HERO: On Beethoven's Sonatas, Part 1

Week 35 in Year Two of one pianist’s journey to perform the 32 sonatas of Beethoven.

Heading into June and July, I now have eight weeks to play eleven concerts. In June, I’ll play the last three of my eight concerts presenting all the Beethoven sonatas for the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society. In July, I’ll be performing all eight concerts for St. Luke’s Classical Concerts in Annapolis Royal, on Saturdays and Sundays at 3:00 PM.

Eight weeks…eight blogs…eight different concert programmes. I see a plan!

So, for the next eight weeks, I’ll write about one of my programmes each week.

I’ve given each one of my eight concerts a one-word thematic title. Today, I’ll write about my concert named HERO. You can hear me perform HERO live on June 11 in Ontario, here, and on July 26 in Nova Scotia, here. For now, if you’d like to hear the music of HERO online, I’ve made a playlist of the great Annie Fischer’s recordings, here. Here’s the programme (looks long, but the middle three sonatas are all short):

Sonata No. 4 in E flat major, Opus 7

Sonata No. 20 in G minor, Opus 49 No. 1

Sonata No. 21 in G major, Opus 49 No. 2

Sonata No. 6 in F major, Opus 10 No. 2

INTERMISSION

Sonata No. 21 in C major, Opus 53 “Waldstein”

What did the word “hero” mean in Beethoven’s time, when, in the aristocracy that Beethoven grew up in, musicians were servants of their rulers? Beethoven “woke”, you might say, to the goal of the French Revolution, which was “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality.” Theoretically, each person was to have equal access to democracy. But there was more nuance than that. The thinkers who influenced Beethoven knew that this waking-up process had to be an ethical struggle, a fight for social justice, morality, and harmony with Nature and the Divine In Beethoven’s heroic music, he depicts in tones what the struggle feels like for a person on a hero’s journey.

The first sonata I’ll play, Opus 7, was written when Beethoven was young, 26, in 1796. He was in Vienna and his star was on the rise. General Napoleon Bonaparte’s star was also on the rise, for he had squelched a Royalist uprising in France and was now advancing into Italy. Beethoven was, so far, in sympathy with Bonaparte. He had abandoned powdered wigs in favour of his own dark unruly hair and he was socially popular as a kind of revolutionary bad boy in the salons. He wasn’t yet deaf, he wore nice clothes even though he was poor because he was trying to prove himself, he was mainly a performer and improvisor, and the women thought he was cute.

Beethoven dedicated this sonata to a teenaged girl name Babette Keglovics. He was friends with her family and gave her piano lessons at their mansion. Babette, like many educated women then, was an advanced pianist, so this sonata is hard to play.

This sonata is in four parts or movements. The first movement is fast and brilliant. But besides demonstrating what an amazing piano performer he was, Beethoven was also developing his skill as an orchestra composer. So he often uses an orchestral style, and you can imagine hearing different instruments in his textures, especially the French horn. The key of this sonata is E flat, which was the best key for heroic music because the horns of that time naturally played the notes of that key best. Lots of people in his audience were military officers and their wives, who relate to hunting or military type references like a cavalry with galloping horses.

But Beethoven was also a deeply tender caring person in his personal life. He’d taken care of his family growing up when his dad became an alcoholic, he was very close to his mother before she died when he was seventeen. When his brother later died years later, he adopted his brother’s son, and there were many other instances where he helped others. He was also deeply emotional in love. So the second movement is a slow movement where we hear that lyrical side.

The third movement returns to being upbeat with a strong French horn influence. But here we also have a stormy middle section, illustrating a test for the hero.

The fourth movement starts out in a singing way, but here too, there’s a middle section that is stormy and challenging. In the end, the hero comes through and the piece ends with the conflict resolved in a gentle, we could even say Canadian manner.

The next two sonatas on the programme, Opus 49 numbers one and two, are the shortest and easiest of the sonatas to play. So why would I program them in a concert called HERO?

I’d like to question what we mean when we say a classical composer is “heroic”. Perhaps we do Beethoven a bit of an injustice by thinking of him as that stormy guy with his head in a thundercloud, alone in his room, shaking his fist at the universe.

I’m not saying that didn’t happen – I mean, haven’t we all had days like that? But is it how we want to be remembered?

Actually, Beethoven wrote a great number of works that are easily played and instantly loveable. His “Für Elise” is probably the most-taught classical piano piece out there – possibly only exceeded by another Beethoven piece, the “Moonlight” sonata. These were pieces he wrote for his students and his audience members, in a caring and responsive fashion. He also wrote a lot of other music for music lovers that we hardly know about today, such as easy arrangements of hundreds of folksongs from all over Europe, especially the British Isles.

To me, Beethoven’s daily community activities, his teaching and responsiveness to amateur musicians, reflect a different kind of heroism. On the day-to-day, he was often frustrated in his moods, as someone with a big gift and many health challenges would naturally be, but to find the daily focus to write charming, useful, accessible music takes, I think, its own kind of heroic courage. The two Opus 49 sonatas reflect this side of Beethoven.

Beethoven’s Opus numbers are mostly chronological, but the Opus 49 sonatas were in fact written early in his life, then numbered later. Each of them has two movements, and they’re both in G. Whether minor of major, the key of G is one that will easily sound in tune on an early piano from this time. In those days, there was no standard system in use to tune in such a way that every key would sound equally in tune, so amateur players used to tune their pianos to such easy keys.

The first of the two, Opus 49 No. 1, has a first movement in the minor mode, and it’s a bit melancholy and lyrical. The second movement switches the mood to a major key, upbeat folk dance. The second sonata begins with a bright, rather formal presentation of a clear-cut sonata form in G major. Its second movement is a very charming little court Minuet, the kind where you can picture a Jane Austen scene with people bowing and doing dance steps while dowagers gossip behind their fans.

After the 49ers, I play the Sonata Opus 10 No. 2 to end the first half of HERO. This sonata vividly displays the contrast between when Beethoven wrote for “Liebhaber” – the German word for amateur, or “music-lover” ­­– and when he wrote music for “Kenner”, or experts, to play.

Opus 10 No. is short, but a showpiece for would-be “Kenner”. It is not only difficult, but full of in-joke trickery and skullduggery. Throughout its three movements – a fast and witty Allegro, a devious, dark Minuet and a crazy-fast finale – Beethoven sets up expectations for both the audience and the pianist, then inserts tripping spots.

After intermission, my HERO program closes with the “Waldstein” Sonata Opus 53, written in 1803 when Beethoven was 33. Lots of threes – and it’s in three movements! He had just received a gift, from the French piano maker Erard, of the very latest kind of bigger piano, which had been trundled over the Alps to be delivered to him. This piece employs a wide range of registers from high to low. You can tell that Beethoven is having fun as a pianist with all the sounds and effects of this newer instrument.

Beethoven was, however, not very well. When he was 30 he had been diagnosed with a gradual onset of deafness, leading him into a terrible existential crisis. For one thing, he realized he wasn’t going to be able to make a living as a performer for much longer. So he embarked on what he called his “New Way”, which was to refocus on composition, develop his own voice, and make his own philosophical journey.

Meanwhile, he was still inspired by Napoleon, but felt more conflicted (Beethoven loved politics) since Napoleon was now trying to fight with Austria and would eventually invade Vienna twice. He was working out his feelings by writing his third symphony that he was calling the Bonaparte symphony. And he was writing this sonata, too. But then, before either one of these works was published, Napoleon decided to crown himself Emperor. Beethoven saw this for what it was, which was a takeover by Napoleon to become a kind of military fascist dictator, and he was so furious about it that when he heard the news, he took the first page of his symphony and tore it apart from top to bottom, throwing it on the floor and exclaiming, “Now he is just like all the other dictators!” At least, this is the story told by a visitor of his that day.

After that, he reconfigured his symphony as symbolic hero’s journey of an individual towards an ethical version of liberty, fraternity and equality in harmony with the divine, calling it the Eroica, or “Heroic” symphony.

As for the Waldstein sonata, he dedicated it to a knight who he believed to be someone who represented those qualities. This was the Count Ferdinand Waldstein. Waldstein came from Beethoven’s home town in Bonn and had recognized his talent, arranging and paying for him to move to Vienna. A few years later, Waldstein had to flee Bonn when the French invaded and come to Vienna himself. From there, Waldstein had raised his own infantry and gone off with them to England to help the side of the British. In the end, his infantry never managed anything other than to save a burning biscuit factory in England, and eventually Waldstein died alone and bankrupt back in Vienna. But every pianist knows his name today because of this tremendous “Waldstein” sonata.

It's in three movements. The first, very fast and with great tension building up throughout. In the second slow movement, you can hear a distant battlefield bugle as there is a pause, and a reorientation. This leads into the final movement, where it becomes clear that what one is fighting for is for peace and harmony to return to the land. However, there are some more battles that must be waged before the movement ends in a triumphant finale.