Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Members Recordings - Pianist Corner Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8, Op. 13

Michael,

You are completely entitled to play Beethoven any way you want. I mean, it's not a question of morality as some may see it, so I agree that any artist is free to present the music to the public as they see fit.

In my opinion, what we have here is a distorted view of the sonata. Perhaps it's more of a post-modern art experiment than a performance of the Pathetique. You have (I'm presuming that this is you playing) changed so much about it, including in some cases the notes.

Personally, I don't agree with the way you play it - not morally but as I see it, factually. I don't think you are playing Beethoven here, not really.

The sound certainly comes across in the recording as banged. It doesn't matter if you started on the key surface or not - it's still possible to bang. Mind you, many many pianists, even great pianists, have banged at certain stages. Horowitz at his worst is a good example (although his best was magnificent).

This performance, I guess, must be taken as a piece of art in itself - whether I like that piece of art or not is completely irrelevant in that context. From a philosophical viewpoint, it highlights the idea, the fact if you will, that all performances are pieces of art in their own right, and no matter how much we try to present only the music in a performance, there will always be an element of ourselves in that performance by virtue of the fact that each time we play, we must make an artistic choice.

Listening to this conjured up Egon Schiele in my mind more than it did Beethoven.

I wonder how many will get this reference. It's perfect. I see Schiele's self-portrait right now as I type.

It does remind me of Ervin Nyiregyhazi.

Hi Joe,

While the interpretation is different than what one usually hears, I don't consider it distortive of the sonata. If anything, the fidelity to the emotional content is higher - and also is given expression with higher intensity - than were one to play the music in a minimalistic/accompanist style as notated without significant freedom of motion and interpretation. It is only in the 20th century that notation in classical music came to be viewed as prohibitive. In the 19th century and earlier, notation clearly is intended as suggestive. You've probably read as much about the piano playing - in their own works - of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms and Chopin, as I have, so I am sure that you agree.

With a Beethoven sonata the initial tempo indication of a movement only applies to the opening measures even if it is a m.m. indication. This is in one of his letters which, unfortunately, I can't reference as I don't have a volume of his letters here with me.

And his playing seems to have shown tremendous dynamic range, too, leaving damaged pianos in his wake - but when these period instruments are played in the prevalent minimalist style of today, there is no damage, so I am inclined to think that some elements are missing from the literalist and pedantic approach to interpreting Beethoven's piano music.

On the subject of banging, how can one bang one's fingers upon an object if the motion begins while one's fingers are in contact with the object?

Hi Phantomfive,

It was entertaining to watch the speculation in the comments for the video. Life is too short for games and hoaxes, but if I wanted to I probably could pull off something tremendously effective in that area. I have a particular idea for a fictional and alter ego performer who would, for various reasons, arouse much interest and controversy - but too much time and effort would be involved just for one's personal entertainment.

Of possible interest is this recording, which to my ears is Nyiregyhazi. It probably is part of the broadcast out of Hungary that has an excerpt of him playing the Liszt Sonata.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYaWjHWgepE

I can't say I like this recording, no matter who is the performer. It's an assault on my ears. But so was the last Elton John concert I attended. So what do I know?

However linked to this clip was this gem of Rubenstein having his own little prank It's hilarious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTKVeEYSp9U

And reminds me of one of my piano students who insisted on playing "America the Beautiful" at his school concert. I could see no way out of the impending disaster but to tell him ..." No matter what, don't take your hands off the piano, slap your forehead or start over .... just continue ... in the correct rhythm.

When he arrived for his lesson after the concert he assured me he'd been a great success so I asked for a demo. He did exactly what Rubenstein did here. All wrong notes .... but perfectly in time.

There is some "progressive rock" which I like, so I guess I don't have any issue with strong dynamics . . . !

The combination of piano, stage and acoustics, is familiar with E.N. at the Old First Church as heard on "purist" type transfers, as with the Desmar LP - and not like what is on the recent CD album with Old First Church selections that sound, in my opinion, highly distortive so that one can hardly even hear the stage and church sound.

But I haven't read about him performing this in the age of the portable cassette recorder when someone in the audience could have recorded it.

As with the Liszt Sonata excerpt, the recording and/or performance date is uncertain.

OK now we're on a point of aesthetics - is it distortive of the sonata or not? Well, to me it is, and perhaps that is because of how we usually hear it. So, I'll leave you with your own view of it as far as that is concerned.

Regarding tempo, when Beethoven said that about the tempo being applicable to the opening only, it is generally thought that what he meant was that a movement doesn't have to remain locked in a metronomic tempo from beginning to end. There are places where one can relax or intensify the tempo, but it is always done with an underlying pulse in mind. Schnabel and Arrau are good examples of this type of playing, and since they both studied with pupils of Czerny (Leschetizky and Liszt respectively), I guess we can trust them. Well, perhaps we can't trust them because it's also true that everyone changes things that they have been taught, and everyone remembers advice differently. This, actually, is exactly what I meant when I said that I feel your interpretation is the work of art in itself rather than the piece you are playing. Does that make sense?

We have to face that we are all 'wrong' about Beethoven, because none of us were there in the room with Beethoven. Even working down the 'lineage' through Schnabel or Arrau or many others, we don't actually know what was going on. Nor do we know how changeable Beethoven was about his own ideas. Perhaps the day after he wrote that letter he'd say to someone else 'play my works in time, do not distort the time' - these things have to be taken into context. He is known to have said to Czerny that he wanted his music to be played exactly as he wrote it on the score, but he said that once, in a certain situation, at a certain time.

OK how can you bang when you're already on the key? Well it's quite easy. You can put your finger on the key surface and thump it into the key bed. Or you can not thump but be playing so loud that the impression that gets to our ear is one of banging. There is more to banging than simply hitting the key from above. It's an aesthetic, it's a state of mind, a state of muscles, regardless of whether you start in the air or on the key.

Anyway it doesn't matter if I agree with the way you play it or not. What you have done (and I'll thank you for this) is that you have got me thinking about what it means to interpret music, and how do we reach the conclusions that lead us to play in a certain way. So that is a good thing.

Hi Joe80,

I don't think of Schnabel and Arrau as being 19th century type pianists. This isn't intended as dismissive of their playing - there is something to be said for an approach to performing music that is more "mathematically" and symbolically consistent than that of Nyiregyhazi, Beethoven or Liszt. The issue though is that emotions can not be circumscribed mathematically or with symbols.

About the alleged banging, I can play with maximum size tone from key surface and without keybedding.

Otherwise my finger tips, not to mention my wrists, would be "obliterated" with just a few fortissimo chords like these - and probably I would end up tearing a tendon:

[you've heard this previously . . . ]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOEzwrTf8-4

When I first played the pre-Soviet Petrof grand here, with its less-than-contemporary key depth, my wrists ached and were sore for several days after the first few powerful chords following which I had to immediately stop playing.

That was keybedding!

Hi Michael,

Of course you're right about the style changing between the 19th and 20th centuries, and by the mid 20th Century we had become obsessed with authoritative urtext type performances that in some cases were so wide of the mark that they could hardly be called music at all. Yet I think that the great artists all had something to offer.

Schnabel was born in 1882, so I think it's fair to say he was absolutely a 19th Century pianist, but he was attracted more to the music of the 18th and early 19th Centuries, and then he kind of has a 'romantic gap' if you like, and then composed his own music in the 20th Century that wouldn't be out of place in the second viennese school.

We can't listen to Beethoven and Liszt to compare them (could you imagine if recording was invented 20 years before it was, or if Chopin had lived to old age and Liszt had lived to 90? So many questions would have been answered!). We have accounts of their pupils, but there is a problem with that as far as authority is concerned.

The idea of playing mathematically, or without arpeggiation for instance in chords, and playing pretty much metronomically was well in place in the 19th century although it wasn't widespread. Mendelssohn was known to never want to veer from the score, and he didn't enjoy playing around too much with the tempo. But that said, I'll bet if we could go back and listen to Mendelssohn, we'd find he used lots of rubato. Why do I say that? Because these things have to be taken in context of what else was going on.

Mozart talks in his letters about distorting rhythms and dynamics, and over use of vibrato on string instruments (although it's evident he wanted vibrato), and he talks about how they are basically devices used by musicians to cover up bad playing. Again, it must be taken in context, and I'll bet we'd get a surprise if we heard Mozart. Actually i use a lot of rubato in Mozart, even in the Allegros, but I try to keep the structure in one piece. Basically I do what comes naturally to me through the lens of my own study and training, but that doesn't mean it's right of course.

I guess there is a question raised with Beethoven, and it's somehow harder to answer with Beethoven than it is with Chopin, Liszt and in some ways Mozart. Would Beethoven have pushed the modern piano to its limit had it been available to him in 1810? I can't answer that question fully. He seemed to push everything else to its limit so why not the Steinway? Is it right to contain a piece in its historical context or is it right to play it as we are capable of today?

Nigel Kennedy in the proms a few years back did the Mozart violin concertos, and then did the most amazing trippy psychedelic cadenzas, completely outwith the realm of Mozart that it was unreal. He was proving a point, and he also believed in what he was doing. He believed that his cadenzas were closer to the spirit of Mozart, because had Mozart somehow made it to his 250th Birthday, and was able to perform his violin concertos in public, he may well not have played a cadenza that was in the style of something from the 18th century, and may well have done something that reflected the fact that we've had 250 years of music since he started composing. (OK, 257....)

You are making the same kind of point, and I believe you are convinced by your own performances - not perhaps that you think they are definitive, but that you believe that music by any composer shouldn't be contained in the time it was composed but rather belongs in the time it is performed, and the view you are presenting is that everyone in the 19th Century was far less precious about things than we are today.

Am I right? (I dunno....)

A music score is an inadequate way of showing the intentions of the composer. Words like "allegro", "crescendo", etc are totally random in a sense...

If a composer wants to offer some specific instructions he does so with other means (or a metronome marking, for example).

As such a music score is up for interpretation.

And as such the interpretation is up for critics!

I didn't mind the intro of the Pathetique, to be honest, in Michael's recording, but the Allegro felt a bit weird for my ears...

Hi Joe,

When I play a piano I don't think about when the music was composed, or how pianists played it then vs. now, or other such things. Now that I am old enough I might not even have seen a printed score of the music in decades except to check up on a harmonic progression, a chord inversion, or some other detail. Instead of all of that, my mind goes to and feeds off of experiences with emotions that are in some way associated with the music - usually these experiences reside in the memory but sometimes they are aspirational.

There are constructed facts and artifacts in the physical world and its history to which one can refer musicologically, but these do not negate freedom of expression or the possibility of creative processes rendered upon and emergent from the interconnected facts of the physical world and with such creativity often having a contrarian or even (to some persons' perception from one location in space and time) destructive aspect.

We live in an era when creativity in classical music performance not only is under valued, but even is despised. To my thinking this is a good reason to be a creative performer - usually when everyone is on one side of a trade, it is good to be on the other side and doing something which is quite different from the majority.

The world is always changing and facts must perpetually degrade in order to be supplanted by new outcomes of creative processes.

Hi Michael,

many scornful remarks have been made about the way how you play the beginning of the famous "Pathétique"....

Well, I carefully listened to what you do.... I don't agree with this kind of approach, and I would never recommend to anybody to play that way. But I can feel the honest wish to express something extraordinary and amazing. And this composition is extraordinary and amazing, it's just a masterwork! There are different ways how to hurt such works: some people just play them in a correct, but "grey" way, others are overwhelmed by their power and beauty and lose control. It is very hard to combine correctness and enthusiasm, to find a healthy balance. In your recording this vulnerable "mix" is not perfect at all.... I simply ask myself: What is the bigger "crime"? Just to play a correct, but boring version, or to get overwhelmed and carried away by one's feelings as it happened to you? At least your recording made me listen to this famous music with "new" ears and imagine what I would do with it if I ever played it myself. And there are "grey" versions I simply listen to and ask myself: so what

Yours

Felix