As I’ve mentioned, exhaustively (exhaustingly?), I’m in the midst of a year during which Beethoven is never far away. I’m often playing him, constantly practicing and thinking about him, and in general finding that he is taking up so much space in my head and in my life, there’s little room for much else.

Last week, amid this sea of Beethoven, was an island of Mozart: the Concerto K. 467, which I played in France. I’ve always felt that despite their status as Classical Era Icons, the distance between these two composers, in argument, in effect, and in affect, is immense. This time, playing the Mozart concerto while Beethoven was oozing from my every pore, the feeling was stronger than ever - it struck me as amazing that works which are unquestionably masterpieces could be so profoundly unalike.

I remember a remark Richard Goode made in an interview, to the effect that playing the 32 Beethoven sonatas in one year - presumably to the exclusion of much else - was a kind of sensory deprivation. (I am taking this statement grossly out of context - the larger message was that the immersion in Beethoven was one of the most extraordinary experiences of his life.) It’s a feeling that I’ve come to understand; it’s not that Beethoven’s music is lacking in sigh-making beauty or innovation, that it fails to give tactile pleasure to the performer, or that it is in any way grim, dour, or lacking in color. Rather, it is that in spite of his music’s beauty, its warmth, and its endless storehouse of ideas, it is above all the indomitable will of the composer - the will to say what must be said - that makes Beethoven’s music moving, that makes it Beethoven.

One of the works that I recorded and have been playing a lot of is the Sonata Opus 28 - the “Pastoral” sonata (not a name I’m fond of). Midway through the development of the first movement, we find ourselves in F# Major - a highly unlikely, not to say inappropriate, place to find oneself in the middle of a movement which is in D Major.

(*Brief musicological aside, which can be ignored by anyone not interested, without any serious deleterious effect on his/her understanding/appreciation of the rest of this essay: in fairness, this chord is actually approached as V of b minor [vi], making it somewhat less surprising, but through repetition, its function becomes increasingly unclear.*)

Now, composers before and after Beethoven wrote music with surprising harmonic twists and turns, so this chord, while immediately exotic, is not all that shocking. What Beethoven does next, however, decidedly is: he repeats the chord, over and over again, for twenty eight measures. For the first few measures, while the harmony remains unchanged, we at least still have a motive from earlier in the movement. Gradually, though, all other elements dissipate, and by the end, there is nothing else: no melody, not even a rhythm, just this chord, this harmonic visitor from a foreign country, desperate in its quiet insistence. By bar twenty eight of this, when Beethoven asks the performer to hold the chord - very quiet by now - indefinitely, we no longer have any sense of home whatsoever. The sheer repetition has forced our ears to rethink - even if only subconsciously - everything they had assumed about what they had been listening to. And all this done with one chord, stubbornly repeated, over and over, until Beethoven decides he’s finished with it, and in three short phrases, modulates us back home, as if it were nothing, the F# Major merely a mirage: this is Beethoven’s force of will.

The effect that this force of will has on the listener is so profound, it becomes difficult to imagine that music could ever be powerful or moving for any other reason. And that is why there have been times in the past where I’ve found it very strange to move from Beethoven to Mozart - the latter’s lack of a will of steel, heard in that context, can seem like a defect. This time, however, playing K. 467 was a joy and a delight, in equal measure, and it occurred to me that Mozart’s lack of will - his emotional malleability - may be not only not a defect, but in fact a defining feature, the quality that makes his music remarkable, much as the opposite is true with Beethoven.

Busoni referred to music as “sonorous air,” in which case one could call Beethoven’s music sonorous idealism. We sense in his music not only what he feels, but what he wishes he felt - not just his world (and ours), but the world he wished he lived in. Mozart, to put it mildly, is not like this. The greatest ever composer of opera, Mozart’s music is dramatic simply because life is dramatic. His music changes character and mood with such astonishing speed and frequency because that is how people behave. Nothing in Mozart’s brief biography suggests a particularly happy life, but the subject of his music is very definitely things as they are - not as they might be.

For the first seven bars of this concerto’s slow movement - an aria for the piano which could have just as easily been for the Countess instead - the emotional soundscape of the music is clear: wistful and poignant, but simultaneously noble, and very, very proud. In bar eight, however, comes a question which is asked with some urgency. When it is reiterated, two bars later, the question is asked in a voice far more stricken. By now, the defining characteristics of the opening of themovement - which occurred just seconds earlier - have vanished. The music has gone from major to minor, and more important, the nostalgia has been replaced with a sadness which is unmistakably raw.

And then, five bars later, after a harmonic sequence astonishing enough to give the lie to those who say that Mozart was not inventive, we are back in F Major, and the pain - which briefly seemed to be all-encompassing - morphs again, this time into something far closer to resignation. Not acceptance, perhaps, but the understanding that life must go on. And so it does: everything just described takes approximately one minute to play, and occurs prior to the first entrance of the piano! This is, thus, stage-setting, in a sense, and yet a whole emotional universe has already been revealed. In the same amount of time, Beethoven might have restricted us to one chord…

It was a very happy hiatus from Beethoven for me. While it might have been a rude shock, it instead was very wonderful to be reminded just how diverse is the music that I love. Now it’s back to Beethoven; despite his immense and immensely powerful personality, this time I’m reserving a corner of the room for myself. And for Mozart.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Blog, Beethoven, Mozart. 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.