First Beethoven

Every classical music blogger ought to write at least one Beethoven post a year. This is mine.

For fun, I did a search of my blog and discovered that I've managed to write several most years since 2008. The only exception was 2010 when I appear not to have mentioned Beethoven at all although I did lots of blogging.

Here's the series of those Beethoven posts, just in case someone (other than me) wants to peruse them.

Last week, I had the great privilege of introducing a piano student to the world of playing Beethoven. This excellent student had not yet played any Beethoven and wanted to. Opus 109 had appealed to her but we agreed it probably wasn't the best first Beethoven work to try to play.

Our discussion of Beethoven turned to the attitude with which it should be performed. In general, the pianist needs to realize that this music comes from an overall  environment of struggle and effort that gives it its strength. In addition, it should engender a mood of profound reflection, deep understanding, and sympathy typical of German Romanticism.

Its greatness is not primarily in the beauty of its melodies, the novelty of its harmonies, or the compelling quality of its rhythms. No, as Bernstein put it, its greatness springs from its sense of inevitability.

This is not to say that Beethoven was not a fine melodist, a harmonic genius, or a composer of highly propulsive gestures. All those things are true, but they are so well-integrated into the intention of the music that they rarely draw attention to themselves.

Indeed, Beethoven's music strikes us as having only one way of existing and that is as he composed it. The lines are so incisive and the textures so clear that there's never a moment when the listener can really imagine an equally likely alternative path for the music to follow. (A particularly muddily textured passage by Arthur Farwell was also on the music rack as we discussed the first two pages of Beethoven's "Pastorale" Sonata. We could both imagine several other options for Farwell's measures - measures that Beethoven would never had written.)

As Dr. Falby taught back at Peabody, Beethoven's music is incredibly end-oriented. From its first note, it lets us know it's on its way to its ending. At any moment in the music, you can, without question, tell which way it's going and how far it is to home. This focus, which is so very western, makes the music singularly arresting and affecting, and it powered Beethoven's works to the very highest ranks of the canon.