Ahhh, the numbering of the works of the classical masters! If you’re old enough, you may well remember owning an LP of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (From the New World), but it would have been labeled as his Symphony No. 5, before scholars renumbered it. Likewise, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major was actually the second piano concerto he wrote, after the one that would later be published as the Second Concerto. (There had also been an unpublished student work, but we don’t need to consider that one here.) Beethoven chose to publish this concerto first, so the numbering reflects not the compositional order but the publishing order.

Classical music can be confusing.

So let’s listen to both concertos, No. 1 in C Major, and No. 2 in B-flat Major.

Both of these works reflect the youthful classicism of Beethoven’s early period. In each of these concertos you hear the strong influences of Mozart (who was already gone) and Haydn (who was not). But in each you do catch glimpses of the more expansive Beethoven to come, the Beethoven who would take classical forms and stretch them to unprecedented lengths. More important than that, though, is that in each work you hear Beethoven’s humor and musical wit, which are characteristics not always called to mind when considering this composer. Of particular note for me in a Beethoven concerto is the third movement, the rondo, when Beethoven always seems to have a great deal of fun with the rhythms, almost making the listener wonder, at first, where the bar line and the beat even are. There’s a feeling of syncopation even where there’s no technical syncopation happening at all.

In the first performance I am featuring here, of the Piano Concerto No. 1, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, is joined by pianist Khatia Buniatishvili, who is a wonderful artist I’ve just discovered this year. She plays with technical control that is amazing to behold, and she’s also one of those pianists who does put on a bit of a show as she plays. (Her hair would be quite the distraction if she were playing from the score as opposed to memory.) But note also how attentive she is when she goes tacit and the orchestra picks up the main thrust of the music. Buniatishvili performs truly as a partner with the orchestra and with Maestro Mehta, and it’s a fantastic performance.

In the second performance, the Piano Concerto No. 2 is played by soloist Martha Argerich and conductor Daniel Barenboim, leading the West-East Divan Orchestra. Some years ago I listened to the entire cycle of the Beethoven symphonies that Barenboim and this orchestra performed at the BBC Proms, and this combination of musicians has, to my ear, a particularly special touch with Beethoven. Argerich is, of course, an absolutely brilliant musician of Argentine and Swiss descent, and she brings here the weight of experience and years of musical training and insight to her performance of the Second Concerto. Which was really the first…but we won’t go into that again.

Share This Post

 For most casual listeners, the words “Beethoven” and “sonata” almost always indicate one of the sonatas for solo piano, and with good reason; the piano sonatas comprise some of the greatest writing for piano in music history, and they are important listening for anyone. And if you happened to be a piano student of any skill, likewise your piano teacher eventually had you work on one of Beethoven’s sonatas.

However, Beethoven didn’t just write sonatas for piano alone. He also wrote sonatas for solo violin and piano, and for solo cello and piano.

Before turning to a specific sonata, it’s interesting to look at the term itself. Sonata is an Italian term, which differentiates an intrumental work to be played rather than a vocal work to be sung (a cantata). Over time, especially in the Classical era when forms began to settle in to certain sets of expectations, a sonata became somewhat standardized as a large-scale work of three movements, which in turn were usually in a standardized sequence: an allegro which used a form in which a single melody (or maybe two) were stated, then developed, before being played again one final time before ending; a middle movement which was usually in a slower tempo; and a fast finale, often much faster than the first movement, and often in a Rondo form. The structure of the first movement–intro, theme, development, recapitulation, coda–became so entrenched that it in itself became known as sonata, or sonata-allegro, form. So important did sonata-allegro form become that it became the almost universal form in first movements of symphonies.

Of course, the history of the symphony is as complicated as that of the sonata, and as Classicism gave way to Romanticism and then to Modernism, adherences to standard forms came and went and came again. Even Beethoven was not always locked into the expected forms: he would start a three-movement piano sonata with a slow movement (the “Moonlight”), or he would write two- or four-movement sonatas. It is best, when thinking about musical forms and definitions of musical terms, that one remember the wise words of Captain Hector Barbossa of Pirates of the Caribbean fame: “The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

And when you’re a towering genius like Beethoven, who is literally shaping the course of music history for centuries to come, well then…the guidelines are there to be ignored at will. 

After all that, let’s turn to Beethoven’s Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 5 in D Major, which follows all the usual rules and adheres to the usual structure. Beethoven wrote this sonata at the same time as the one preceding it, the Sonata No. 4, in 1815 when his deafness was reaching its endpoint. He was entering what historians have called his “third period”, which is when his most introspective and profound music seems to have resulted.

This sonata is apparently less frequently performed than the Sonata No. 3 (which as of this writing I have not heard), which I find interesting. The Fifth Sonata begins with a simple declarative statement by the piano, which sounds twice, seeming to hesitate after each sounding, before taking off into the initial allegro. The movement then propels through its formal demands before drawing to a close before the listener really expects. The second movement puts the cello’s lyrical strengths on display, before a final movement that is fugal in nature. When the entire work ends, it is with a feeling of reflective abstraction as Beethoven, only left with his inner ear at this point, is transcribing sounds he can only imagine.

As much as I love the violin as a solo instrument, the cello is not to be slighted in its uses. The technical demands of the instrument are entirely different from those of the violin (which Beethoven had already mastered). Playing the cello has its own physical demands, and the instrument’s voice resides in a much lower register, which means that it has to be treated differently than the violin if it is to be heard in full partnership with its accompanying instrument. Beethoven clearly understood the cello as well as he did the violin, judging by the results in this sonata.

Share This Post

 One reason that film music often struggles to get mainstream acceptance as music worthy of interest on its own is the fact that film music is always dependent on the film for its inspiration and genesis. Film composers don’t tend to have a great deal of freedom in their work, and they have to compose their scores to accommodate the timing and rhythm of the film given them to score. Obviously some of these composers are masters in their own right and create great works even with these constraints, but the constraints are still there.

Music as an aid to storytelling is best seen, prior to the movies and even after them, in the world of opera, but there is a smaller arena where the great composers of the 19th century often found themselves dealing with at least some of the same constraints that film composers would later confront. I’m talking about incidental music for plays.

Some incidental music has gone on to be quite famous indeed, seen as masterpieces on their own. Felix Mendelssohn’s work for A Miidsummer Night’s Dream is one of the enduring classics, and one of its melodies has even become a traditional recessional in modern weddings. Hector Berlioz also wrote incidental music, as did Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Bizet, and Grieg.

And so did Ludwig van Beethoven.

What’s interesting about a lot of incidental music is that, Mendelssohn’s work for Shakespeare excepted, the music has outlived the plays in nearly every case. Schubert’s music for Rosamunde is well known (and in that case, mainly for the overture alone), but the play is almost completely forgotten. Likewise with Beethoven’s fine music for a play called The Ruins of Athens. This play was written by August von Kotzebue for performance at a new theater in Pest, and if it’s been performed anywhere in the last hundred years, I’d be shocked. But because one of music’s greatest of all masters wrote incidental music for it, the play isn’t completely forgotten.

Beethoven’s suite of incidental music is one of his more pleasing works, even if even this group of pieces is rarely heard except for the Turkish March movement. The suite is not purely instrumental, featuring movements for voices and orchestra. It’s all suitably dramatic but also very much Beethovenian. For all his anticipation of Romanticism, Beethoven was even at his most ostentatious always grounded in classical proportion and form. This suite, with its drama and genial melodies, doesn’t so much seem to anticipate Wagner as look back at (and, in so doing, extend the reach of) Mozart, and it does so with the geniality of the Beethoven who wrote the Pastoral Symphony.

I’ve long maintained that one need not necessarily have seen a film to appreciate its score on a separate listen, and when people question me on this point, all I need do is point to music like Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite or Beethoven’s The Ruins of Athens and ask, “Do you really need to see a forgotten play to appreciate this music?”

Share This Post