Deafness, Personal Problems, and Searching for a New Way

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From the course by Curtis Institute of Music

Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

478 оценки

Curtis Institute of Music

Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

478 оценки

Our relationship to Beethoven is a deep and paradoxical one. For many musicians, he represents a kind of holy grail: His music has an intensity, rigor, and profundity which keep us in its thrall, and it is perhaps unequalled in the interpretive, technical, and even spiritual challenges it poses to performers. At the same time, Beethoven’s music is casually familiar to millions of people who do not attend concerts or consider themselves musically inclined. Two hundred years after his death, he is everywhere in the culture, yet still represents its summit. This course takes an inside-out look at the 32 piano sonatas from the point of view of a performer. Each lecture will focus on one sonata and an aspect of Beethoven’s music exemplified by it. (These might include: the relationship between Beethoven the pianist and Beethoven the composer; the critical role improvisation plays in his highly structured music; his mixing of extremely refined music with rougher elements; and the often surprising ways in which the events of his life influenced his compositional process and the character of the music he was writing.) The course will feature some analysis and historical background, but its perspective is that of a player, not a musicologist. Its main aim is to explore and demystify the work of the performer, even while embracing the eternal mystery of Beethoven’s music itself. This season's Curtis courses are sponsored by Linda Richardson in loving memory of her husband, Dr. Paul Richardson. The Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation supports Curtis's lifelong learning initiatives.

From the lesson

Crisis

From 1793 until 1809, Beethoven composed at a steady pace. But for the next several years, he stalled dramatically, as he dealt with the onset of his deafness, severely trying personal circumstances, and the struggle to find what would become his late style, which to a remarkable degree involved the total reinvention of his musical language. This lecture examines the intersection of these three issues, and of his life and music more generally. Works discussed come from this comparatively fallow period and will include the Fantasy, Op. 77, which exemplifies the vital role improvisation played in all of Beethoven’s music, and the Sonatas Op. 78, and 81a, the “Lebewohl.” The last of these is one of Beethoven’s only serious experiments with program music, which made it an important reference point for many 19th-century composers. Another topic will be the ways in which the works of this period seem to manipulate time, which was always one of Beethoven’s key fascinations, and becomes ever more critical moving into the late period.

Beethoven’s Mediant Fixation Begins: Op. 31, No. 111:14

Deafness, Personal Problems, and Searching for a New Way9:53

Beethoven as Improviser: Fantasy, Op. 779:01

Serenity and Slapstick: Op. 7813:27

Formal Experimentation and Musical Storytelling: Op. 81a12:11

Meet the Instructors

Jonathan Biss
Neubauer Family Chair in Piano Studies
Performance Faculty

[MUSIC]

Now having gone on this lengthy tangent about what we're not going to talk about,

I would like to slowly make my way to what we are going to talk about--

which is, in large part, the Sonatas Opus 78 and 81a, as well as the Fantasy Opus 77.

So, the first thing to know about these pieces is that they were written

just as Beethoven was beginning to enter

what was, by his standards, a fallow period.

Beethoven was never as insanely prolific as Bach, who wrote over 1,000 works

in his 65 years, or Mozart, who wrote 625 pieces in 36 years.

Or Schubert, the most unfathomable of them all,

with nearly 1,000 works in his 31 years.

But, from the time Beethoven began publishing in the

mid-1790s, he did write at a pretty impressive pace.

Particularly given how much revising he did and how unwilling

he was to follow any established rubric in his compositions.

But around 1809 the pace begins to slow, first slightly, then dramatically.

There are a number of reasons for this, and I'd like to go into them a bit here

because they tell a story which is deeply bound

up with the story of the development of Beethoven's music.

Take the year 1806, for example. He completed the Appasionata sonata.

He wrote the three massive groundbreaking Razumovsky quartets,

the violin concerto, the G-major piano concerto, and the fourth symphony.

Now that's seven behemoth works, most of them 35 minutes

or longer, all of which have firmly entered the canon.

In 1809, he wrote, in addition to the piano sonatas we'll discuss shortly,

the Emperor Concerto and the Harp String Quartet.

Not a bad year, by any means. But less than half of the

quantity of great music that 1806 produced.

In 1813, the only work he wrote is Wellington's Victory,

an occasional piece which is unique among Beethoven's output in

that I'm not ashamed to say that it is actually bad.

Health was one factor in this, but there are three other issues

which played a role in this

temporary block to Beethoven's normally unstoppable imagination.

The first issue is Beethoven's family life.

As I mentioned in the first lecture, in addition

to it being the expedient move for his musical career,

one of the likely reasons Beethoven left Bonn for

Vienna in his early 20s was to escape his family.

Now, different historians tell different stories about

the relationship with his father, with some

painting the picture of an abusive parent and others dismissing this as a kind of

facile legend, but some things are certain:

that Beethoven's mother died when he was a teenager,

that his father was an alcoholic, and that he himself

was the primary carer for his younger brothers, Carl and Johann.

I said in the first lecture that Beethoven tried

to escape this, but the fact is, he was too

controlling a person--or to put a more positive spin on it,

a person with too strong a moral center--to simply disown the problem.

This is no small matter.

Look at the whole rigamarole of the Eroica Symphony,

with Beethoven first naming it for Napoleon

and then rescinding the dedication when Napoleon acted in a way he disapproved of.

Clearly, Beethoven did not buy into the

notion, popular later, that art isn't political.

He was what he wrote, and he wrote how he was.

At any rate, when Carl became ill in 1813 or so, Beethoven took

charge, both financially and, in his own mind, as surrogate head of the household.

And when Carl finally died, Beethoven decided that he should have

custody of his son even though the mother was alive and well.

Again, different historians can come to different conclusions about who

was in the right and who was in the wrong here.

Beethoven's sister-in-law was certainly no angel.

But the fact is, Beethoven took her to court for,

and ultimately won custody of, his nephew, also named Carl.

And unsurprisingly he proved

to be as controlling a guardian as he was a brother-in-law and everything else.

I won't go into the sad details of their relationship, but suffice to say

that Carl tried very hard to escape his

uncle's clutches, even attempting suicide at one point.

He failed, thank God, but the story, beginning to end, took a

huge toll on Beethoven, who, one can only assume, meant well.

The years of his brother's illness and the subsequent

custody battle are precisely the years when he composed the least.

The second issue, which may have played a role in

his slight output at this time, is his personal life.

Beethoven's romantic life altogether is a story of frustrations.

He had a tendency to fall in love with aristocratic women who,

much as they may have cared for him, would never have married him.

There was a series of at least four of these, beginning with

Julie Guicciardi, in 1802, and it was in 1812 that he wrote

the famous letter to the so-called Immortal Beloved, which

was, in fact, only one in a long series

of mostly desperately unhappy love letters that Beethoven wrote.

There is no particularly compelling evidence

that Beethoven ever had a physical relationship with a woman,

and he was certainly never anywhere close to marriage.

I feel reluctant to assume too much about what sort of

effect this may have had on his music.

But it is worth noting that Beethoven is not

only the first great composer not to have permanent employment.

He is also the first one without any proper family.

Mozart had six children, though only two of them lived to adulthood.

Bach had about 600 of them, and while Haydn was childless, he was married.

When you put these two factors together, it's easy to imagine that by 1810

when he was nearing 40, his sense of being shut in was becoming overwhelming.

This leads us to the third, and, by a large margin, the most crucial issue.

Beethoven was going deaf.

This is already, alongside the first four notes of

the fifth symphony, the most well-known thing about Beethoven.

So I don't want to dwell on it, but, at the same

time, it would be foolish to pretend that it is, somehow, insignificant.

Our imagination of the tragic, deaf Beethoven is a late-in-life one,

but in fact, he had experienced bouts of tinnitus as early as the 1790s.

And in 1802, the same year he wrote the "new paths" letter we

discussed last time, he wrote another momentous letter, this one to his brothers.

It's been known as the "Heiligenstadt Testament,"

because that is the name of the town from which it was written.

Read it, if you can bear it.

It is in really any collection of Beethoven's letters,

and I imagine it's probably easy to find online.

It's a wrenching document, telling of his increasing sense of isolation, misery,

and, worst of all, shame at being deficient in an area where he felt he ought to excel.

He discloses that he already attempted to end his life,

and the ultimate thrust of the letter is that the only thing keeping him alive

was his need to create, to say what he needed say artistically.

The tragedy of this hardly needs to be stated, much less explained.

It's also a reminder that by this point, in sharp contrast to his predecessors,

self-expression had become not only a, but the principal reason he wrote.

a, but the principal reason he wrote.

I say the following with considerable reluctance, because its feels

so heartless to see an upside to a person's misery.

But I have always wondered if, on a purely artistic level,

Beethoven's loss of his hearing might not have had a silver lining.

Beethoven's late works, to an absolutely unprecedented extent, forced

him to rebuild his musical language from the ground up.

The only possible parallels I can think of are

Schoenberg and Stravinsky. But, forgive me,

while both were geniuses, the twelve-tone works of Schoenberg and the

later works of Stravinsky simply cannot hold a candle to late Beethoven.

The Heiligenstadt Testament is virtually contemporaneous with that "new paths" letter,

so, could he have produced the music that followed it,

if he had easy access to the world of sound?

Just as many people who lose one sense have the others heightened,

is it possible that Beethoven's deafness

heightened his general atunement, his general awareness,

that the less he heard, the more he heard?

It's a question I often ask myself while playing the late

sonatas, which more than any other music I know seem to abandon

convention, rhetoric, and, often, reality. They are products of an imagined world.

Unsurprisingly, this imagined world was not easy to create.

By 1810, Beethoven has largely renounced the heroism which

is prevalent in so many of the most famous middle-period works,

and is clearly once again looking for a new path, as he had eight years earlier.

But whereas Beethoven powered through that earlier period

of doubt, this time he hits the pause button.

Clearly those practical issues were a factor as well, and it's

difficult to know what's the chicken and what's the egg here.

Was he composing less because he was struggling to find his way towards

a new style, or was it an enforced break that gave him the time

and space he needed to create the style? Who knows.

The pieces Beethoven did write between 1810 and 1815 are often masterpieces.

But many of them have a quality about them which, to

me anyway, suggests a kind of insecurity about his way forward.

The steps, anyway, are halting ones.

And as those years proceed, the pace of composition gets slower and slower.

When he wrote the wonderful Sonata Opus 90 in 1814,

it was the first piano sonata he had composed in five years.

Lord knows how he found his way out and in the process reinvented,

well, everything.

Let's take a short break for a review question.

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