TLS: Beethoven's Piano Sonatas. A short companion.
Premise Checker
Charles Rosen. 256pp, plus CD. Yale University Press. £20. - 0 300 09070 6.
The Times Literary Supplement, 2.11.15
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2076448
Leon Plantinga
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was not at
all usual (except among the English, who had their own way of doing
things) to play piano sonatas at public concerts. Arias, symphonies
and concertos were concert fare. Solo keyboard sonatas were typically
directed towards quite different destinations: for semi-private
performance by the composer (or occasionally by another accomplished
performer such as Haydn's London friend, Therese Jansen), or, much
more often, for publication and the delectation of a growing
population of amateur musicians.
Beethoven's piano sonatas conform to this pattern. While he sometimes
played them at musical gatherings among the Viennese aristocracy, this
was hardly the primary purpose for their composition. Unlike his
earlier piano concertos, the sonatas usually went straight to the
publisher. And herein lies a puzzle: for Beethoven's piano sonatas,
with a couple of exceptions (Op 49 and maybe the Sonatina, Op 79) must
have been beyond the technical grasp of all but the most accomplished
of the amateurs to whom his publishers hoped to sell them. Still, some
combination of factors allowed this unlikely project to succeed. The
simple force of Beethoven's prestige as a keyboard virtuoso and
composer of symphonies seems to have encouraged many amateurs to buy
sonatas they could not play very well. And in German-speaking lands
the literature of early Romanticism, the writings of W. H. Wackenroder
and Jean Paul, and the music criticism of Friedrich Kanne, Amadeus
Wendt, and, above all, E. T. A. Hoffmann, ascribed to instrumental
music a lofty and unprecedented importance, indeed a transcendental
significance. In such formulations the compositions of Beethoven
appeared more and more as central exhibits. An encounter with one of
his sonatas, however tentative, held promise not merely for a musical
exercise, but for an improving spiritual experience, an engagement
with the noumenal. Then, too, in some nineteenth-century German homes
the Beethoven sonatas may have remained on the bookshelf, taking their
place alongside the collected works of Goethe as a silent but
effective testimony to the culture of the household.
In his new book on the Beethoven piano sonatas, Charles Rosen at first
seems intent on addressing general subjects such as these: what were
the social uses of the sonatas when they were new, and what did they
mean to those who played and heard them? (At the beginning we are
offered Proust's charming reminiscence of his grandmother, who held to
firm principles "on the way to cook certain dishes, to play the
sonatas of Beethoven, and to receive guests graciously"). But this is
only the introduction. The body of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, it turns
out, is resolutely directed towards the music itself and Rosen's
recommendations for its performance. It comes in two parts.
The first, which he calls "The Tradition", raises a series of broad
issues having to do with performance - questions about proper
phrasing, tempo, pedalling - and offers frequent reflections about
formal shapes of movements. The second part ("The Sonatas") presents,
in chronological order, remarks about each of the thirty-two sonatas
with opus numbers (excluding, thus, some four or five juvenilia).
Some of the most instructive pages in the book are about phrasing.
Rosen cites Beethoven's oft-quoted view of Mozart's pianism, "fine but
choppy playing - no legato" (this assessment comes to us only via a
much later report by Beethoven's student Carl Czerny to the Mozart
biographer Otto Jahn), but argues convincingly that a good bit of
Mozart's later eighteenth-century tradition of a sharply articulated,
somewhat detached style of playing was still in force in Beethoven's
piano music. According to this tradition a slur (or curved line) over
a group of notes had a particular meaning: these notes were to be
played as a discrete unit without separation (that is, legato); the
first got a slight accent and the last was lighter and shorter than
its notated value (still shorter if there was a dot over it). Notes
without slurs are to be detached, those with dots sharply so. Rosen
laconically cites one late-eighteenth- century writer (Daniel Gottlieb
Turk, Klavier-schule, 1789) as his authority, but there is plenty of
other evidence from the period that such was the general practice.
Beethoven's own scores show considerable care in delineating phrases,
and only a gradual and partial change from short groupings in the
eighteenth-century manner to the longer, continuous lines favoured in
the following generations. Thus Rosen points to a place in the first
movement of Beethoven's last sonata (Op 111) where the pianist is
still instructed to play the theme with three different articulations,
from sharply detached to firmly connected. What is urged here is a
more transparent Beethoven sound than we are used to hearing, music
with clearly etched details, with light (or air) between phrases.
For the modern pianist this takes a bit of doing. Our instruments have
a much slower rate of decay than Beethoven's piano, so that un-wanted
sound tends to persist. And pianists now-adays are taught to use the
damper pedal as a matter of course, to treat it as a part of the piano
sound, much as modern string players use vibrato; in Beethoven's time
both were seen as occasional things, as special effects. That velvety
sound of the present-day grand piano, with the vibrant after-roar of
its pedal, is often little conducive to fine and variegated
articulation of Beethoven's phrases. Rosen, who mainly plays modern
pianos, acknowledges this in passing, but gives little direction for
solving the problem.
A most attractive feature of Rosen's approach to this music, in the
section on phrasing and elsewhere, is the great respect he shows for
the text, for the details of the autograph scores (at least those
published in facsimile) and first editions as bearers of the
composer's intent. Where such readings run contrary to the usual
inclinations of present-day musicians, he is always inclined to give
Beethoven the benefit of the doubt. But one area wherein the composer
left us largely without instruction is the vexed matter of tempos.
Rosen quotes Beethoven's well-known rejection, in a letter from 1817,
of the traditional Italian designations "Allegro, Andante, Adagio,
Presto", and, in one from 1826, of the tempi ordinarii of the
preceding century. But again Rosen argues for a certain continuity of
practice from those traditions - provided we can figure out what they
were - in Beethoven's music.
One kind of direction Beethoven left us was a series of metronome
markings for all the movements of the symphonies, the first eleven
string quartets, a single piano sonata (the "Hammer- klavier", Op
106), and a few other compositions, though these indications have been
widely mistrusted, mainly because modern musicians find many of them
too fast. A usual way of approximating tempos in the sonatas has been
simply to extrapolate from movements with markings to those, perceived
to be similar, that are without them. Another way is to heed the
testimony of Beethoven's contemporaries, chief among them Carl Czerny,
who left markings for all the sonatas. Rosen uses both methods in his
ruminations about tempo, much preferring, however, his own instincts
to the testimony of the likes of Czerny.
His test case is the designation "Allegretto". The allegretto final
theme and variations of Mozart's Piano Concerto K453 in G major, with
its systematic acceleration of note values, he says, really works
(without boredom or scrambling) only with a basic pulse very close to
seventy-six to the minute. For the famous Allegretto of Beethoven's
Seventh Symphony the composer gave (mirabile dictu) a metronome
marking of seventy-six. Thus we have established one tempo ordinario,
applicable to both Mozart and Beethoven, which Rosen proceeds to affix
to a host of movements by the two composers.
One might protest about the subjectivity of this procedure, and that
the two test movements are terribly different in character,
Beethoven's having about it a distinct processional quality (Schumann
associated it with a church wedding). But in fact something like that
value of seventy-six could have been had in a historically more
credible fashion. J. J. Quantz, a respected music theorist writing in
1752, had spelled out the four tempi ordinarii quite explicitly: they
were to be coordinated, following ancient custom, with the human
pulse, which Quantz reckoned, in a "jovial and high-spirited" person
(in the afternoon), at eighty to the minute. This eighty, for him, was
the basic pulse of the allegretto. If "the tradition", as Rosen
construes it, is based on a smattering of historical reference and a
great deal of musical intuition, some of his conclusions turn out to
coincide with the historical record.
There is no system to the tour of the sonatas that makes up the second
half of the book beyond straight chronological presentation. Rosen
simply offers comment on whatever strikes him as interesting about
each work: remarks on form or performance (sometimes revisiting ground
already covered), on rhythmic organization, similarity to other works,
or (again) tempo. He is generally better on the late sonatas than the
early ones. What he has to say about the final three (Opp 109, 110 and
111 of 1820-22) is often illuminating. He calls attention to distinct
voices in the apparently monochrome accompaniment in the development
section of Op 110, first movement, a telling distinction, clearly
there in the score but almost never heard in performance. And his
treatment of the complex finale of this sonata impressively
underscores its surpassing eloquence, its passage from desolate
lamentation to something like exaltation in an intricately
choreographed sequence of recitative, arioso and fugue.
Rosen is an appreciator of fugue and writes well of the ennobling
effects of its gradual assimilation into Beethoven's sonata-type
movements: the String Quartet Op 59 No 3 (1805-06), the Sonata for
Piano and Cello Op 102 No 2 (1815), and the Piano Sonata Op 101
(1816). To those, however, who find the gargantuan fugal finale of the
"Hammerklavier" (Op 106, 1817-18) exasperating, Rosen's discussion may
seem satisfyingly similar. We are offered a narrative of the piece
that is frustratingly hard to follow, even with a score. Few bar
numbers are given, and Rosen uses a system, in any case, that begins
the numbers at an unusual point in the music (readers using the
standard Henle or Dover editions will need to add ten to each of his
citations). He has written about this composition where there were
evidently fewer constraints as to space in The Classical Style
(revised, 1997), and, perhaps in some desperation, refers the reader
to that discussion. In both places, it seems to me, his emphasis on
harmonic motion by thirds in this fugue is overdone; one might, for
example, point to mm 134-50 (standard numbering), where the music
makes a stately downward progression by fifths halfway around the
circle, from F to B natural.
If Rosen heeds his own instincts in preference to the testimony of
writers of Beethoven's time, he also seems a bit cavalier about
consulting the present day literature on his subject. Just two works
were apparently at his elbow while he wrote his book, and an odd pair
they are: Wilhelm von Lenz, Beethoven et ses trois styles (1852-3),
and D. F. Tovey's A Companion to Beethoven's Pianoforte Sonatas
(1931). For Beethoven's letters, he still relies on the old English
translation of Emily Anderson (1961), a fine resource in its time, but
now superseded by the exhaustive German critical edition by Sieghard
Brandenburg (1996).
Neglect of the current Beethoven literature (such as the standard
Kinsky-Halm Thematisch-bibliographisches Verzeichnis) seems to have
led Rosen to mistake the slow movement of the Sonata Op 2 No 1 of
1795, an artful reworking of a piano quartet movement from a decade
earlier, for an original compositon. Its true origins go far towards
explaining the movement's formal shape as well as the status of this
Beethoven sonata as one of only two with four movements on the same
tonic (the other one is Op 10 No 3).
If there is some ambiguity about the intended audience of Beethoven's
sonatas, the same might be said for Charles Rosen's book. There is
something here for the ordinary reader with a strong interest in music
and a determination to per- severe through the tough spots - or a
willingness to skip them. But the book is clearly directed more
towards musicians, especially towards pianists, who will have much to
gain from Rosen's admirably wide range of musical reference, and his
usual rich mixture of musical wisdom and opinion, both eminently worth
having.
Peter T. Daniels
protecting their copyright than the NYT.
They know where to find him.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net