To play all 32 Beethoven sonatas in public over two years, or 20, is one of the greatest challenges facing the pianist. The technical difficulties they present pale before the range of experience they embody and demand for their full realization. Claudio Arrau, one of the first to present the complete cycle, emphasized their relevance for modern listeners, saying, "Beethoven shows himself to be our contemporary in his existential struggle for survival." Any performance of a body of works so vast stands or falls on whether they are viewed as a retrospective or given new relevance by being reinterpreted by each new generation.
András Schiff has reached the midpoint in his traversal of the 32 Beethoven sonatas. The two recitals I heard at Davies Symphony Hall this month, under the auspices of the San Francisco Performances, have taken us to the year 1801.
At the conclusion of each recital, he quietly announced the name Johann Sebastian Bach and then played entire works: the Partita in B-flat in one, the G-Major French Suite in the other. In both cases Schiff seemed sublimely at ease. The works have a kind of flow and improvised feel, as well as the odd ornament effortlessly included here and there, which makes them sound fresh and as though they were being composed on the spot. My neighbor, a pianist, turned to me and said, "He's not a pianist; he's a harpsichordist."
Study in Contrasts
András Schiff, of course, is a pianist who, like Glenn Gould, has been successful at performing Bach on the modern piano. In concluding his recitals with Baroque works, which might seem out of place in a modern concert hall, he points out the contrast between "early music" and Beethoven, whom we can never include in that category.
In Beethoven we are dealing with music that was conceived for the piano, both present and future. It contains greater contrasts in tempo, tonality, dynamics, and, above all, emotion than any keyboard music before and (some say) since. When Bach passes from the Allemande to the Courante, to a Gigue in one of his harpsichord suites, the contrasts are really only of tempo, and shades of mood. Key contrasts rarely occur within a work.
There are always key contrasts between movements of a Beethoven sonata. And with these changes you can count on contrasts of mood. A prime example of this is the inclusion of depressive and even tragic emotion within an otherwise genial work such as the Op. 26 "Funeral March" Sonata.
In his lecture on the latter work, Schiff points out that the A-flat minor key is introduced in the first theme and variation movement. When the third movement arrives, Schiff allows no breathing space, making explicit the dramatic meaning that the composer had so carefully prepared. Indeed, Schiff hardly paused between any of the movements of the sonatas (a holdover from Baroque performance practice, perhaps?). Surely a funeral march, especially one bracketed by boisterous music, would gain impact by being enclosed in silence.
Beethoven knew the value of silence, often composing dramatic pauses within the movement. They give both the audience and the performer a chance to digest the preceding music and brace for what is to come. The reason that the next group of sonatas Beethoven composed after the "Funeral March" Op. 27 sound so strange and new is that they contain no breaks between the movements. Calling them
Sonata quasi una fantasia, Beethoven is at his most experimental and challenging.
In the "Moonlight" Sonata, he demands that the dark and mysterious first movement be immediately followed by an almost comical dance, without pause. This is meant to be a shock. To pause before the Allegretto does not make it less beautiful, though it is a violation of the formal plan of the sonata.
Expounding on Compositional Development
In spreading his cycle over two years, Schiff is making considerable demands, not only on his memory, but also on his listeners. Each recital begins with an implicit announcement, such as "When we last left off, Beethoven had just written the last sonata he would compose in four movements" and was about to embark on three sonatas that would serve as a transition to the first bona fide masterpiece, the "Pathetique." And while Schiff's expository approach has the benefit of showing us Beethoven's development in a measured and gradual way, closer to the way the composer himself must have experienced it, it can seem academic and labored.
Since Schiff chose to play the sonatas in the order in which they were written, we do not expect the dramatic contrasts that are unavoidable when the early 18th-century sonatas are juxtaposed with towering achievements such as the "Appassionata" or hammerklavier sonatas, which we will hear next season in his concluding four recitals. In choosing to show how Beethoven's style evolved gradually, Schiff suggests that neither the sonata form nor music itself was being drastically changed.
Beginning with his third recital, the two "easy" sonatas Op. 49 were chronologically correct, but dramatically, they were hardly the way to begin an all-Beethoven recital. Lovely as they are, Beethoven never intended to publish them. The trouble was, this "classical" approach continued through the rest of the works that followed, yielding a sameness to the "content" of the music that Beethoven surely did not intend.
Despite Schiff's technical polish and clarity that were evident in the two sonatas of Op. 14 that followed, there was something a little stuffy about them. I wanted the crucial feeling of audacity and wit in the way that Beethoven misplaces the downbeat in the finale of the G-Major Sonata, inviting all sorts of comic misadventures and setting traps for the unsuspecting performer and listener. It would have been more fun if, just once, Schiff had actually slipped on those hilarious banana-peel triplet runs and then landed on his … feet?
I am usually inclined toward an adherence to, or at least a serious consideration of, all the composer's markings in the score. I would have minded less Schiff's taking a full intermission between the movements of the "Moonlight" Sonata, had he not literally followed Beethoven's pedal indication in the first movement. Playing the entire movement without lowering the dampers may have been practical on older instruments, but the blur that I heard convinced me that it cannot be done this way on the modern piano. The modulations were impossible to follow, and I looked on with horror while Schiff's right foot remained glued to the floor.
Music requires a balance between the literal and the imaginative. I hope that in the concluding recitals of the Beethoven sonatas, Schiff balances his didactic approach with one that stresses more what they might mean to him — and to us.