Week 1: Beethoven or Never
A weekly account of one pianist's process to learn the 32 Beethoven sonatas.
The chair’s legs were made of moose antlers. Next to it in the small living room was a record player atop a small wooden cabinet filled with vinyl records. My little sister was turned away from me, playing with the seashells, rocks, postcards, fans, and dolls that covered every available surface in the room. I knelt before the cabinet and drew out a record. Scrawled on its cover in Aunt Mary’s cramped handwriting, I read the words, “I am full of emotion – it is like heaven!!”
Aunt Mary was outside, walking my parents through the vast garden in front of her small bungalow in the Northern Manitoba bush. If I asked her permission to play the record, I would have to pass her German Shepherd guard dog, tethered by the long table in the dining room between us and the front door. Instead I chose to trust in Aunt Mary’s enthusiastic affection for us, pick up the needle and spin the record. Pale northern daylight filled the room and the music of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto No. 5 rose to meet it, played by Artur Rubinstein with the Symphony of the Air, Josef Krips conducting, an RCA Victor recording.
My father’s name was Victor Toews. He was born just after Victoria Day, 1930, the first child conceived by his parents after they fled to Canada from Stalin’s Russia in 1926. His older sister Aunt Mary nicknamed him “Caesar”, none of us remember why, though I remember her humorous gaiety using it. We all remember her impassioned love for music, how she would dance with a fan around our living room to Spanish music. My father loved to tell the story about how when he was a boy, she bought tickets for the two of them to hear the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, using her egg money from their Steinbach farm. She dressed him in his Sunday best, while she herself donned a large hat and a fox fur stole, its attached head arranged over her shoulder. Somehow they got to Winnipeg, where she paraded them both down the aisle of the Winnipeg Auditorium.
Dad, whose family could not afford music lessons, determined that I would learn piano. He found an old painted Heintzman upright at an auction sale, then refinished it to a golden sheen. Every morning from when I was 5 years old in Winnipeg, through our move to Prince Edward Island when I was 8, until I left home at 16 to study music at McGill University in Montreal, he woke me up to get my practising done before breakfast. I think it came naturally to a prairie farm boy used to morning chores. By the time I’d finished, he’d made oatmeal porridge for the family, put milk and sugar on the table and got the Bible reading ready. It was the same daily breakfast he had eaten growing up on a subsistence farm with an oat field and cows. My mother, sister and brother gathered, and together we prayed and ate.
Nobody knows the exact origin of the surname Beethoven, but my favourite theory is one I read decades ago while standing in a university library browsing Beethoven books. The source is lost but I swear I did not make this up. Instead of the popular idea that the name means Beet Garden (Beet Hoven), the researcher proposed it could mean “By the home of the Toews’s” (Bei Toven). Ha. Comically, it didn’t feel surprising to me at all. As a kid I think I unconsciously thought of Beethoven as a relative. Stories of his stubbornnes, absentmindedness, love of poetry and passionate ideals about humanity synced with the characters of my grandfather and other relatives.
Beethoven’s music was embedded in our home. Dad bargained for boxes of used records of his music at auctions. We spent hours spinning chestnuts like José Iturbi’s record of the “Moonlight” sonata. Once I’d progressed in piano above Dad’s lesson price range, and Miss Frances Gray at the University of Prince Edward Island volunteered to teach me for free, she lent me a hardcover book of the scores of the Beethoven symphonies. I sat my little brother next to me on the couch with this book, put on a symphony recording, took his hand, and traced the lines of the score with his little finger as we listened.
Beethoven remained a through-line in my adult years. My first CBC studio recording, in Montreal when I was 19, was Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata Opus 53, and my first CD recording included his Opus 109 Sonata. My wedding vows were spoken to a backdrop of the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio.
I am now 63, just retired from 30 years as a university piano professor. Of course I taught Beethoven sonatas in every one of those years. Recently having been liberated, why would I want to study all 32 of them now?
The simple answer of the mountaineer: because they are there. But: newly composed music, diverse lesser-known and worthy music, music by women or by people of colour, Indigenous music, all of that is also there. Again, why Beethoven – surely the epitome of the dead old white guy who’s had way too much attention?
While I was doing my doctorate degree at Stony Brook University in New York in the early 1990s, I resolved to focus my requirements on a questioning study of Beethoven, from several non-traditional angles including the role of women as Beethoven interpreters – an astonishingly rich topic. I had a field day studying Beethoven’s creative process as a composer. Lots more to say in future posts but just this right now: I owe much to Richard Kramer, who taught a seminar on Beethoven’s sketches. And also to Jane Sugarman for Stony Brook’s first-ever course on music and gender.
My piano teacher, Gilbert Kalish, though a masterful contemporary music pianist, was deeply fascinated by Beethoven. Gil saw no conflict between studying new music and old classics. This summer I heard another student of his, Katherine Dowling, in an interview describing Kalish as an “omnivore”. At the time I studied with Gil, he was performing Beethoven’s complete cello sonatas with Joel Krosnick at Abraham Goodman Hall in New York City, while also practising the fiendishly difficult Night Fantasies by Elliott Carter, which Carter had written for him and three other pianists. The musics informed each other.
I would like to document the creative process of a performer approaching the complete cycle, in a weekly post. How does it work and how does it feel to research, read, memorize, program, consult, grow, doubt, despair, book concerts, record, edit, seek criticism, experience audience reception, and be pushed and pulled into a new shape by this music? I hope to practise during the week and write a post on Sunday.
But is it not too late in my life for the massive undertaking of a Beethoven cycle? I am 7 years older than Beethoven at his death at 56 – a passing that was not particularly premature for his time (gulp). Do I have the stamina for over 600 minutes of memorized music, the contents of 8 whole concerts? I do some digging for when other pianists started, and discover that the Canadian pianist Robert Silverman’s distinguished traversal was begun in his 60s. And my favourite of all the great 20th century European pianists, Annie Fischer, began to record them at exactly my age – then took 15 years further before completion!
And so, given that my work plan means I have no more time to edit this post, I press Publish.