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Tag: Beethoven

2010

Thursday, 5/6/10

I was about 16 when I had an experience that I recollect in nearly Proustian detail, listening for the first time to the String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131. I was sitting in a friend’s living room when her father put a recording of it on the hi-fi. I remember everything about those three-quarters of an hour back in 1961 or ’62: the room in which I was sitting and the direction in which I was facing; the single, exposed Bozak speaker vibrating like an exotic organism in the unfinished wooden box that Mr. L. had built to contain it; the quickly dawning realization that the first movement was the most overwhelming piece of music I had ever heard—a feeling that comes back to me whenever I listen to it, in real sound or mentally, as at this moment; and I remember (but this memory comes also from countless later listenings) the mysterious, throbbing sound of the first violin’s statement of the opening subject in that recording, made by the Budapest Quartet in the early 1950s.

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I am now several years older than Beethoven lived to be. I still think of him as my alpha and omega, but in a different sense: as the author of music that transformed my existence at the onset of adulthood and that continues to enrich it more than any other music as I approach what are often referred to as life’s declining years. His music still gives me as much sensual and emotional pleasure as it gave me 50 years ago, and far more intellectual stimulation than it did then. It adds to the fullness when life feels good, and it lengthens and deepens the perspective when life seems barely tolerable. It is with me and in me. A thousand or 5,000 or 10,000 years from now, Beethoven and our civilization’s other outstanding mouthpieces may still have much to communicate to human beings—if any of our descendants are still around—or they may seem remote, cold, obscure. But what matters most in Beethoven’s case is his belief that we are all part of an endless continuum, whatever our individual level of awareness may be. In the Ninth Symphony, he used Schiller’s words to tell us explicitly what many of his other works, especially his late works, tell us implicitly: that the “divine spark” of joy and the “kiss for the whole world,” which originate “above the canopy of stars,” must touch and unite us all. The spark is there, he said, and so is the kiss; we need only feel and accept their presence.—Harvey Sachs

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Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, op. 131/1st Movement

Budapest Quartet, 1943

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Busch Quartet, 1936

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2010

Thursday, 2/11/10

intimate, adj. 1. Relating to or indicative of one’s deepest nature. 2. Essential; innermost. E.g., Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, op. 132.

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Beethoven composed his string quartet, Opus 132 in A minor, in the winter of 1824-5. He was 54 and recovering from a serious bowel condition from which he had nearly died. As a result, he entitled the central movement “a song of thanksgiving … offered to the divinity by a convalescent”, and the second section of this movement bears the inscription: “Feeling new strength.”

Over 100 years later, in March 1931, TS Eliot, aged 47, wrote to Stephen Spender: “I have the A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”

Eliot began the Four Quartets in 1935 and worked on it for years, finishing it in 1941. Whereas the composer wrote one quartet, with five movements, the poet wrote four pieces, each divided into five sections. Like Beethoven’s work, Eliot’s poem was triggered by personal suffering, although not of a physical nature. It was probably connected to his separation from his wife, Vivienne, in 1932; her mental illness; and the rekindling of a platonic relationship with his first love, the American university teacher Emily Hale.

The first poem in the series, Burnt Norton, opens with an image of a couple walking in a rose garden and is full of regret for what might have been. At this point, Eliot’s concerns appear personal. However, in 1939, when he was working on the second poem, East Coker, war had broken out and by 1940 Eliot was working in London as an air-raid warden during the Blitz. The climactic verse of the final poem, Little Gidding, is set at night in a London street just after a raid. By the end of the four poems, Eliot had moved from the personal to addressing what he described in the poem as the “distress of nations”.

If suffering is the trigger for both pieces, then faith offers the shared antidote of “reconciliation and relief” that Eliot wrote to Spender about. Both men were practising Christians, and their belief underpinned much of their later work. Beethoven was a Catholic, and Eliot famously converted to Anglicanism aged 38, nine years before writing Four Quartets.

In 1933 Eliot said he wanted to get “beyond poetry, as Beethoven in his later works, strove to get beyond music”. I am sure that it was Beethoven’s religious aims in the long and intense central movement of the quartet that Eliot had in mind when he wrote these words. Beethoven had been studying liturgical music – Palestrina in particular – while he was working on his Missa Solemnis, which he completed two years before starting work on the quartet. This study influenced the central movement of the quartet, which is based, unusually, on an ancient chorale melody and mode. Similarly, Eliot’s poem had a strong religious purpose and referenced Christianity in many forms – from direct quotations of the medieval mystic Juliana of Norwich, to the setting of the final poem in the village of Little Gidding, which was the site in the 17th century for a persecuted religious community.

Interestingly, however, both men were also drawn to the philosophy of eastern religions, with which they supplemented their own Christianity. Eliot quotes from the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita, in Four Quartets. Beethoven was influenced by the older Hindu scripture, the Rig-Veda. In his diary the composer jotted down a line from the Rig-Veda commentary about the idea of God being “free from all passion and desire”. Eliot expresses similar sentiments in his poem when he writes about:

The inner freedom from the practical desire
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving.

—Katie Mitchell, “A Meeting of Minds,” Guardian

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Beethoven, String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, op. 132/Takacs Quartet

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

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2010

Tuesday, 1/12/10

I began listening to this piano sonata many years ago, after discovering, at our local library, a recording of it by Claudio Arrau, which I proceeded to check out over and over again (until I finally bought it). Since then I’ve also heard recordings by Artur Schnabel and Wilhelm Kempff and Solomon and Andras Schiff, as well as this one (thanks to my brother-in-law John, who gave it to me as a present years ago). As with any masterpiece, there’s no such thing as a “definitive” performance; it’s inexhaustible. Different performances reveal different dimensions. Listen to the way the dark, subdued second movement opens up to the joyous third movement: it’s one of the most hopeful passages of music I know—one I never tire of hearing.

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53 (“Waldstein”)/Emil Gilels, piano (1972)

Part 1 (beginning of 1st Movement)

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Part 2 (end of 1st Movement and 2nd Movement [begins at 2:41])

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Part 3 (3rd Movement)

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2009

Tuesday, 11/3/09

If you were a musician, could anything be worse than to find, one day, that unlike the day before, and the day before that, and all the other days you could remember, you were no longer able to play your instrument? That’s what happened, in 1958, to this man, the great British classical pianist Solomon Cutner (known professionally simply as Solomon). Then 56 years old and at the height of his career, he suffered a stroke. It left his right arm paralyzed, silencing him for the rest of his life, which lasted another 32 years.

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor (“Appassionata” [1804])/Solomon, piano

1st Movement

2nd Movement

3rd Movement

lagniappe

Andras Schiff on Beethoven’s piano sonatas

In London a couple years ago, pianist Andras Schiff explored Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in a series of much-acclaimed lecture-recitals, which can be heard here.

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Thelonious Monk and Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, et al.

Thelonious Monk possessed an impressive knowledge of, and appreciation for, Western classical music, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of hymns and gospel music, American popular songs, and a variety of obscure art songs that defy easy categorization. For him, it was all music. Once in 1966, a phalanx of reporters in Helsinki pressed Monk about his thoughts on classical music and whether or not jazz and classical can come together. His drummer, Ben Riley, watched the conversation unfold: ‘Everyone wanted him to answer, give some type of definition between classical music and jazz . . . So he says, ‘Two is one,’ and that stopped the whole room. No one else said anything else.’ Two is one, indeed. Monk loved Frédéric Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and Bach, and like many of his peers of the bebop generation, he took an interest in Igor Stravinsky.—Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)

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