How to be Consoled by Beethoven
Week 41 in Year Two of one pianist’s journey to perform the 32 sonatas of Beethoven.
As I’ve mentioned here, my concerts for July, presenting the cycle of all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in Annapolis, Nova Scotia, were cancelled due to circumstances beyond my control that keep me at home on the Island.
I’m thinking about (and know of) those who were planning to listen to it. They, or you, were all ready. Many people have been taking this journey with me, in some cases, listening to all 32 sonatas as I performed them for the first time in Kitchener-Waterloo, ending in June.
What does it mean, is there something to be learned, when something unforeseen happens on a journey?
First question: Does this mean this journey is actually over now, given that I’ve performed the complete cycle?
My instant, intuitive answer is NO. In fact, I’m beginning to think this journey is still quite near its beginning – even though I cannot seek future bookings until I’m sure I can travel.
I started this journey because I have always wanted to bring it to people, in particular to my fellow Canadians, in the way that musicians like Gould, Kuerti, Silverman, have brought Beethoven to Canadians. The way the CBC brings cultural life to Canadians. The way the Stratford Festival brings Shakespeare to Canadians. I’m not giving up that dream.
By the way, my particular “it”, what I wish to bring to people, is not just the Beethoven piano sonatas, but the process involved in them. That’s why I started this blog. In that sense, I’m still on my journey, as I write about this immense frustration of being waylaid and shunted onto a rail siding, sitting here, confused, grieving, afraid, but finding consolation and answers not least in Beethoven’s music itself.
I may not be performing or even practising Beethoven right now, but my mind is constantly playing my Beethoven setlist. The setlist tracks get shuffled by my subconscious. It deviously chooses what would inform and console me in any given moment. This morning, for example, it was playing the very sweet third movement of the Sonata Opus 10 No. 3. This movement isn’t just sweet, though. It’s also positioned by Beethoven as a heavenly consolation, right after a halting, tragic second movement. Here it is.
I noticed it was playing on my mental soundtrack as I sat on the deck with my morning coffee and journal, under our Magnolia Sieboldii tree.
The bloom of this tree, very different from most magnolias found in Canada, is the national flower of Korea. A Korean website describes it thus: “In its full shape and beauty, [Magnolia Siebaldii] symbolizes the national character and mettle of the resourceful and indomitable Korean people.”
This tree keeps on producing white flowers all summer, even while its first blooms have already turned a tan colour and dropped their petals profusely on our deck, and have then formed cones. One can look up into its branches and see all stages concurrently. By the fall, all the flowers will have become bright red cones, while the green leaves turn golden. A slow, mystical progression.
To return to Shakespeare for a moment: did you know that one of the things Beethoven did with his money from publishers was, slowly, a few florins at a time, to buy Shakespeare’s complete plays? At the time, they were being translated by the early Romantic-Era German literary couple, August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel, in the German village of Jena, a place that had become an intellectual early-Romantic-Era hotspot.
Beethoven was also slowly collecting their friend and neighbour Friedrich Schiller’s complete works. You know, the guy who wrote the words to “Ode to Joy”.
You might wonder what Shakespeare, or Beethoven, or the Jena writers, have to do with contemporary Canadian culture. Why bother?
Well, look at it this way. Did you know that Shakespeare was valued first in Germany, which led to the plays gaining their major recognition in England? Sometimes a prophet isn’t recognized in their own country. Culture is a project for all of humanity. While culture does express the life of peoples, nations, and nation-states, it’s an interactive project between these. If we as Canadians want the whole world to recognize why we will certainly never be the “51st state” of the USA, well then, we must send Canadians abroad to express who we are, and equally, welcome others from abroad, in an exchange of ideas. And not only from the present, but also from history, or we’re doomed to repeat it.
By saying this, I don’t excuse the colonialism that has paved so much space for European culture in Canada. We must resolutely refute the Doctrine of Discovery, and remedy its damage. But we also have to refute and remedy the damage of the rise of AI content at the expense of human art. We stand to lose human knowledge, not only of how to make art now, but how we have made it for hundreds of years. All art. Live art performed by humans.
Here’s how a group of German rebel humanist friends who gathered in the early 19th-century village of Jena, including the Schlegels, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, and others, perceived Shakespeare. To them, he was an “other”, foreign bard. Andrea Wolf, who describes the Jena writers in Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, writes:
Shakespeare’s plays appealed to the friends on many levels. For them he was the epitome of the ‘natural genius’ as opposed to the polished refinement of the French dramatists Jean Racine and P{ierre Corneille… The French tradition, Goethe said, could never express human intimacy and passion as Shakespeare did. His plays were instinctive and emotional, his language was organic and evolving. Perhaps most importantly, the power of the creative imagination was central to his works: ‘The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling’.
Beethoven self-identified as a “Ton-Dichter”, a tone-poet. He saw himself as doing for music what the Jena writers were doing for literature, only in a language of tones.
But for me, on my Island, and you over there, how does that work hit us personally?
The other morning, I woke up to find that my mental soundtrack was playing the crazily difficult fugue from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata Opus 106. All day long, the fugue played on, and into the next day as well. Since I wasn’t going near a piano and was fully occupied by my current life situation, I eventually became curious as to the choice of this selection. It’s hardly background music! But when I tuned into it for a moment, I found it was really being helpful. Sometimes the best consolation is validation from someone else: yes, things are tough, I see you. Beethoven was walking with me, through toughness.
When the great Beethoven pianist Annie Fischer performed her farewell recital in England, for her encore she played this same crazy fugue. Now generally speaking, encores are supposed to be on the other end of the spectrum of piano music. They’re usually meant as a gentle nightcap for one’s audience, a sort of meme of consolation. I love this for encores. I think a perfect encore to the complete Beethoven cycle might be, for instance, a piano solo arrangement of the Schubert song, An die Musik (“To Music”). Here’s the late Gerald Moore’s version.
But no, Annie Fischer wasn’t the type to gently doze in a nice armchair by the fire on a winter’s evening, or even under a magnolia tree on a summer’s morning. For her, consolation was all about the challenge of NOT disappearing gently. I guess I’ve got a fair bit of that spirit in me, enough to play the fugue for myself on repeat as I wait for the day I fully intend to bring it and all the other sonata movements back to you, their rightful audience. So I’ll sign off for today with that terrific fugue, for all you who are consoled by human challenge and perseverance. It is played here, live, by Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear, who became the first Black pianist to perform the complete Beethoven cycle. As we Canadians would say, “Elbows up!”
Stewart Goodyear: Beethoven's Hammerklavier 4th movement - YouTube