I agree wholeheartedly...if I were playing on a period instrument. I'm not and my piano cannot do the same things as his did. Therefore, regardless of what Beethoven was thinking (and you can only go based on what we have in original scores, what he may have written himself or said, or eye-witness accounts of him performing it), it is only an educated guess as to what you can do with your instrument. I can try to make my modern concert grand sound like a period instrument, but that is something that I personally don't agree with doing. I can completely understand those (and you may be one of them) who try to do this, but I am of the opinion that Beethoven also intended for other musicians to play his music, and whenever a composer allows that, you must expect individual interpretations, even ones you may not like.

that is still only an educated guess, as is my opinion on the subject.

Have you done this? I would very much like to hear it done. I'm not tied to one way or the other - whatever helps me to play it well is all that I'm concerned about here.

Actually, my edition keeps the stems up from m. 21 through m. 22. The switching is something that my teacher recommended to me after I struggled with the pedaling/fingering/tied note issue.

I have to agree here. Also, my score only has Beethoven's pedal marks in them (no editorial ones), and there are no pedal marks for m. 21-22 in question, nor in m. 99 etc. So, how would one hold down those whole notes without a pedal? Either he only indicated pedal for expressive purposes (most likely) and assumed the performer would be able to figure out sustaining issues based on how the individual instrument responded, or he didn't want pedaling at all in this section. How does one know which it is?

It's a bit counter-productive to assume that classical-era pianists used that pedal for anything other than special effects - the habit of using it to sustain, in place of fingers, was a later practice. If any sustaining was done - it was an intentional blurring of tones, a dreamy effect.

So Beethoven would not have expected this passage to have pedal applied to it for sustaining.
Judging from examples in the rest of his scores, if he had wanted the special 'senza sordini' effect here - he would have specified it. He was very picky at times.

As far as I can judge - the idea of using the pedal in this passage shouldn't even be considered, especially with a view to how it would be performed on a period instrument. It's prety plain how it should be performed, I think - only an insistence on crossing the hands between bass and treble will produce a desire to use tbe pedal. It just seems counter-intuitive.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it should be played without pedal, but if you are trying to get at Beethoven's exact desires, then your logic stands.

On a side note I personally like using the pedal, as I think modern instruments are just too dry sounding without it. Adding pedal, whether legato pedaling or direct pedaling makes the whole sound much warmer and rounder, IMO. Probably not Beethoven's original desire, but I'm not one who tries to figure out what the composer actually meant. I am a musical person myself and have every right to interpret according to my own taste. There's an extreme of this of course, where one also fudges the notes and rhythms beyond all recognition - I'm not talking about that .

Yes - well said.
I feel if a modern piano is to be used, you might as well use everything it has to offer at times.
You're exactly right about using the pedal to avoid dry-sounding modern piano (they're just made TOO efficiently nowadays)- I find that on a forte-piano the tone is not as crisp as a modern piano, it doesn't damp as well. This makes for less need for a sustaining pedal, in my opinion. I find Beethoven extremely easy on an older forte-piano, for this very reason. That, if anything, usually makes me reject any suggestion of using the pedal to sustain on an older piano. AFter experiencing these pianos, I really think that a competent pianist would have been more than capable of getting along without it in most cases.

To me, it seems to be an issue of applying modern piano methods to works that were written for older pianos. I wonder if anyone, having tried a forte-piano, has come to same conclusions about the way they feel and sound under your hands, the idea that using a sustaining pedal would have been overkill.

You keep saying this as if it makes your argument but after watching several videos and doing my own experimentation, rhythmic sacrifices appear more often in the versions that cross over. Quite frankly, I don't see any reason why there should be rhythmic sacrifice here. Classical music is so rife with RS's I'm stunned anyone would notice anyway.

Another good point. I don't think it causes any sacrifice in rhythm, actually, which is partially why I asked for some audio proof. It all comes down to sound anyways. By switching to LH triplets, there's no sacrifice in rhythm, no "blips" or what have you.

I never needed to 'obsess' about it, because it never entered my mind to do anything other than cross the hands. There was no reason not to.

I was wishing I had access to either a manuscript or a really good Urtext. (Y'know, there are urtexts and there are urtexts.)

If you'd like to be more specific about how Beethoven notated it, I'll be interested -- i.e. "why he wrote the score the way he did."

Like, how is it that he does and doesn't indicate crossed hands?

Yes, absolutely. I had never done it any other way when I've 'played through' the piece (never worked on it), and once we got into this discussion, I sat down and went over it carefully (with extreme scrutiny) to make sure it really works, although I didn't have any great doubt about it.

Yes, it absolutely works, and if I may say so, it works beautifully.
Even as played by me.
And without extreme effort. As I said, it's not one of the most challenging of these kinds of things in Beethoven. (The beginning of the last movement of the Waldstein is much harder.)

If I had greater facility with recording and uploading stuff, I'd put it on here. But I don't, which is the main reason I only ever put one thing online (and I had help for that).
I promise you that not only can it be done, it isn't even that hard. Please try it -- listening to yourself carefully and being ready to sort of half-flutter-pedal. (It varies according to the piano and the space. On my piano right here, which is a NY Steinway B, you hardly have to release any of the pedaled sound.)

Hopefully Pianoloverus will see that post.

Let me add.....For me, maybe the main outcome of this 'argument' (like many others on the site) is that it makes me more interested in the piece than I ever was before. I hope that's true for others too.

So now there might be one more indicating not crossing hands? Who cares? So the ratio is now only 4:1 in favor of the hands crossed approach.

I thought you admitted about 25 posts ago that most editions and pianists indicated the passage should be played the way you thought was so impossibly incorrect. But apparently not.

Your posts remind of some thoughts expressed by Reuben Fine, one of the great chess players of the 1940's. He claimed that Bobby Fischer had a problem with moves near the edge of the board. When someone pointed out a Fischer mistake in the center of the board, he said "Oh, that's just the inverse of the edge of the board problem."

You are imagining the latter.
And mistaken about "most pianists." I never said anything about that.


BTW......I sort of knew the guy.
Including that he happened to be a student at a class I gave.

I guess that makes me about 140 years old.

P.S. His book about the psychology of the chess player is pretty preposterous. But that's another story.
And dunno about the relevance of what you said to this thread, nor do I think many others will.

Other posters who disagree with me here are doing it on substance, without getting personal. That's a good model.

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, it might provide some clues.
This is going from the Henle Verlag edition - supposedly urtext. If this has already been compared, please forgive me.

Measure 104, the triplets are now explicity written in the lower stave. If you look at measure 30 and on, the triplets are actually written back and forth on the two staves - to me it implies using two different hands for the triplets, to deal with the whole note. I say that, because it would have been just as easy to have written them on one stave - as in most of the passages.

The big difference in 104, is that the whole note is replaced with a shorter note and does not need to be sustained. It makes sense to write the triplets that way, because of this. It seems to be standard piano notation. So it's not necesarry to notate the triplets on 2 different staves - it seems to be okay to cross hands here for the vocal line.

The 1st Edition shows the same practice. http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/2/29/IMSLP51116-PMLP01462-Op.31-2.pdf
Perhaps it we ask Stores nicely, he will tell us about the autograph - he owns many reproductions about them. This is assuming an autograph is available.

Very interesting thread this. I have always used the hands crossed approach as it seems very logical, and I know other pianists (Barenboim for example, you can see him on youtube) do it too. But the sustained notes is indeed a good argument. We have to bear in mind though that Beethoven was also the man that put crescendo's on single notes, not everything he writes is possible, he was thinking far ahead of his time.

Parts of your second post in this thread. You begin by saying the same over and over.






You said many posts ago:"However, I was glad to learn (better to know than not to know) that there's such a large view in favor of playing the movement in a way that I had thought was just misguided. (This included my checking on youtube to see if people actually play it that way -- and I see that they do.)"


The obvious relevance was that what Fine said(which you didn't quote) showed a stubborness to prove himself correct that was laughable.

Which you didn't follow in you recent sarcastic comment "Hopefully Pianoloverus will see that post. "And I suppose my pointing out 50 posts ago what the huge majority of editions on IMSLP showed is not substantive.

I was talking about obsessing in this thread. As in 24 posts.

See, in my Schenker edition, I too have in m. 104 the upper staff in Bass clef and the lower staff in treble, indicating that the LH should cross over the RH. But what of m. 21-22? In this edition, the upper staff in Treble clef, and the lower staff remains bass clef. Also, m. 104 lacks the tied whole notes that are in m. 21-24. Is this also the case in your urtext?

I guess you honestly can't tell that what you claimed I said (i.e. that most pianists do it that way) is very different than what I did say (which you quoted here).

So be it.

I just tried the non-crossing method (having always crossed) and I love it. The LH leaps are nothing (barely more than an octave most of the time) and I think the right hand can add more subtlety to the quarter notes.

I don't think I'll go back to crossing. Just my opinion.

In Henle - measures 21-on, the triplets are in the lower stave, and the melodic line ends up in the upper stave. The tied whole note is present as well - it ties for 3 measures in both instances.

In measure 104, and on - mine is like yours: it's a quarter note, staccato with the the melodic line in the lower stave - indicating left hand to play it.

It's in the latter case that it becomes permissible, in my opinion, to start switching hands - the staccato quarter note gives the player the freedom to do so: it's not needed to sustain the missing whole-note.

That is how mine is as well. And I agree with your assessment and that is how I learned the piece as well.

But we don't have to consider it in this case because it is very possible to play this without blips and without crossing hands. Gould crosses hands but makes mistakes on that part (he does the best at holding the bass using this method though), so crossing over doesn't ensure a seamless performance.

I can agree with that!

You're nitpicking in the extreme. If I change it to most editions and some pianists I guess you'd be happy, and my point is just as valid. That's why I compared your posts to Reuben Fine's "answer" to the question about Fischer's moves.

There isn't an autograph for the dminor and there's very little sketch material. The sketches that do exist are from what's known as the Kessler sketchbook (Kessler, is Joseph Kessler, a composer and pianist to whom the book was given by Carl Andreas Stein from the family of piano builders). Though few sketches for 31/2 are included the Kessler sketches are one of the very few completely intact sketchbooks in existence today (i.e. no leaves have ever been removed).

Want to offer a thought on what it would show if there were one?

i.e. How Beethoven was conceptualizing the hands and the pedaling in those passages?

I'd love to see that autograph, as well.
You sent me links to many of your photographs at one time, Stores - is this among your collection, or do you have some nice photographs of it you can share with us all?

Don't make me make Mark_C beg

>:)

Umm, there ISN'T a dminor autograph, Matt. It's not that I don't have it there just isn't one. Reread my post above. So solly.
And by the way the photos you saw were a very small portion of the facsimiles, etc. that I own. I don't have photos of everything (it would take a long time to shoot), but one of these days I'll try to make everything accessible.

Well, in my opinion it would probably show very much the same thing the first edition (Simrock,1802) shows, which can be found on IMSLP (it's actually the first edition listed). My best guess is that he'd leave the technical aspect of something like hand crossings to the performer, since it's such an individual thing. Beethoven, wasn't quite so free with his pedal markings, however and his indications are still rare even at this point. When he does indicate pedal (as well as it's "leaving point") it's something we should pay attention to, if we're wanting to play it his way, because there's often a strong reason he's left the indication (or not).
Personally, I can't imagine switching hands with the triplets. It's MUCH easier to crossover and as a result there is no break in the continuity, nor is there any accent (or blip I guess we're calling it?...if that's what you meant). It is, of course, entirely possible that Beethoven MAY have changed hands himself with the triplets seeing that for one he possessed excellent technique and the keys of the Viennese pianoforte had not yet begun to widen quite as much as they would in a few, short years. I also cannot imagine using very much pedal at all in this area, nor would I on an early instrument. The triplets, the rate of speed at which they're played and the register they lie in are all a recipe for mud once you throw in much pedal.