In April, I spent four days making a recording of Beethoven Sonatas; on the third day, at around 4:30 in the afternoon, I lost my mind.

(Lest this sound melodramatic, I should say that I don’t actually think it was all that remarkable under the circumstances. In fact, going a little crazy may be an essential element of the recording process. It is, I think, nearly impossible to be happy with a record after you have made it: your relationship with a piece of music does not exist in a vacuum - it is a living, evolving thing, touched by your life experiences, the context it is given by other music, and the way your Cheerios tasted that morning. A recording, however, does exist in a vacuum - it will never acknowledge the way your feelings about the piece have changed. So all a recording can do, really, is serve as a snapshot of your relationship with that piece, on that day. This is, in one way, a relief; in another, it makes the whole process hugely fraught with pressure - you want the snapshot to be simultaneously as pure and [more important] as vivid as possible. Separately, each of those desires implies a great responsibility; together, they represent an unattainable ideal. Does losing one’s mind seem as extreme as it did one very long parenthetical paragraph ago?)

I was in the process of recording one of the variations in the last movement of the Sonata Op. 109. This variation, on the most fundamental level, is not difficult - if making music were merely a question of playing the right notes at the right times, the first take probably would have been perfectly adequate. But it is one of those late-Beethoven moments where the composer, more than anyone before or after him, conjures an image of the infinite, and it is this sort of thing that is most difficult of all to record: if you smudge a passage, your course of action is clear - you play it again, and usually the problem is solved. But can simply repeating something bring you closer to that which exists only in your inner ear? It is in moments such as these that I find myself desperately missing the response of an audience - a silent response, the way the air in the room is made different by everyone ceasing to breathe it - and the recording studio becomes a very lonely place.

I had begun the afternoon by playing the movement several times in its entirety, after which I went into the booth to listen. On top of the intangibles, this revealed a number of all-too-tangibles that I wasn’t pleased with, so I went back to the piano to try that variation again. The first take, post-listening, is often very strange: having been just made aware of the discrepancies between what I thought I was doing and what was actually coming out, the result tends to be an improvement in some ways, but also overly self-conscious. So I played it again - a bit more natural, I thought, and yet…

My producer chimed in from the booth, “That one was very good. We definitely have it.”

(This phrase was used, conservatively speaking, 300 times over the course of the four days. On the one hand, it’s an awfully important phrase - there’s probably nothing more important when recording than feeling that you can trust the producer. At the same time, however, I’m not sure I have the faintest idea what it means. No wrong notes? No hideous rhythmic disfigurements? The absence of anything identifiably wrong, in my view, does little to compensate for the absence of something inexorably right. And in music such as this, the feeling of not having it - of searching for something unattainable - is an essential part of the music’s expressive DNA.)

And so, I replied, “I need to play it again.”

It’s difficult to say how many more times I played it after that. I’m quite sure that it was more than three, and less than one hundred. It was quite a remarkable experience, in one way, to play this music, which is so intensely spiritual, over and over again. It was also physically, mentally, and emotionally draining in a way I could never begin to describe. Playing Op. 109 once, in a concert, spends the whole body and soul. Over and over again, in an empty room, with a red light as the audience?

Finally, my producer, who has the patience of a saint, and if he were not so unusually good at what he does, should have been a psychologist, said, “I think that’s come very far - we should leave it.”

Through gritted teeth, I replied, “It’s just not good enough.”

A silence from the booth. Then, in measured tones, “Do you think you could identify any particular element you aren’t happy with?”

It was not a good time for me to vent my frustration, given what I’d just put the poor man through, but I couldn’t help it. With just a touch of derision in my tone, I replied, “You wouldn’t understand. It’s ineffable.”

The silence in the booth was crisper this time, and at its end, it was the producer, not the psychologist, who spoke. “Well, until it becomes effable, let’s move on.”

And we did. To say that I recovered my sanity at that moment would be imprecise: I returned to that neither-nor state, between reality and fantasy, that one lives in while recording. Just over a day later, I walked out of the studio for the final time. Four sonatas had been recorded: four photographs, with my smudgy fingerprints on the fronts, and my name and the date on the backs.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Blog, Recording, Beethoven. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.