DEDICATIONS: On Beethoven's Sonatas, Part 4
Week 40 in Year Two of one pianist’s journey to perform the 32 sonatas of Beethoven.
As I navigate this July, I feel so very grateful for my concert presenters. In particular right now, I’m thinking of Heidi Fewster, the director of the exciting new series called Classical Concerts, at St. Luke’s Anglican, a richly historic church in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia that features a gorgeous nine-foot concert piano. Despite the sad cancellation of my July series there, the understanding, hard-working volunteers in Annapolis generously remain keen to reschedule that series at some future date. Meanwhile, I’d like to mention their next upcoming concert on August 10 with two world-class players, Katie Schlaikjer and Anya Alexeyev. Later this fall, the series features two of my pianist colleagues here on the East Coast who I hold in the greatest esteem, Peter Allen and Simon Docking. You can be sure to expect music played by seasoned professionals with finesse and integrity at all of these concerts.
Today’s subject is the concert I’ve titled DEDICATIONS. It’s one of my eight-concert series presenting all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas.
Here is a playlist of DEDICATIONS, played with a noble, simple profundity by the American pianist Richard Goode.
This program really ought to be called “Dedications to women”, as I chose five sonatas illustrating Beethoven’s artistic collaborations with five different female musicians.
What were Beethoven’s interactions with women like, given his cranky and explosive tendencies, impulsive nature, chaotic living conditions, not to mention his often inappropriate humour? I’d have to say, probably messy. Despite this, and without necessarily giving him a pass for his daily behavior, my impression is that in essence he was respectful, warm and idealistic about the worth and humanity of women.
Beethoven never married, though he dearly hoped, or consciously professed that he hoped, for a stable marriage. Much has been written about his psychological makeup and his possible ambivalences. You could read Maynard Solomon’s well known and researched views on this (if somewhat dated in the field of psychology), in his book titled Beethoven.
I’m not a psychologist. I know that Beethoven dated a lot while a young socialite, eventually had a half dozen short romances, and probably deeply fell in love with two women, about whom way too much has been written. In DEDICATIONS, I focus on other kinds of relationships, about which far too little has been written. Beethoven had many close artistic interactions with women mentors, piano builders, and patrons, and he several times stated that he preferred women as interpreters of his piano sonatas.
DEDICATIONS begins with the Sonata Opus 14 No. 2. It’s dedicated to Baroness Josefa von Braun. I’ve done some reading about this wealthy amateur, for whom Beethoven wrote a pleasing, intermediate-level piece, for her to play while she took lessons with him. She is generally characterized as having been an older lady, for whom he perhaps played this music at salon evenings.
This brings an image of her to mind as some sort of dowager. I wondered, so I did the math on their ages. She was 33. He was 28.
She was the wife of Peter von Braun, who was about 40. Braun was the general manager of the two most important theatres where Beethoven wanted to play. But young Beethoven was being stymied by Peter Braun. Seems the man had some kind of political bias against him.
Beethoven, throughout his communications, shows the fairly universal tendency of composers to be extra nice to those who can help them get a premiere performed. I’d add that we performers as a general rule completely understand this tendency, and we all appreciate a nice dedication, given that new scores are often thorny or at least, well, new.
As Jan Caeyers writes in his Beethoven biography, Beethoven hoped with this sonata dedication to win over the sympathy of the pleasant Josefa, and see if she could talk to her husband – and it worked. Peter Braun did relent, and offered Beethoven the gig space.
This sonata is in three movements. The first movement starts with a nice tune in the right hand alone, followed by the left hand answering, so that this less-advanced pianist didn’t have to play hands together right away. With devices like that through the movement, Beethoven creates something charming but also playable. The second movement is a little march, where one can hear the influence of his teacher Franz Joseph Haydn, such as Haydn’s use of wit and surprises. Beware the sudden last CHORD!!
The last movement is a “scherzo”, which in Italian means joke. Here it’s not comical as in Stephen Colbert stand-up comedy, but rather, gentle wit and good spirits, with some fun hand crossings and entertainment value.
The next sonata in DEDICATIONS is the famously nicknamed “Moonlight” Sonata, Opus 27 No. 2. The name was bestowed, decades after Beethoven’s passing, by the Romantic poet Ludwig Rellstab. Rellstab wrote a fanciful description of the music, as like being on a boat on a mysterious lake in the moonlight with ghostly swans gliding by.
And of course, a ruined castle.
This was not Beethoven’s vision at all.
He wrote this for Countess Julie Guicciardi, a teenaged piano student of his. Julie wrote that he taught her to play it, and was very strict about making sure she got everything right. She was 18, he was 32, and there was a little love affair going on, soon stamped out by her father, who rejected a proposal from Beethoven. Julie was a pretty and vivacious teen, and this piece includes lots of features that young pianists love – lots of pedal, drama, melancholy strumming of chord patterns, and a passionate finale with amazing fast notes. Beethoven wrote the dedication as being from “Luigi”, rather than Ludwig, to Guillietta, rather than the Julie that everyone called her. So, Luigi and Guillietta, like Romeo and Juliet – complete with the disapproving family. Beethoven was reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at that time. The romance fizzled out, but the public has kept this sonata popular ever since.
The “Moonlight” sonata is in three movements. What I hear in the first movement is not what Rellstab heard, but in fact a funeral march, with similarities to an actual funeral march he wrote around this time within his sonata Opus 26. The sonata moves on into a second movement that seems light and charming, perhaps a kind of nostalgia for a simpler world, or hope for a happier future one.
The music then catapults into a fiery and tragic third movement. As Beethoven was writing this in his early 30s, he was starting to be deaf. This was not like gradually turning down the volume, but instead, buzzes and clicks and sudden changes of volume, and it threw him into an existential crisis. Part of him was reaching for a normal life and hope and marriage, but I think there is a deep melancholy and grief in the background of this sonata.
In his later life, Beethoven said this about the “Moonlight” sonata:
“People do go on about that sonata! Is it not obvious that I have written far better works? The sonata in F-sharp major – now that is something else entirely”.
I’ve placed that very F-sharp sonata next in my program. It’s a short work in two movements: the Sonata Opus 78, nicknamed "à Thérèse". Dedicated to Countess Thérèse von Brunsvik, it was written in 1809, when Beethoven was 39 and Thérèse, 34.
Thérèse had been raised in an enormously wealthy Hungarian noble family, along with her younger sister Josephine. If you cast your mind to who are known locally in your community as exceptionally talented elite adolescents, that was how these two sisters were regarded in theirs. As it happened, they were both also beautiful. When they were teenagers, they began to take lessons with Beethoven. He fell in love with the younger sister, Josephine. It was a mutual, genuine, and lasting affair of the heart, but an inappropriate match socially. Marriage would have been out of the question. This began many years of an angsty attraction and correspondence, while Josephine went through two failed marriages and ended up divorced with four children. She died very ill at age 42, never having openly accepted Beethoven’s love for her.
Meanwhile, Thérèse devoted herself to good works and never married. Because she was a brilliant and thoughtful person, the good works had great effect. For example, she pioneered the idea of “Kindergarten”. Today, we have Thérèse to thank for organizing the first preschools.
Beethoven knew her very well as a thoughtful friend and a fine pianist. For her, he writes a first movement that is beautiful and lyrical, but also intelligent and interesting in the way it changes from one chord and mood to the next. The second and final movement is very tricky to play, a worthy challenge for her as an accomplished musician. It has some passages that have a Hungarian flair.
The fourth sonata in DEDICATIONS is a late work, the Sonata Op. 101, dedicated to Baroness Dorothea Ertmann. This sonata was completed in 1817 when Beethoven was 47 and Dorothea 36.
Dorothea had grown up as a piano student of Beethoven. She was a top-flight, outstanding, famous pianist. She premiered many of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, in private salon gatherings for small groups of avid, educated listeners. She was said by those describing musical life at the time to have been tall and with physical strength. The musician Anton Reichardt heard her when she was about 30 and wrote,
“As she performed a great Beethoven sonata I was surprised as almost never before. I have never seen such power and innermost tenderness combined in even the greatest virtuosi; from the tip of each finger her soul poured forth, and from her hands, both equally skillful and sure, what power and authority were brought to bear over the whole instrument. Everything that is great and beautiful in art was turned into song with ease and expression!
Dorothea married a military commander, who was stationed just outside Vienna. They had only one child, when she was 23, named Franz Carl, who sadly died when he was just a toddler. They never had more children, but remained a loving couple and were very close to Beethoven. There is an account that when Dorothea lost her child, Beethoven had come over and said, “now we will speak in tones”. He sat down to play piano, and she later said, “he told me everything, and at last brought me comfort.”
Beethoven often called himself a “Ton Dichter”, or poet in tones, and this sonata is a profound declamation. The first movement employs a singing style. The second is a kind of military march, only otherworldly, like one in the heavens. Then follows a grieving, longing movement, which transforms into a wonderful burst of joy and triumph in the fourth and final movement.
The last sonata on the DEDICATIONS program, Sonata Opus 109, was written in 1820 when Beethoven was 50, six years before his passing. He was almost deaf, and mostly living alone, though famous, with many friends around him, and his nephew Karl sometimes staying with him.
This sonata is dedicated to Maximiliane Brentano. Maxe, as she was informally known, was between 7 and 10 years old when Beethoven knew her. She was the daughter of Franz and Antonie Brentano, her mother being informally known as Tonie.
Before Beethoven met them, the Brentano family was living in Frankfurt, far from Vienna. Tonie’s father, however, was Viennese, an avid collector with a mansion in Vienna filled with art and objects from all over the world. When he died, it fell to Tonie to go through all of it. The whole Brentano family ended up living in the Vienna mansion for three years while Tonie accomplished that gigantic task.
Perhaps you can relate to her predicament. If so, I suggest the very entertaining contemporary memoir, They Left Us Everything, by Plum Johnson. I believe the sorting task took its author about the same amount of time as it took Tonie.
Meanwhile, Tonie’s much older husband Franz was often away, keeping his business afloat. Beethoven came over and played for Tonie a lot, on a piano located in an anteroom just outside her chambers. There he apparently played so passionately at times that once Maxe ran in and poured a pitcher of water over his head.
Beethoven sent the score of this sonata to Maxe eight years after the Brentanos had departed Vienna to return to Frankfurt. He had not seen them since, and Maxe was now 19. Beethoven wrote to Maxe,
“This what is now addressed to you and what recalls you to me as you were in your childhood years, so equally your beloved parents, your admirable and gifted mother, your father filled with truly good and noble qualities.”
The father had meanwhile, from afar, partly financed him to write his massive late work for choir and orchestra, the Missa Solemnis.
Tonie played classical guitar. I think you can hear some guitar sounds in this piece. Others have noticed that there also appear to be some quotations from Beethoven’s song cycle, An Die Ferne Geliebte, or To The Distant Beloved.
I can only speculate that since Tonie wasn’t a pianist, perhaps Beethoven wrote this music for Maxe to play… but for Tonie to hear.
The entire sonata is an outpouring from a man looking back on his life, and in some kind of transcendent dialogue with the Divine. It is in three movements, first an expressive movement, then a fast tormented movement, then an ethereal set of variations on a soulful melody.