The Greatest Beethoven Piano Recording Ever?

Year 2, Week 10, in one pianists' journey to perform the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven.

Suspense….What will happen next in this blog??

…I’d have so much to tell you about great Beethoven recordings, about all the ones I’ve listened to this year, and about my reactions to them, whether they be desire, indifference, disgust, admiration, or anxiety-inducing panic …but…

Drumroll….What will be said here next??

…I could talk about Beethoven sonata performance as though it’s a competitive sport, because I know that Beethoven had to best other pianists in salon contests and assert his character and even engage in the sort of dissing-the-other patter typical of TV wrestling shows, but ultimately, I need to drive home that he did all of that not for its own sake but because driven by the larger imperative of a genuine

REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT!!

Fight in front of the Hotel de Ville on 28 July 1830,, by Jean-Vcitor Schnetz

I have never started a blog this way before. And when Beethoven started his “Tempest” Sonata Opus 31 No 2 in D minor, he had never before started a piano sonata that way.

He’d warned his student Carl Czerny. He said he was embarking on a “new way.”

During a time period that was in the throes of a revolution giving birth to liberal democracy, while embroiled in a fighting and poetic movement later called “Romanticism”, those were fighting words. “A new way.”

If you go back to look at the passage I’ve put in bold font above, it is my improvised simulation, in words and pacing, of the revolutionary opening of Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata.

Next Sunday at 3 PM, the “Tempest” sonata will be the work with which I open my eight-concert series in which I am to play all 32 Beethoven Piano Sonatas for the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society.

These days you often hear of one or another performer of Beethoven sonatas referred to as a “genius”. One move that does not qualify you to be a genius is playing all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas. I’ve been keeping a list of people who’ve done that in history and I’m up to 135 names. Far less than the 2000+ who have climbed Mount Everest, but still, not exactly an innovative move.

There might be something else going on in such an activity that’s innovative. Say, climbing Everest alone in bare feet (shudder). But is that genius, or a stunt?

The etymology of the word “genius” points to the idea that someone is creating a whole new genre. Beethoven had genius. What about those who perform his music? Surely by definition, playing covers of anything, especially something famous that’s been covered thousands of times, doesn’t lift you into the realm of genius. However, for a performance or recording of Beethoven to be great, for me there ought to be some sort of resonance with genius, something of the revolutionary spirit, something that protests and puts innovation before perfectionism, something that’s willing to be curmudgeonly and different if necessary.

If necessary – not as an end in itself.

There’s no shortage of pianists doing competitive stunts using Beethoven sonatas. Indeed they’ve been a required work in international competitions for decades. Competitors vie to turn in the “best” Beethoven performance. Elsewhere in the industry, there are those vying to stand out for a “unique” performance. I’ll name some names here, which is not at all to diss these pianists, just hint that there is maybe a wee bit of stuntsmanship involved. Playing the fastest performance I’ve been able to find of a given sonata movement, for instance (Igor Levit), or the slowest one (Anton Kuerti), or the one that most adamantly sticks to the same tempo despite the varied contours of the movement (Glenn Gould), or playing all 32 sonatas without stopping (Julian Jacobson and Stewart Goodyear), or being the first person to independently put them all on YouTube (Valentina Lisitsa), or sightreading them all online during the pandemic (Eric Zivian).

Chapeau, tout le monde! It’s a tough music world, and showcasing uniqueness is eternal. I could be accused of doing it myself by writing this blog.

But stuntsmanship and innovation are different forms of uniqueness.

I have no idea what the greatest of all Beethoven piano sonatas recordings may be, but I’d love to hear of your candidates. Please leave me the names of any that have been important for you!

However, here are a few of the factors that to me would qualify a recording for such greatness, with examples.

1. It has been transformative for someone.

For me, that would be José Iturbi’s recording of the “Moonlight” sonata on an old 78 RPM disc. It was included in a pile of records my dad bought at auction when I was 12. We listened to it in the evenings at our summer place by the ocean while watching actual moonlight. I was transfixed. It may have been issued as part of some “pops” anthology of “masterpieces”, but I love it. Nobody plays it like this anymore, with lots of rubato, suitable romantic blurred pedal, bringing spooky operatic melodies out from the gloom. Also, you can tell it was recorded in one take, not corrected by any engineering tactic. It’s a dramatic, populist performance and it reaches people, just as it reached my whole little non-expert family.

2. It passionately – not just academically – advocates in a revolutionary way for a new approach to our knowledge of Beethoven.

For me, this was the first-ever recording of the “Tempest” sonata on a historically accurate fortepiano, the one by Malcolm Bilson. I bought this vinyl album when it first came out; I think I was in my 20s. I listened to it again the other day and once again, I was bowled over. This is such vivid playing, such a compelling argument for the characteristic sounds of those early fortepianos. This is truly “how the piece goes”, completely overturning any accusation of mere stuntsmanship. Mind you, playing anything on early pianos during the 1980s, when Malcolm made his first recordings, was incredibly daring. During that time, I was a student at Indiana University, then one of the grand world centres of piano playing, when in the midst of my studies, the school hired a harpsichordist named Elisabeth Wright. She was supposed to teach Baroque music, and she was given an out-of-the-way studio in an older hallway, perhaps to help deter us piano majors from being converted to that antique instrument. But unknown to the authorities, Elisabeth was not sticking to Baroque music: she had acquired a Beethoven-era early piano. She kept it out of sight at home. During her first summer in town, while she went to Italy to teach in a summer Baroque program, she left me to house-sit for her and keep it in tune. I could not tell my piano teachers I was doing this. I knew they felt that it would ruin a student’s touch on the modern piano to be corrupted by such instruments. Needless to say, times have changed, but they changed due to Malcolm Bilson’s recordings, performance, and advocacy, and of course, to spirited revolutionaries like Elisabeth.

3. It highlights a forgotten, perhaps controversial, yet essential aspect of Beethoven’s life and work.

To me, the topic of women playing Beethoven falls into this category. I think it’s relevant to our Beethoven knowledge because I think he had profound interactions with many women pianists and often stated that he preferred them to male pianists. I think it’s worth trying to understand why that was. It was a revelation to me, during the early 1990s, to discover that a woman pianist actually had a recording contract to record all 32 Beethoven sonatas. This was Edith Fischer, a Chilean pianist. I thought then that she was the first woman to complete a recorded Beethoven cycle. Now I believe she was the second or third. Annie Fischer (no relation) preceded her, and possibly the Soviet pianist Tatiana Nikolaeva, about whom I don’t have enough information. But during the 90s, those two pianists had not yet had any recordings issued for the North American market. Of course this was way before YouTube. Back then, when I discovered Edith Fischer at Tower Records in Manhattan, she was issuing CDs one by one – there weren’t many copies, but you could buy them – and she hadn’t yet finished. I didn’t know whether the final result would qualify for “greatness”, but I knew that she was heroic to me. That this could actually be done by someone like me, eventually (she was my mom’s age), was galvanizing. Today, when I listen to Edith Fischer, I’m very impressed. I haven’t had enough time to compare carefully, but I think I like her playing better than Annie Fischer’s, and that’s saying a lot, since most music critics put Annie Fischer’s cycle into their list of the greatest cycles ever recorded.

Before considering the factors I’ve just mentioned, it goes without saying that a performance or recording should be of professional quality. By no means perfect – that is impossible – but a thorough study must have been done. Misreadings, for instance, shouldn’t be happening (though most recordings have a slip in them somewhere). They are different from mistakes that happen in the moment (which are often edited out of modern recordings). I’m talking about the errors where the person just hasn’t looked carefully at the score and has learned some wrong notes. Such misreadings used to make Beethoven furious, and I certainly don’t blame him, when he took so much care with the details of his scores.

This is personal, but when I’m listening, it doesn’t matter to me what the quality of the recording engineering is like. Unreasonably, I feel very fussy about it when I’m doing a recording of my own. But audio quality is really a separate issue from the artist’s musical conception, just as the quality of the hall or the instrument are separate. I can happily listen past those elements to focus on the artists themselves.

What is your favourite Beethoven piano sonata recording?