up there with Plato, Donatello and Picasso. He paid little heed to making his music performable, but thanks to the e orts of composers such as Liszt and others who followed in his footsteps, the symphonies and quartets were popularised through piano transcriptions for two and four hands, well before radio broadcasts and recordings became commonplace. ese transcriptions live on in their own right, even though we now enjoy unprecedented access to performances of the originals. e interest in transcriptions is more complex than meets the ear. True, they served to disseminate music in a world without phonograph or wireless. Yet they also served as a didactic tool, facilitating the study of how a symphony might be composed. And they served to supply an inevitable element of sheer showmanship – I’m an orchestra! – as well as handy income for composers and performers. Nowadays, especially since around 1970, when we are ever richer in conventional orchestral recordings and performances, they have come to be esteemed for their own intrinsic interest. Early LPs such as Glenn Gould’s 1968 Fifth Symphony or Roger Woodward’s 1977 Eroica, for all their gladiatorial momentum, insisted upon the musical rather than the merely historical interest of the notes delivered, not without a few rolled eyebrows.
e didactic interest is especially true of the symphonies, in which Beethoven’s harmonic intricacies can be a shade obscured by orchestration. Moreover, I feel that’s arguably part of the point of an orchestra, especially with the likes of Boulez conducting. e e ect should not always reveal the means. Meeting the means via the naked piano then has an overwhelming e ect, especially in the acoustic of a small venue. Perhaps the most famous champion of this is Wagner, who in his youth had taught himself by writing transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies; this intimate access to Beethoven’s processes – especially with the late quartets – never left his creative energies. He enjoyed
TULLY POTTER COLLECTION
nothing better than an evening of Beethoven’s symphonies or quartets on the piano after dinner, sometimes as a duet with Anton Rubinstein or Liszt, and usually followed by a grand pronouncement such as this, on the String Quartet in C-sharp minor Op 131: ‘As I said, it was a point of honour for a musician to write a fugue.’
Numerous composers known and unknown felt the need – didactic, commercial or fanciful – to create transcriptions of Beethoven’s music, and did so in bewildering variety. ere are versions for solo piano, piano duet and two pianos, as well as weird combinations of other instruments. Some versions seek heightened clarity, paring down the original to essentials (not least so as to be playable by amateur music-lovers), while at the other extreme there are fanciful paraphrases such as Liszt’s Fantasie on themes from e Ruins of Athens – popular with other composers for its Turkish march. e Fifth Symphony alone exists in over 50 transcriptions. Hummel – of whose transcriptions Liszt wrote, ‘It is sad to see the ideas of the masters so Ludwig van Beethoven, painted in 1820 by Joseph Karl Stieler
Franz Liszt (left) was critical of Friedrich Kalkbrenner's ‘scribbled’ transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies
distorted’ – wrote a version for ute, violin, cello and piano, while Léon Grisez o ers one for two clarinets, Jacques Larocque for saxophones and percussion, and Antonio López Villanueva for guitar, lute and two bandurrias (to go with his Moonlight Sonata transcription for the same forces). Perhaps, on top of practical motives and didactic aims, we must add sheer novelty value. As a lucrative market it was also competitive: Liszt said of his undertaking to do the transcriptions that he had done so ‘rightly or wrongly’, but was adamant enough to say of Kalkbrenner’s ‘scribbled’ transcriptions that Kalkbrenner ‘would do better to arrange his wig’. e quartets, on the other hand, clearly seen as more serious stu , are only rarely transcribed for novel groups – the Adagio of Op 131 can be heard for two utes and two clarinets – and piano versions are the norm.
The recorded repertoire of Beethoven symphony transcriptions opens with all sorts of oddities, including piano rolls, some even ‘conducted’ by the likes of Artur Bodanzky. Early complete cycles of Liszt’s transcriptions set down by Cyprien Katsaris and Idil Biret are still estimable. I personally prefer Biret’s rounder tone while Katsaris is capable of a dash of madness, a panache that is ever-present also in Leslie Howard’s set, contained within his vast and lavishly documented recording of the complete piano works of Liszt on Hyperion. Perhaps the sheer status and showmanship of a transcription allows irreverent licence that a hallowed oeuvre such as a sonata
28 January 2020 International Piano deters? Howard, by the way, o ers Liszt’s earlier versions of Symphonies Nos 5-7.
Without all the distractions a orded by those pesky instruments of the orchestra, the pianist can make points that might at best be heavy-handed for a conductor. Take Gould’s bewitching 1968 account of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Gould insists upon a mesmeric regularity of rhythm which, with a conductor, would likely be condemned as stodgy if not perverse, but which on the piano reveals a sort of trance-like devotion to the Eastern ideas with which the composer irted. It may be signi cant that Gould only played Symphonies Nos 5 and 6 and the Allegretto of the Seventh, which are the most disposed of all towards repetitive yet accumulative rhythmic stasis. ere are individual curiosities, as you would expect. I treasure the under-rated Leonard Hokanson's 1972 account of the Eighth Symphony (via Liszt), not least for the other side of the LP – Hermann Prey at his most melli uously magical, singing words from various poets including Schiller, Uhland and Kerner, set by one Friedrich Silcher to melodies drawn from Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies. Without the glorious Prey one might drift from ‘transcription’ to ‘travesty’, but it o ers a delightful velvety glimpse into the 19th-century parlour. Or, in a characteristically intelligent coupling, the late Paul Badura-Skoda paired Liszt’s transcription of the Fifth Symphony with Schubert’s Sonata in C minor D958, one of those mature sonatas in which Schubert clearly has the magnitude of Beethoven in mind. Admirers of BaduraSkoda’s clipped intonation will be very happy here.
e Ninth Symphony, in which the pianist or pianists have to make do with no singers, is an interesting case. How does it work? Even Liszt hesitated. Perhaps
the audience ‘hears’ Vickers or Hotter or Ludwig or Schwarzkopf, abstracted via memory? Or perhaps they do without? (At least they are immune from dim-witted nonsenses such as replacing ‘joy’ with ‘freedom’.) I strongly suspect that we do ‘hear’ Schiller, which in itself raises fascinating questions about the role of memory and accumulated experience in music appreciation. e same could be said of the plaintive straggle from the oboe at bar 300 in the rst movement of the Seventh Symphony: when played on the piano, do we still ‘hear’ an oboe? Answers will di er; the process is rich.
Another oddity, recorded by Richard and John Contiguglia in 1973, is a transcription for piano duet by Liszt of his own Festival Cantata, originally scored for soloists, chorus and orchestra and premiered at the 1845 Beethoven memorial in Bonn. e piece – a good half hour long – climaxes with a re-working of the slow movement of the Archduke Trio. A booklet note by the brothers says that while the transcription ‘deprives us of the orchestral e ects praised by Berlioz, it mercifully spares us from the banality of O L B Wol ’s text.’ Interestingly, their recording came nearly 30 years before a recording of the full score.
Ihave been looking at transcriptions that are reductions, not at aberrations such as Weingartner’s upward transcription of the Hammerklavier Sonata for orchestra. One rationale for piano transcriptions might be to suggest that Beethoven, having been a great virtuoso, was always
‘really’ writing for the piano. After all, he himself wrote a version for piano duet of the terrifyingly contrapuntal Grosse Fuge Op 133, originally for string quartet. On the other hand, Weingartner’s rationale was to call into question the adequacy of our beloved box of strings and hammers to do justice to the colossal music of Op 106. e value of his experiment, I contend, is in its failure, and moreover in the interesting counter-experiment we can conduct by listening in our imagination to an orchestra playing a symphony as if it is playing a transcription of a piano sonata. Bernstein’s revival of the Toscanini/Mitropoulos tradition of giving orchestral strings the parts of a late Beethoven quartet, while related to the Weingartner thesis of inadequate forces, also suggests that classical music has two audiences that don’t always overlap – the symphonic and the chamber. ese conductors add to the didactic dimension.
Pianists tend to play transcriptions of the symphonies rather than of the quartets. I can see why – apart from the issue of showmanship, the clarity the piano might lend is already manifest in a quartet – yet I would relish hearing the late quartets the way Wagner did, from inside. is cuts both ways: I wish too there were a transcription of the Hammerklavier for string quartet, or Op 110, since, to push the slightly daft thought-experiment, you might say Beethoven seems more likely to be rightly accused of ‘really’ writing for the quartet than for anything else. Parlour game nonsense, no doubt. But transcriptions are at home in the parlour, which is what makes them invariably fun and entertaining. IP
www.international-piano.com Gould insists upon a mesmeric regularity of rhythm in his 1968 recording of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony
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Experimental thinker
Ronald Brautigam is a rare breed of pianist, as accomplished on the fortepiano as on the modern grand. Simon Mundy caught up with the Dutch virtuoso about his new disc of Beethoven piano concertos recorded on historic instruments
It was the day after his 65th birthday when I met Ronald Brautigam in the café of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw to talk about Beethoven and early pianos. He is wearing well, though like his contemporary Simon Rattle, the mop of unruly hair is now white. Brautigam is an undogmatic player, who sees virtue in performing music in all sorts of conditions and on all sorts of instruments, nding excitement in experiment rather than theory. He is one of the very few pianists to be equally at home on all stages of the fortepiano and the modern grand, but he says that ‘more and more people are interested in playing both. It’s no longer a choice you have to make. It’s just a possibility.’ He admits, ‘you have to work so hard – much harder – on fortepiano. On the other hand, you get rid of a lot of sounds you don’t need.’ ere are limits, however. ‘In reality, and especially in today’s halls, the fortepiano is much more suited to solo and chamber performances. Already in Beethoven’s time Czerny was refusing to play with full orchestra because the balance was wrong.’ For his new set of Beethoven piano concertos, with the Cologne Academy and Michael Alexander Willens on the BIS label, Brautigam swaps instruments after the ird. Moving from a reconstruction of an 1805 Anton Walther to one of an 1819 Conrad Graf, the development in the sound is immediately clear. e ird Concerto is evidently on the cusp of needing a more substantial response. ‘If Beethoven had owned a modern Steinway he would probably have been even wilder, even more revolutionary.’ e Walther instrument has ‘pedals’ nestling just beneath the keyboard to be engaged with the knees, which illustrates the hard work necessary. Proper pedals must have been a welcome innovation.
e Walther and Graf are Brautigam’s two favoured instruments on many of his Beethoven recordings, including the discs of the complete variations, bagatelles and piano pieces made between 2011 and 2016 (BIS-2403 SACD). He has also played on reconstructions of a 1792 Walter and a 1788 Johann Stein for Haydn and Mozart. ey were all made by the American craftsman, Paul McNulty, at his workshop in the Bohemian countryside
Ronald Brautigam: ‘I like to play the music through in my mind. That’s how I can explore what I want to say’
MARCO BORGGREVE
south of Prague, and McNulty was on hand during the recording process to make sure the old-fashioned mechanisms behaved themselves. He also made the copy of the 1830 Pleyel for Brautigam’s intriguing complete cycle of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words (also on BIS). As for upcoming projects, Brautigam is ‘dipping into Schubert and Weber’ and looking to continue his association with the Cologne Academy by recording the ve piano concertos of Johann Wilms, the Amsterdam composer ve years younger than Beethoven who gave the Dutch premiere of some of Beethoven’s concertos. Wilms was also involved in the early history of Felix Meritis, the magni cent building on Keizersgracht which contained (and still contains) the city’s rst purpose-built concert hall. Its oval shape is similar to Edinburgh’s St Cecilia’s Hall and the model, a century later, for the recital room in the Concertgebouw.
Despite having recorded vast swathes of late Classical and early Romantic music on fortepiano, Brautigam often performs on Steinways with modern instrument orchestras. Stylistically, he says he has always thought of Artur Schnabel as a hero, and the in uence of his teacher is still strong. ‘I always feel that Rudolf Serkin is standing behind me, looking over my shoulder.’ With Riccardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra he made albums for Decca of concertos by Frank Martin, Hindemith and Shostakovich. He also occasionally strays into contemporary music and found ‘Sally Beamish so good to work with’ on her concerto. If he has one work left as an ambition: ‘I would love to play the Busoni concerto, but,’ he grimaces, ‘that would cost me so much e ort and time.’ He is not these days the most assiduous of practice fanatics. He sees little point or reward in playing six or eight hours per day, even when learning repertoire. ‘I do enough to keep my ngers t but mostly I like to play the music through in my mind – just sit still and perform it in my head. at is how I can explore what I want to say.’ He has two pianos at home in Amsterdam, one ancient, one modern. ‘I used to have two fortepianos but I found I just wasn’t playing one of them, so I let it go. I have one big Steinway and the fortepiano has ve and a half octaves which is enough for everything up until the Appassionata. I’m not one of those who needs a whole collection.’ If his practising regime is as mental as it is physical, his recording methods are deliberately tough. ‘ ere should always be a feeling of spontaneity. e music has to have life, so I only stop if it feels wrong. For example, I recorded the Diabelli Variations in three whole takes – that’s long.’ Brautigam is relaxed about how he approaches performances. ‘Music should be kept very simple – beginning, middle, end – and I’m not sure I have an interpretation, nor do I believe that what is written on the page is necessarily what has to be followed exactly. For example, in the Hammerklavier there are some ridiculously fast metronome markings in the rst movement but it is only marked Allegro – who knows what Beethoven’s metronome was doing at the time. I rather agree with Anner Bylsma [the Dutch cellist who died in July 2019], who said that Bach wrote down what the audience should hear, not always what we should play.’ For much the same reasons, he never listens to his own recordings once the rst editing sessions are out of the way. ‘ at was then. It is behind me. Between the time when it is recorded and released, I’ve changed and think di erently. ere are so many factors that will keep changing. Most of all I nd I want to keep seeing if it is possible to make more space within the music without making it longer. In a way it’s the only sort of improvisation left.’ IP
Beethoven – e Piano Concertos by Ronald Brautigam and the Cologne Academy is now available from BIS Records (BIS-2274 SACD) ronaldbrautigam.com
BURKARD SCHLIESSMANN Recipient of Goethe-Prize 2019 of Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Global Music Awards 2018: 2 Gold Medals “Awards of Excellence” (Schumann) Global Music Awards 2018: 3 Silver Medals “Outstanding Achievement” (Bach) Global Music Awards 2017: 3 Silver Medals “Outstanding Achievement” (Chopin)
“I rank this Chopin among the best available. With both the technique and intellect to do just about anything he wants, Schliessmannʼs strength is in the lyrical, legato melodies that make Chopinʼs music such a cornerstone of the piano repertoire ...” James Harrington, American Record Guide “A fantastic Bach recital all around, and in an SACD recording that projects the piano right into your listening space with a three-dimensional effect that spreads the keyboard in front of you from left to right and the full length of Schliessmanʼs Steinway concert grand from front to back. This earns the strongest of recommendations.” Jerry Dubins, Fanfare
“Schliessmannʼs playing is representative of the best of the modern school ...” Harold C. Schonberg, The New York Times
