TEMPEST: On Beethoven's Sonatas, Part 3
Week 39 in Year Two of one pianist’s journey to perform the 32 sonatas of Beethoven.
Today I’ll write about a program, from my eight programs presenting the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, that has the one-word title TEMPEST. Here is a playlist of the program, as performed by the late great Alfred Brendel. About TEMPEST:
This program is the first one I learned in my Beethoven journey, during the fall of 2023. I was giving my first house concert in Prince Edward Island, and I wanted it to be a thank-you party honouring neighbours and friends who had helped my daughter and me during Hurricane Fiona. It was the first anniversary of that storm, so I planned a storm-themed program.
Fiona was the most intense storm ever to hit Canada. It had hit us dead-on in September of 2022. Seventy trees came down on our property and lane during the terrifying night of September 24, 2022. For fifteen days after, we lived without power or water.
The program begins with a sonata nicknamed the “Tempest”. It’s a storm that actually doesn’t resemble a hurricane, though; it’s more like your typical summer day of rain and thunder. The second sonata, as a respite, is a sunny one nicknamed the “Pastoral”. In the third and final sonata, nicknamed the “Appassionata”, stormy weather returns with a vengeance, this time as a full-fledged hurricane.
The traditional nicknames of sonatas were mostly added by publishers, rather than being conceived by Beethoven himself. But Beethoven loved reading Shakespeare, in an excellent German translation still used today, and he is said to have told his colleague Anton Schindler to read Shakepseare’s The Tempest to better understand his stormy music.
All three sonatas were written within four years of Beethoven’s life, from when he was thirty-one to thirty-five years old. During this period, he was starting to suffer from ringing and buzzing in his ears. At random times, he would completely lose the higher pitches in his hearing. On being diagnosed with impending deafness, he fell into an existential crisis. He began to realize that his performing career would have to end. He would need to centre his work as a composer.
At age 31, he said to his student Carl Czerny, “I am not very satisfied with the works I have written so far. From this moment on, I shall take a new way.” What was this new way?
Beethoven sketched voraciously. He mapped out an intricately detailed relationship of moods to specific notes, and he struggled mightily to imbed these details into a unique architectural form for each sonata. In doing so, he created a readable language that he called a “poetry in tones”. Although each sonata is unique, his poetic language is always legible. Studying the language of one sonata helps to inform study of others.
There are some significant relationships between the two stormy sonatas on this program. Both are in minor keys, and start in a slow, unmeasured way. Both of them use a blurred pedal to create a mysterious atmosphere in an opening section. Then both of them barrel into a fast paced, angry-sounding storm.
For the second and middle movement of each sonata, Beethoven chooses a major key that is a sixth above the first movement’s key. That gives a hovering feeling; you feel solace but it’s not entirely grounded, it’s a bit unstable.
Both sonatas have three movements, the third of which drops back down into the original key and stormy mood.
The “Tempest” sonata Opus 31 No 2 in D minor was one of the first works Beethoven wrote after talking about his “new way”. He wrote it during a summer retreat in the hilly village of Heiligenstadt. That wasn’t far from Vienna. In fact, today it’s become part of Vienna and you can take the subway to the Heiligenstadt stop, where you can get out and explore a quiet and peaceful, though sharply hilly, suburb. Beethoven took many nature walks on trails that still exist there.
The slow middle movement of the “Tempest” sonata has a dotted rhythm, which given the tragic nature of the sonata could seem to allude to a funeral march. It’s not one – the beat is in three, not four – but it does employ a quasi-ceremonial sound effect of drum rolls.
The third movement features note patterns that the pianist plays with repetitive circular gestures. It feels like a way of playing with the fateful nature of time, not like in ambient music, but as a kind of personal poem that demands to know, all the while tracing those circular patterns – why are we the way we are?
The Sonata Opus 28 in D major was nicknamed the “Pastoral” quite soon after Beethoven wrote it, and he doesn’t seem to have objected. It’s quite obviously inspired by rural life. The first movement is like a little walk on a sunny day. You can hear in this music the shepherd’s flutes and birdsong that Beethoven often paused to listen to during his walks.
One of the first manifestations of Beethoven’s hearing loss was the day a walking companion called Beethoven’s attention to a shepherd’s flute, but Beethoven couldn’t hear it. There’s a great poignancy, therefore, to his use of these motifs in his first movement, almost as though bidding farewell to them. That idyllic movement is followed by a slow movement of a sombre, reflective character. It was a movement that apparently held particular personal meaning for Beethoven. He later played it through for himself often.
From this movement he goes straight into a peasant dance in the third movement and yet another peasant dance in the fourth movement. At the time, he was writing many contradances for orchestra. The contradance is an intensely social, upbeat dance where partners are constantly interchanged. Beethoven uses its infectious, stamping beats to pull himself up from tragic reflection into communal dance.
While practising the third and final sonata on the program, the Appassionata, I felt that it bore an eerily exact resemblance to the night of hurricane Fiona. I could hear and re-experience the hiss of rain stopping and starting, branches torn off and hurled against our windows, and the roar of the high seas.
Beethoven composed the first stormy movement of the Appassionata, and then its slow second hymnlike movement, while he was at home at the piano. Then he got stuck and didn’t know what to write next for a third movement. He went out for a very long walk with his student Ferdinand Ries. As Ries tells the story, midway through this walk, Beethoven fell into an excited mood and began to hum and sing. When they got home, Beethoven forgot all about Ries and rushed right to the piano. Ries took a seat in the corner and watched Beethoven furiously getting the whole finale to this Appassionata sonata down on paper.
The Appassionata sonata has often been described as a “whirlwind”. I notice that both the Tempest and Appassionata sonatas require the pianist to embody many circular movements.
What was the mechanical process by which whole banks of fallen trees, seen throughout our island after the hurricane, had been torn out of the earth? Living through an actual whirlwind is instructive. That kind of big, violent wind motion seems to involves a windup power that takes something with it, rather than blowing against it. There’s a similar concept in piano technique, where you need a kind of windup and follow-through for great power, like in a baseball pitcher’s windup. My old piano teacher György Sebök used to demonstrate this using a music stand or lamp post. If you hit at it, it doesn’t necessarily fall, but if you curve and connect, you take it down. Beethoven works with this type of motion to create amazing pianistic force fields in the Appassionata.
One of Beethoven’s helpful mentors when he was still a teenager was a lady named Hélène von Breuning, whose children Beethoven taught. She noticed that Beethoven would get into a certain kind of mood that was super-stubborn, intense, and beside himself. She named this mood his “raptus”. Beethoven then began to use the word himself to describe certain moods of his.
To me, hurricane Fiona was a kind of “raptus” of nature, completely beside the ordinary weather where I live. I think this was true of Beethoven’s Appassionata too, in comparison with his other sonatas.
A short intro to the “Beethoven Journey” project:
ABOUT ME:
I confused many people when I started my Beethoven Journey to learn all 32 of his piano sonatas, in August of 2023. That’s because they knew me as a person interested in new music, improvising, composing, diversity, and multiple genres.
But I have a history with Beethoven: back when I was a doctoral student, I did Beethoven research and became fascinated with the early pianos of his time, also his sketches, the process of composition, and the rich history of women playing Beethoven. I learned what a fantastic improviser he was, and he began to feel very contemporary to me.
I was also discovering that besides being a pianist, I really liked writing and talking about playing. And so, as a doctoral student, I gave, famously among my friends, the longest most deadly lecture recital on the Beethoven Sonatas ever given. I think it was about 2 and half hours without a break, like a comical extreme.
I dreamed of learning all 32 sonatas, known as the “Beethoven piano sonata cycle”. However, when I became a piano professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, I put my early interest in Beethoven on hold for decades. Then, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I moved to Prince Edward Island to be near my elderly mother and took an early retirement. My new home in a wooded area near ocean proved an ideal practice retreat, and I was inspired to return to Beethoven.
I’m fascinated that Beethoven was a wonderful improvisor. How do I search for this attribute of spontaneity when I play his music? One answer I’ve stuck to is not to write any fingering numbers into the score. I let my hands find the notes directly, as he must have done while improvising. This is one example of choices I make to align with his process.
Does it feel different to have learned all the sonatas, while playing any given sonata? A psychologist who studies music cognition heard a recent concert of mine. She wrote to me later that her impression of me playing was that there was a kind of holograph going on, that I was looking at each sonata through the layers of all the others. Maybe she has something there. I know that sometimes I am so reminded of one sonata while playing another that for a minute I even forget which exact sonata I happen to be in, so there are perils as well as possible advantages!
Soon after I started the Beethoven journey, I began to write this blog. One of my hopes for this blog is eventually to interview other pianists who’ve played the whole set. I have complied a list of pianists throughout history who have played all 32 sonatas, including Beethoven himself of course, and I have 137 names. They include 25 women. I also count 3 pianists (2 male, one female) who have died in the attempt. For comparison, about 6800 people have climbed Mount Everest and 340 died in the attempt, which is a morbidity ratio only about twice as high as for playing the Beethoven cycle.
It takes eight concerts to play the whole set. The order of sonata can be arranged in whatever way you choose, so in my case, each one of my concerts contains sonatas from throughout his life, organized around a theme.
ABOUT BEETHOVEN:
Beethoven was born in 1770, and the French Revolution shaped his life. When at age 21, he left his birthplace in Bonn for the musical centre of Vienna, he had to pass through the front lines. It was quite dangerous and he never again returned to his birthplace.
In his 20s in Vienna, Beethoven was in sympathy with Bonaparte. He abandoned powdered wigs in favor 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. A to-do list of his from this time includes buying silk stockings and signing up for dancing lessons.
In Vienna it was very soon recognized that Beethoven had genius. In those days it wasn’t that you were a genius, but you had a genius, kind of like a household spirit, like a genie, that would enter you to inform you. this very much described Beethoven, who drew inspiration from Nature and felt he was a personal dialogue with the Divine.
By the end of his life, Beethoven had become an almost stone deaf, famous but very eccentric and curmudgeonly individual. Many visitors from out of town dropped by his apartment as a kind of local landmark, and wrote accounts of how incredibly messy it was. Every morning, Beethoven composed, then went out for a walk, shouting at friends in the street. He took supper in a tavern, polished off a lot of wine, read the newspapers, and sometimes ended up ranting to others in the tavern about the sorry state of democracy.
ABOUT PIANOS:
The instrument that we now call the piano morphed hugely during Beethoven’s life. If you think of your very first internet device and your current one, you get the idea, except that pianos grew instead of shrinking. The first Beethoven’s sonata is written for a small, easily lifted piano that had five octaves and knee-lever pedals. The last sonata is for a much heavier piece of furniture: a six-and-a-half octave piano with foot pedals.