For my piano recital at university, encouraged by my teacher, I took an ambitious program. I opened with an elaborate Haydn sonata and ended up combining a late night Chopin with its full Ballade in G minor. I also played Schoenberg’s first three five piano pieces, intensely complex atonal works that hooked me.
At the center of my program was Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31 on a Floor (Op. 110), my first attempt to play one of the composer’s late visionary sonatas. I loved the Opus 110, which begins with a sublime and whispering first movement and ends with a formidable fugue. The work seemed to me to occupy a completely different realm: elusive, mystical, beyond style, beyond age. Just playing it well wasn’t enough. You had to take listeners with you to their distant cosmos.
Was it reckless of me, at just 20 years old, to venture into music considered the province of mature and experienced artists? Even Rudolf Serkin, my hero pianist at the time and a magnificent Beethoven player, approached these masterpieces with humility and awe.
Fortunately, my teacher, Donald Currier, a professor at the Yale School of Music, increased my confidence. Students, he used to say, could also start learning these extraordinary jobs; you will have the rest of your life to deepen your performances.
Schoenberg’s pieces were so difficult for me that when I learned them, I had embedded them in my brain. I played them from memory with confidence and never released a note. But I don’t think I ever started Beethoven’s escape without wondering if I could get through the contrapuntal thickets.
But in my recital, I did it. Only in the cumbersome central section of the second movement as a scherzo I got a little groggy. A few weeks later, listening to a tape recording of a friend’s recital with me, my teacher said, “Well, Tony, if you reworked that page in the scherzo, you would have a good recording.”
Looking back, I can’t believe how much I bought in the mystical masterpiece surrounding Beethoven’s sonatas. Today, the word masterpiece in itself is problematic. Wasn’t Haydn’s sonata in a good mood that I performed a masterpiece? Or Chopin’s stormy ballad? (Not to mention the works of composers that are often overlooked beyond these masculine white totems.)
But if the “masterpiece” may not make sense, Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, composed between 1795 and 1822, are deservedly touchstones. Hans von Bülow, the first to play 32 in a series of recitals, compared Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clave” with the Old Testament and Beethoven’s sonatas with the New.
These works brought the genre of the sonata to a new dimension: multi-movement, episodic and often irregular, but also cleverly integrated. The pieces abound with unprecedented challenges for their time and remain daunting. So much the better, Beethoven believed. He once said to an editor, “What is difficult is also beautiful and good.” He Dear pianists to sweat.
The coronavirus pandemic silenced the explosion of many Beethoven performances that had been scheduled for this year, the 250th anniversary of his birth. But while live concerts may be few, sonatas have been well served in the recording studio. Numerous pianists, including Alfred Brendel, Daniel Barenboim, Maurizio Pollini, Annie Fischer, Andras Schiff, Richard Goode and, most recently, Paul Lewis, have released distinguished cycles. The best performances highlight not only the structural designs of the sonatas, but also their wildness and fearsome intensity. The full moves exude an ironic, sometimes downright silly humor. And yet Beethoven also plays the mystical sublimity, as in the final minutes of the last sonata.
In recent years, I’ve been drawn to the performances of younger pianists who cut the traps of the “masterpiece” and dare to make personal statements. The latest is Igor Levit, whose nine-disc poll was released last fall by Sony Classical. He was just 25 years old when he recorded the five late sonatas in 2013 for his Sony debut. In recent years, he completed the other 27.
It is an extraordinary achievement. His stories abound in vitality, clarity and a visceral feeling of drama. In reflective passages, his interpretation may be absorbed and tender, as in the opening movement of Sonata No. 28 in A (Op. 101). Beneath the bittersweet, undulating surface of this music, as Mr. Levit reveals, Beethoven compresses an expansive sonata structure in less than four and a half minutes.
I am especially fascinated when Mr. Levit follows his instincts and takes interpretive risks. In an essay for The Guardian, he wrote of Beethoven as a composer who “lives his freedom and achieves it in ever new ways.”
But, he concluded, “I never know what ‘he’ wants and what ‘he’ means. Even less who ‘he’ is. At the end of the day, am the one who has to bring music to acoustic life. “
And it does. His tempos are sometimes very fast, to the dismay of some critics. However, even when the speed seems breathless, Mr. Levit’s performance is astonishingly clear and alive, with a rhythmic bite. So the effect is intoxicating, not sloppy, like in the opening move of Sonata No. 4 in E flat, a long early sonata that tends to be overlooked. In Mr. Levit’s account, this movement seems charming, almost Haydn-style, but full of heroic arrogance and cunning.
Mr. Levit’s recordings sent me back to the Artur Schnabel Historical Ensemble, the first recorded full cycle, made between 1932 and 1935 in England.
Schnabel was Beethoven’s preeminent pianist of his time. Why Beethoven? He was asked once. “I’m only drawn to music that I consider better than can be played,” he replied.
What Schnabel strove for is suggested by a comment Beethoven reportedly described, describing his method of composition. “The exercise in breadth, length, height and depth begins in my head,” he said, “and since I am aware of what I want, the basic idea never leaves me.”
That is what Schnabel’s accounts of these sonatas achieve: breadth and sweep, even when the tempos he takes are so hasty that the passages become murky and the phrases are shortened. His remarkably fluid technique is featured continuously, for example, in the spiraling buoyant end of Sonata No. 3 in C (Op. 2, No. 3). Yes, drop a few notes, but the form and character of the performance are wonderful.
Still, why did you approve of your recording of the demonic ending of “Appassionata”, which despite all its excitement sometimes sounds sloppy? Perhaps because capturing music for posterity was still a fairly new concept at the time. I doubt that Schnabel imagined that these recordings would be taken as immortal archive documents.
He didn’t really care, either. Schnabel had to be drawn to the studio. The recordings, as he later wrote, “are against the very nature” of a performance, which means “to happen but once, to be absolutely ephemeral and unrepeatable.”
Like Schnabel, Mr. Levit strives to convey the overall breadth and depth of music, though he is scrupulously attentive to every note, rhythm, and articulation. The ending of Sonata No. 24 in F sharp offers a revealing comparison.
In this rogue move, after a pointy and jagged theme, the music continues to spin in bursts of passages in which fast threads of 16 notes are grouped together into two-note drums. Schnabel’s performance sounds loud and mischievous, almost a slap in the face. The essential racing character from Mr. Levit’s account is very similar. But because his playing is so clean and precise, and the rhythmic drive so relentless, the music sounds darkly humorous, with a touch of manic danger about it.
If these days I am drawn to brave younger pianists, I will always revere the great older artists who have interpreted these works with insight and command. Like my beloved Rudolf Serkin.
Serkin, who set the highest standards for himself, said in a 1969 interview that he “never had the courage” to perform a full cycle of Beethoven’s sonatas. Then it was announced that, in honor of the composer’s 200th, in 1970, he would play all 32 on a series of shows at Carnegie Hall. He ended up playing less than half in four concerts. I attended all four.
The last one took place on December 16, Beethoven’s birthday. The second half was devoted to the gigantic, still intimidating Sonata “Hammerklavier”, which ends with a complex and tangled escape to end all leaks. This was not a piece that Serkin was known for. Mr. Currier, my teacher and I traveled from Connecticut to listen to him.
The performance was majestic and inspiring. Although he could feel Serkin’s sweating, as Beethoven would have liked, in the end he triumphed.
Later that season he came to New Haven to give a recital. I was able to greet him behind the scenes and told him I had been to Carnegie for his extraordinary “Hammerklavier”.
Looking very serious, Serkin said, “It took me 50 years.”
