Bracing Myself for an Excess of Beethoven

from the Amazon.com Web page for the article being discussed

Next year will mark the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven. The anniversary date will not be until December, but I am already bracing myself for an onslaught of performances and recordings on all fronts. Those who have followed my writing for some time know that I do not harbor any negative feelings about Beethoven, but my negative feelings about excess are vigorously strong.

For the record I was in graduate school working on my doctoral dissertation when it seemed as if the entire world had gone crazy over the “Beethoven bicentennial.” There was a string quartet making regular visits to the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to give a series of concerts covering all of the string quartets. They happened to be one of the few quartets at the time whose repertoire included microtonal music. I had the temerity to ask the faculty member who had arranged this concert series if it would be possible to tack an extra performance on at the end of the Beethoven cycle to provide an opportunity to listen to microtonal compositions that were seldom performed, let alone recorded. He replied, “You don’t understand. Beethoven is the man of the hour! He’s the man of the future!”

To the extent that there are more performers out there with the skills to do justice to microtonal compositions, I would say that the future turned out better than I had feared. By the same count, I can probably say the same about my attitude towards Beethoven. Over that 50-year interval, I learned a lot about the critical role of rhetoric in playing any composition; and I have enjoyed the diversity of rhetorical perspectives that different performers bring to their Beethoven interpretations.

By that same count I appreciate the current Beethoven interpreters willing to admit that the man had a sense of humor. Indeed, there are times when it seems as if he is determined to one-up Joseph Haydn (the teacher he seems to have disliked more than any of the others) when it came to seasoning the thematic material with an abundance of witty gestures. (Indeed, he was still at it even after Haydn had died.) Nevertheless, Beethoven offerings are a bit like servings of pasta. The best of them should be treasured in memory, but too many of them are not particularly good for either body or spirit.

It was in that frame of mind that I found that MSR Classics had sent me (without any request on my part) the sixth volume of a series of recordings called A Beethoven Odyssey. These are recordings of English pianist James Brawn, who made his concert debut at the age of twelve playing a Mozart piano concerto in Australia. The “Homeric journey” is a path of Brawn’s own invention through the 32 published piano sonatas with the three Opus 2 sonatas (published in 1796 and dedicated to Haydn) at one end and Opus 111 in C minor (published in 1823) at the other.

This is far from my first encounter with this “Beethoven cycle.” I have made the trip both by attending a series of recital performances and by serious listening to a variety of different recordings of more pianists than I would care to enumerate. Whenever I have to take on this “cycle” in my writing, I like to point out that Opus 111 is far from “the end of the line” in the Beethoven canon. Opus 111 was completed in 1822, the same year in which the Opus 119 set of eleven bagatelles was completed, followed by the Opus 126 bagatelles in 1824. Between them, of course, is the Opus 120 set of 33 variations on Anton Diabelli’s waltz theme. Furthermore, where the broader catalog is concerned, the last five string quartets have yet to be composed.

The Brawn disc I received consists of three four-movement sonatas. In order of appearance, these are Opus 7 in E-flat major, Opus 26 in A-flat major, and Opus 22 in B-flat major. I have good feelings about all three of these sonatas; but, when it comes to Brawn referring to these as “Grand” sonatas in the very first sentence of his notes for the accompanying booklet, my hackles waste no time in rising. Each of these three sonatas rises or falls in the ability of the performer to identify a rhetorical stance and then convince the listener that it is a convincingly valid one. Brawn never really makes a case for any sense of grandeur. For that matter, I am not sure how much value he attached to taking any rhetorical stance and prefers, instead, to have no priority other than doing justice to the marks on paper.

My response to different approaches to these 32 sonatas covers the full gamut from jaw-dropping amazement at the performer’s insights to a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot reaction at its most dismissive. The best I can say about Brawn’s interpretations is that, with a capable set of technical chops, he sits comfortably between these two extremes. Over the course of listening to this recently-released CD, my blood never came to a boil; but neither was my attention particularly piqued.