Morning Thoughts about Beethoven

I have to say that I am enjoying my 66th year, particularly since I am learning so much more about life and about music than ever before.

I have been working on my piano skills for a while (if you call a while a couple of decades), but now that I can play well enough to actually listen to what I am playing, I find myself totally boggled by the genius of Beethoven, my current companion at the piano.

How is it that I missed so much when I was younger when I listened to recordings and performances of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas? How is it that I never noticed just how personally and effectively he writes for the piano. And how different it is from the way he writes for the violin, the viola, the cello, or stringed instruments in combination.

Beethoven's piano writing contains multitudes, and I am only beginning to be able to notice the surface. His Sonatas are little (or not so little) worlds that are designed to be inhabited and animated by a single human being. The geography is there, the roads are all mapped out and paved, the climate is set, and the progression through the day is layed out. But the drama that happens is a personal one that resides in the mind, heart, and musical experience of the pianist. And that drama can change, depending on the particular feelings and experiences of the person playing.

And if someone is listening, the listener's personal experience can illuminate a secondary drama. I like to believe that in a performing situation the inner images of a person listening can have a great impact on the inner images of a person playing. When there are more people playing or more people listening it is different.

I am actually glad that I have come to this understanding of Beethoven later in my life (and at an age he never reached) because otherwise I would have been too intimidated by what he can do with a given musical idiom, gesture, motive, melodic fragment, harmonic progression to ever consider writing music myself. That what I write and have written is inferior to Beethoven is a given, but how inferior astonishes me on a daily basis.

I understand a lot more about Brahms now, because I understand a lot more of what Brahms understood about Beethoven. I am forever grateful that Brahms took up the job of trying with all his might to keep the figurative fire lit, because of the tremendous music he wrote. And Schubert was able to speak directly to pianists with far more ability than I ever imagine I will have (I do have a volume of Schubert Sonatas, just in case).

Beethoven certainly wrote music for pure entertainment. I would put the overtures and many of the symphonies in this category. And there's nothing wrong with writing and using music for entertainment. Mozart did it extremely well. Haydn too. And Schubert. But I'm so fortunate to have lived long enough to be able to recognize expression that is personal, and intended for pianists to connect with the essence of music.

When music written long ago with great care reaches out from the page and resonates with the beating of my heart, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude.