Beethoven's Choral Fantasy

I have recently joined an exclusive club. In fact, I'm not sure I know any other members. I am pianist who has played the Choral Fantasy as a pianist and as a violist. I know Beethoven also played viola, but I doubt he ever played it in a performance of the Choral Fanatasy.

On Monday night, our Chowan performance season had its great conclusion with the majority of our music students and faculty, as well as a number of members of the Virginia Symphony, performing Schubert's Mass in G Major and Beethoven's Choral Fantasy. These "Masterworks Concerts" are terrific projects that bring the year to a rousing close and expose students and community to grand musical experiences that they can't find anywhere else in our region.

My friend, Jeff Prillaman, sang in the performance and suggested that I write a paper on playing the Fantasy as a pianist on the viola. I might make a more formal presentation of this at some point, but for now, I want to share my experiences here.

I was seated directly behind the piano (on the bass side) and the lid of the piano was off. This was a more more powerful and compelling sonic experiecne than sitting at the keyboard with a board (the music rack) between me and the strings.

Adding to the effect of power was the fact that I was surrounded by sound and the viola vibrated sympathetically in my hands.

From my violistic vantage point, the structure of the opening of the piece became much clearer to me. The opening measure, which I understand as a Beethoven in his monumental defiant mood (but am usually tempted to dismiss as simply a tonic chord) really came to life as Beethoven setting into motion three registers of the piano. The low, middle, and high sounds are clearly experienced as different locations, different choirs, from behind the piano with the lid off.

My use of the term "choirs" just now makes me start to wonder if that is the real meaning of this being a "choral fantasy," not just the fact that it has an actual vocal choir at the end. After all, once Beethoven starts repeating his "Ode to Joy" tune, he organizes the orchestra into choirs of double winds, clarinets, horns, etc. all accompanied by piano, and then there is a choir of vocal solosists, then the full choir.

A couple of details related to the viola part were important to my experience. At one point, Beethoven gives the violists a single note on beat four of a measure that feels early and funny. We violists laughed at the way it felt every time we played it. I doubt that one note is even heard in the context of the whole orchestra, but it's something cute and special Betehoven put there just for the violists.

At another point, there is a very rapid transition from pizzicato to arco. If we are to take this literally as a change that all the violists should make at the same time while playing both the last plucked note and the first bowed note, it has implications for tempo. And it happens at a point at which the piece might really take off. I wonder if this is a spot at which one should take a cue for the tempo from a seemingly obscure detail in the viola part.

There are several tricky transitions I referenced in my last post. In performance, there is a sense of synergy that pulls the group through those transitions even if some of the players are uncertain. Perhaps the piece is enough in our collective consciousness so that as a group we know how it goes, or maybe Beethoven has written in such a way that the tenuousness of some lines dovetails with more certain material in other instruments (but I don't think that's what happens.)

There are many passages that feel and sound very different, and the particular differences leave me thinking that this piece is more for the listeners than for the performers. Some portions feel jumpy and uncertain but sound sublime and like paradise. But a lot of the performers do get to sit around and listen during the piece, so Beethoven includes us as listeners as much as he can.

Finally, the great triplet ascending octave-ish passages in the piano in the presto finale sound very brilliant as if a rocket has been fired up out of the orchestra, but they do not feel brilliant as you play them.

That Tricky Beethoven

Tomorrow night we are performing Schubert G Major Mass and Beethoven Choral Fantasy - two beloved works - on the season-closing Masterworks Concert at Chowan.

The Fantasy has a couple of transitions at which the tempo, and sometimes meter, change very abruptly. One of the transitions is designed to confuse the ear of the listener - which means it can confuse the people playing it as well!

The following quotation from Ignaz von Seyfried, a friend of Beethoven, applies.

But when, especially in the Scherzos of his symphonies, sudden, unexpected changes of tempo threw all into confusion, he would laugh tremendously, assure the men he had looked for nothing else, that he had been waiting for it to happen, and would take almost childish pleasure in the thought that he had been successful in unhorsing such routined orchestral knights.

Research Reflection

It seems to me that a lot of good music research needs to be interdisciplinary. After all, music connects with a wide range of disciplines in a variety of ways. In fact, although we often picture research as being the work of specialists, trying to get a fuller picture of whatever one is researching frequently leads the researcher to acquiring knowledge beyond his or her own field.

Here are the two recent examples that got me thinking about this:

A student is working on a term paper about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The text in the symphony is by Schiller. For this student to do a good job with his research, he needs to go beyond what the books about Beethoven 9 say about Schiller to get an idea of the place of this text in his overall output, etc.

I am researching Erik Satie's Sports et Divertissements. I need to give a short presentation for Chowan's Symposium on Monday. My plan was to give a little general background and play a few of the pieces while pointing out what I have noticed about them, mostly from a theory and performance angle. Most of the reading I did was supporting that approach until I discovered an excellent book by Mary E. Brown that points out the fact that the person most responsible for the publication of the piano pieces and the drawings that went along with them had a background in women's fashion magazines, and the whole layout of Sports et Divertissements comes from that realm.