Week 36: Two Keys to Performing Beethoven Piano Sonatas
One pianist's journey to perform the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven.
Concert No. 6 in my Beethoven journey was completed last night! I was delighted to have been invited to present it in a spacious North Shore family home, for an inspiring group of some fifteen of their enthusiastic and welcoming friends.
Selections from the concert will be repeated in public tomorrow – Sunday, June 9 – in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. Here’s the advert:
Today, while I’m regrouping, I’ll write a bit about two keys to performing Beethoven sonatas. They aren’t as commonly taught as one might think, but I believe Beethoven himself used them. I personally find them indispensible.
1. Know the chord changes.
Last night after I played, there was a time for questions, and someone asked about my learning process. I mentioned the importance of knowing the chord changes underlying the notes. At the reception afterwards, a piano student said to me, “I wish there was an edition of the Sonatas that had the chords printed above it, like with popular music scores.” Brilliant!! Why is there no such edition?? I have a mind to make one myself.
Last night, I was so glad I knew the chord changes at the occasional points when my very recent memorization of the sonatas became vulnerable. I have about six weeks to learn each of my Beethoven programs, each of which constists of several sonatas. I can memorize the music in that space of time, but not always fully integrate it into mind and body. Knowing the chord changes meant that when I got that frightening feeling, known to all classical pianists, that my hands would imminently forget a run or chord voicing, I could quickly patch in something from the same chord without having to stop or stumble. I’d place good money on a bet that Beethoven did the same, and probably even discovered a few new licks this way. Another benefit of knowing the changes is that when you teach the sonatas, you can sit at a second piano and improvise an accompaniment to your student’s rendition. This helps them to hear the rhythm and structure of the work.
When the great composer-pianist Franz Liszt, at the age of eleven, was taken to play for Beethoven, Beethoven asked him to play a Bach fugue. This, by the way, demonstrates Beethoven’s foundation as a musician bred on the music of his German predecessor Johann Sebastian Bach. Thinking in chord changes was such a common practice during Bach’s time that music was often notated with just the bass line and a set of chord changes. That notation was called “figured bass”, and both Beethoven and Liszt would have been trained in how to play from it. Fugues, however, don’t have a figured bass notation. Instead, several different lines besides the bass, called “voices”, are written down. But as Beethoven knew, the voices when played together do imply chords. So, when Liszt plays this Bach fugue, Beethoven tests whether Liszt knows the chord changes by asking him to play it over again in a different key. Well to do that, unless you’re a guitarist with a capo, you have to know the chord changes so well that you can think on your feet to translate them into a different key. Jazzers do this all the time. Classical pianists of today, not so much. Liszt passed the test, and legend has it that then, Beethoven came over to him, patted him on the head, and said, “Devil of a fellow!” I don’t know, it sounds suspiciously Brit to me. Beethoven never did get to England, although he did sell a lot of his music there. Anyhow, I hope that we classical pianists can retrieve this skill of knowing chord changes, which also renders us more versatile to play in different genres.
2. Forget fingerings.
As a young student I was once in a competition judged by the eminent British piano teacher Fanny Waterman, who founded the Leeds International Piano Competition. I didn’t win. While digesting this after the announcement event, I was taken aback when she approached me near the buffet table to give me her views on why not. She expressed to me her dim opinion of my teacher at the time, the legendary György Sebők. She felt he did not prepare students to compete, and she suggested to me that I could do better, in a competitive environment, to keep a firm grasp on every single note by assigning and memorizing its fingering, then silently reciting those numbers as I played. I think she meant sort of setting up a mental sound track like, “3-4-5-5-1-2-I hope I play better than that so-and-so-3-2-4” and so on.
As I stood silently horrified, my mental sound track was instead to recall Sebők’s voice expressing his dim view of competitions. If I entered one, he would take a long puff of his cigarette in its holder, then say, “Enjoy that circus”. He once told a story in his masterclass of being on the jury of a week-long international competition, before he gave up on them, and noticing that certain jury members would rush off every day to practice their scales to stay in shape. He called this sort of thing “superstition”. In his office, on the wall next to the piano, he had placed a small six-inch-long brass sign that he’d cribbed from a hotel, reading, “No Unnecessary Noise.” He used to say he could hear the mental noise of certain pianists as they played, distracting from the music.
Sebők was vigilant to calm his own distracting thoughts. He proposed a theory that if one was entirely successful in doing so, one could hear the thoughts of others. Every year, he said, he would take a long walk up a mountain path to a little chapel in the Valais region of Switzerland, away from where he used to give an annual summer masterclass in the little village of Ernen. He would sit silently in this chapel until all thoughts from the preceding year had died down into silence. Then he would return.
Beethoven almost never wrote fingerings into his music. An exception is a place in the Sonata Opus 2 No. 2 that I played last night. He suddenly writes in a note-by-note fingering for a suddenly difficult passage. I have been unable to find anyone in YouTube videos who uses this fingering. I haven’t been able to use it on modern pianos, either (perhaps it’s playable on early pianos; the next time I visit one I will check). But this sonata is filled with comedy, and I suspect Beethoven of having some fun at the expense of his rival pianists. Meanwhile, Beethoven spent inordinate amounts of time making careful notations for almost every aspect of the performance other than fingerings.
I made a rule at the outset of my Beethoven journey to never put fingering into the score. It has worked well for me. I have felt liberated to become closer to Beethoven’s thought process, and more adept at inuiting the best fingering without too much conscious thought. I do still believe that for piano students who haven’t yet developed an experienced knowledge of fingerings, writing in an occasional fingering as a pedagogical tool is useful, as long as it is understood that they are pencilled, changeable, and best ditched from the conscious mind once the work has been integrated.
I have two more concerts before I complete my eight-concert journey through all 32 Beethoven Sonatas.
The seventh concert, titled “Hero”, will take place in July. It will include the great “Waldstein” Sonata Opus 53, as well as Sonata Opus 7, Opus 49 No.’s 1 and 2, and Opus 10 No. 2.
The eighth concert is slated for the one-year anniversary of beginning this journey, August 14th. The program will include Opus 14 No. 1, Opus 90, Opus 10 No. 1, and wind up with his last Sonata, Opus 111 in C minor.
Please write me if you’d be interested in attending either one of these!