Beethoven Sonatine WoO 44a transcription

In honor of the Beethoven 250th birthday year I made two new transcriptions of the Sonatine WoO 44a that the young Beethoven wrote for mandolin and harpsichord. I was surprised to see that Van Magazine listed it as number five on their list of Beethoven's ten worst pieces. While I agree with their other nine choices, this charming little Sonatine has always held a special place in my heart.

I made a transcription of it a couple of years ago for our Summer Strings orchestra, and it was a real favorite (people referred to it as "Woo"). Because of this recent ranking, I decided to re-work the Sonatine as a piano trio in two versions: one for typical piano trio (violin, cello, and piano), and one for violin, viola, and piano, so that non-mandolin-playing people who don't have a string orchestra at hand can play it as a piece of chamber music.



The music is available on this page of the IMSLP, and in the meanwhile you can listen to a computer-generated recording of the violin, viola, and piano version here.

Gottfried van Swieten, a person I would like to have known

In my wonderings about Haydn's Opus 20 Quartets, and the relationship that Mozart and Haydn had in Vienna, I have been thinking about Gottfried van Swieten. Baron Gottfried van Swieten was the son of Gerhard van Swieten, Empress Maria Theresa's private physician, who also held the position of director of the court library in Vienna.

Gottfried had a career as a diplomat, and spent seven years (1770-1777) in Berlin working as an ambassador for Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia. While he was at Frederick's court, van Swieten spent a good deal of time studying music. He had the great fortune to study with a student of J.S. Bach.

By the late 1770s Frederick's interest in music had waned considerably. I sometimes wonder if Frederick might have given van Swieten his music library when van Sweeten left for Vienna in 1777. We know from a letter Mozart wrote to his father in 1782 that the Baron invited Haydn and Mozart to his home every week to play manuscripts of music by Handel, J.S. Bach, and Bach's sons.

The historical record is sparse, but the musical record is rich. The Haydn Quartet Opus 20, no. 2 has material in it that sounds strikingly baroque, and three of the Opus 20 Quartets have fugues as their last movements. I wonder if Haydn and van Swieten might have know one another during the early 1770s, and I wonder whether Haydn, who was a well-known composer, might have been introduced to J.S. Bach's unpublished music by van Swieten earlier than the historical record shows.

When van Swieten returned to Vienna in 1777 he took over his late father's position as court librarian. And then he invented the card catalog.

Yes. The card catalog!



But he is best known as an important patron of contemporary composers like Gluck, C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven (Beethoven dedicated his First Symphony to van Swieten). Van Swieten also supported revivals of out-of-fashion composers like Lully, Handel, and J.S. Bach. He also wrote music himself.

A ramble on this upcoming Beethoven year

Some people are making a big deal of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth in December of 2020 with festivals and special programming, and some people are reacting to the hubbub by vowing to avoid listening to Beethoven for the year. While looking for some kind of middle ground in these internets, I found my way to this proposal to spend 2020 listening to a wider variety of music than usual.

Unfortunately everything on this list seems to involve recorded music, and I, as a recovering classical radio professional and CD reviewer, rarely get the kind of pleasure from recorded music that I do from live music. I also rarely derive as much pleasure from hearing other people play a piece of music as I do playing it myself. Following the score while listening to a recording helps. So does watching videos taken from concerts. Sometimes I play along with recordings, but only as a tool to help me learn the viola part of an unfamiliar orchestral piece.

As I grow older I notice that the musicological community has grown younger, and those young musicologists have a formidable presence in these internets. Their mission is (in part) to challenge the status quo, and make a case for more gender equity and racial equity in music. There's nothing wrong with doing that. The world of music is full of people who are biased, egocentric, opportunistic, bigoted, and sexist. It always has been that way, and it will probably always will be. (Beethoven probably had many of the above characteristics.)

When I was in my twenties I thought I knew a lot about music. When I think about how little I know now, I can't imagine how musically "provincial" I must have been as a young person. My musical coming of age coincided with the beginning of the HIP (historically informed performance) movement, and after I learned about the recorder and the baroque flute, I had a goal of only performing pieces of music on the instrument they were intended to be played on. Some of the Handel sonatas, for example, were written to be played on the recorder. That worked for a while, until I got frustrated with the limitations of the repertoire. (It was before musicologists discovered the thousands of pieces of flute music that fell out of print, only to be woken up again with the advent of the Werner Icking Archive and the IMSLP.)

During my twenties and thirties I worked as the person who programmed the music for the local college radio station (four or five hours every day). I was not happy with the state of public radio programming at the time, and was eager, in my innocence, to provide the local radio audience with an alternative. In order to attract and maintain their listeners NPR stations played single movements of pieces rather than entire works. They also played select pieces of music over and over again. Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances was big. So was Rhapsody in Blue. There was a moratorium on twelve-tone music, and one on vocal music, so it's no wonder that driving across the country (or at least from Illinois to New Jersey and Boston), I could recognize every piece on the radio. Usually in two or three notes.

Our radio station was different. We played whole pieces. We played vocal music (song cycles during the week, and on Sundays I would often play an opera). Fridays were devoted entirely to early music played on period instruments (and sung, of course). We played new (twentieth-century) music. We played twelve-tone music. We played as much commercially recorded music as we could find that was written by women, as well as concert tapes of new music written by women. Beethoven was in our regular rotation, but we usually played each of his symphonies about once a year. A year would also include a single playing of each of his string quartets and other chamber music, as well as his sonatas.

I felt kind of "cutting edge" at the time because nobody in the "larger world" of radio could get away with the kind of self-indulgent programming that I could get away with. Our station was not part of NPR, and the powers in the University that were in control of the radio station did not do anything to measure listener response. Many of the recordings that went into the station's library were bonus recordings sent to me by the CD reviewing magazine I wrote for (they sent a list every month, and I checked off the things I wanted for the library). I had a friend at Naxos (the father of the vice president), so I got their whole catalog during their early years, and added the recordings to the station's library. The Marco Polo recordings of unusual music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were mind expanding. Every monthly shipment was an education. I would, of course, only allow excellent recordings in the library. Less-than-excellent recordings were (ahem) "traded" in order to pay for expenses (like my salary).

This radio paradise all came to an unfortunate end twenty years ago. At that point I went to graduate school to study composition, and I learned to love Beethoven's string quartets through their viola parts. I also spent a few years learning all of Beethoven's violin sonatas, and performing most of them. I have only played the viola parts of the first, fifth, sixth, and seventh symphonies, along with a handful of overtures, and have played the violin parts of the sixth and seventh. I have played the flute parts of them all (including piccolo in the ninth). I really hope I get a chance to play the viola part in the second, third, eighth, and ninth symphonies before my playing anatomy gives out.

Now that I have reached an age four years after the age that Beethoven ultimately reached, I look forward to this upcoming celebration of his work. My feeling about Beethoven during the past thirty-five years has grown. At first I regarded him as a perhaps over-played composer that I would put in equal rotation with other classical-period composers, and now I believe that he was a remarkable composer who is worthy of all the accolades associated with this 2020 celebration of his work.

You might find these posts about radio and these posts about Beethoven I have made here over the year interesting reading.

Listening to Beethoven String Quartets "einmal anders" with Animated Graphical Scores

Go ahead and watch before you read further:



I have enjoyed Stephen Malinowski's animated graphical scores ever since they first appeared on YouTube. I used them in my music appreciation classes to help students who didn't read music follow the scores of pieces we were studying. I imagine there isn't a reader here who hasn't come across one of Malinowski's animations in these musical internets. It's hard to imagine the amount of thought and time and work and love that he has put into this project.

This Beethoven String Quartet project is a collaboration with the San Francisco-based Alexander String Quartet. He used the Beethoven cycle they recorded for Arte Nova in 2010.

During my decades (!) of being a CD reviewer, I combed through at least a dozen sets of Beethoven Quartets with score in hand. My task was to evaluate the playing and the quality of the recordings and write about the differences between this or that interpretation. Sometimes those differences are difficult to put into words, and sometimes those differences are extremely difficult to put into words. From what I have heard so far (and I'll be listening one quartet at a time, just like you) the recordings are expertly balanced (am I just hearing the viola in this movement from Opus 18 no. 2 more because I can see it--"dressed" in green--or has the engineer brought up the level on that voice when it should be heard?). The playing is excellent, and the interpretation seems to be more equally-voiced than those first-violin-dominant recordings of yore when microphones and mixing boards were far less sophisticated.

Through his work as a composer, as a person fascinated by graphical representation of music (which many of us did by hand with graph paper before we had computers), and as a pioneer in applied computer graphics, Malinowski has found a direct way to explain the way pieces of music work from the inside, and in real time, so that people without any musical background can have a more complete sensory experience with these quartets than they would listening to a recording on its own.

For those of us who get non-computer-aided stimulation from reading scores, I can say that what Malinowski has represented graphically with color, light, and shape, is right on the money. Or non money, because he distributes it for free.

He writes about his methods here.
You can find the complete Beethoven Cycle (on YouTube) here.
And you can follow links from this page that show the history of Malinowski's work and the tools he uses (and has used over the years) to do it.

If you want some more guidance, you can go to my 2010 post about listening to Beethoven String Quartets.

I just learned that Malinowski has just started working on animations of the Haydn Opus 20 Quartets. Coincidentally my Haydn Quartet Project quartet (playing through all the Haydn Quartets in order with a group of quartet novices--people who have never played in a string quartet before) is finishing up Opus 17 and embarking on Opus 20 soon.

Beethoven and Sanders

When was the last time Americans had a presidential candidate (or any other kind of candidate) who would use a whole movement of a Beethoven Symphony to frame an argument? I confess that sometimes I was distracted by the Beethoven (I always get distracted when people use intact pieces of music for background), but by the development section I found common ground. I really appreciate the way the coda frames the coda of the argument, and the way the people who made the film allowed Beethoven to close the argument.

I have heard that both Democrats and Republicans have responded strongly in favor of what Bernie Sanders has to say and how he says it. I can certainly understand why.

Music of Gratitude: Beethoven

Last night's concert was a wonderful experience. Before we played Beethoven's Sixth Symphony our conductor Kevin Kelly mentioned to the audience how grateful he was to have enjoyed 18 seasons of the Prairie Ensemble in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The orchestra's response, prompted by Beethoven, was one of collective musical gratitude (felt by everyone in the room) in this Symphony that is really "about" gratitude. I had never thought of the piece that way before, and after last night I will never think of it without feelings of extreme gratitude for being able to make music in this most pastoral of prairies.

[I will even forgive Beethoven for the viola passage at letter K of the last movement, which last night happened to go pretty well.]

I'm grateful that we could put such a difficult program together on three three-hour rehearsals (and the last run-through of the Beethoven during the last 45 minutes of the rehearsal on the morning of the concert on a collective empty stomach). I'm grateful for the chance to fret and sweat over difficult passages and to have wonderful people to play with who bring an equal amount of integrity to the rehearsal process.

It was the last concert for the Prairie Ensemble, but the tradition of this kind of music making goes backwards and sideways in time in all directions. We know it when we find it, and, with hope we will find it again.

The Lure of the Superficial

It gets more and more difficult to get music appreciation students to even try to understand Beethoven. Year after year I find fewer and fewer students really care to engage in Beethoven beyond a melody or two. In Daniel Barenboim's "Beethoven and the Quality of Courage" that just appeared in the New York Review of Books, he mentions that Beethoven was unable to write anything superficial. Perhaps the problem lies in the undeniable fact that our young people are being bombarded with so much superficiality in their lives (much of it technologically produced) that some of them never learn to separate the superficial from the essential. Perhaps Beethoven's "in your face" substantialness is too much for many of them to deal with.

I fear that the gradual and deliberate "on-lining" of education will not teach students how to separate the essential from the superficial. After learning how to separate the superficial from the non-superficial the old-fashioned way, it is possible to derive value from anything, but people first need to learn how to learn in order to be able to do the self-directed type of learning that is necessary when studying something solely by way of a computer. That kind of learning is certainly not being taught in the high schools that are suffering from years and years of teaching "to the test."

When it is difficult to engage people in learning material that isn't necessarily going to be "on the test," how can you expect them to move forward and become truly educated.

I have never been able to "do" being superficial with any degree authenticity (irony intended). I also don't recognize superficiality until after the fact.

Now it's time to share a poem by Hughes Mearns:

Yesterday, up on the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd stay away . . .

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door . . . (Slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away.

Speed

I learned a great deal from listening to a recent Radiolab podcast about Beethoven, but I didn't learn anything about Beethoven from it. When the hosts confessed their mutual dislike of Beethoven, and then suggested that the Beethoven "we" know might not be the Beethoven that he wanted us to know because of the metronome markings, I wanted to stop listening, but I continued (it's only an 18-minute podcast). Matthew Guerrieri's voice popped into the discussion, and there were elements of sense that came up concerning the tempo a person might choose when playing music in different acoustic environments, and the fact that Beethoven couldn't actually hear his metronome. I know from experience that composers almost pick tempos that are too fast for fast movements, and I have never taken printed tempo markings (even mine) to be anything aside beyond suggestions. Italian words are nice and vague. They suggest character, and that's what music is all about.

The hosts had a string quartet play some excerpts from Beethoven's 5th and 3rd to demonstrate how exciting it is to hear Beethoven played, with a metronome, at a fast tempo. It would be very difficult for a whole orchestra (including the bass section) to play at such fast tempos without scrambling around, but the hosts didn't touch that subject (it would muddy their argument).

After these 18 minutes I now understand why so many New York musicians tend to favor fast tempos. They think that it makes music more exciting. Perhaps they think it's what people want to hear. I noticed it 30 years ago when I was at Juilliard, and I notice it in many recordings I hear from New York-based ensembles. I noticed it last week when I heard a New York-based woodwind quintet play a concert out here in the "hinterlands."

I think that tempo is subjective and relative, and that there is a whole world of musical excitement that has little to do with speed. I hope that Radiolab keeps its distance from musical subjects in the future.

Lengthy Reflections on "A Late Quartet"

Now that the "A Late Quartet" is playing in a few major cities, I'll let free some observations that might be interesting to people who have seen the film (I wrote a "preview" review that had very few plot details a few weeks ago). If you haven't seen the film you might want to wait a while to read this post. I have read several reviews from its LA and New York showings, and have found very little written about details that make me STILL think about the film every day. Nobody seems, for example, to mention the props and the sets and they way they relate to the characters, so I will begin with those.

First, there are the households. Robert and Juliette Gelbart, the second violinist and violist of the quartet, clearly live on the upper west side of New York. Everything about their apartment not only screams "Upper West Side," but it screams of the Upper West Side I knew during the 1980s, and occasionally observed during the 1990s. My father used to call the Upper West Side "Piano Town," because that's where all the pianists he knew lived, but I learned (when I moved there) that it is populated by musicians of every stripe. The rents used to be rather cheap, the walls were thick (good for practicing), and it was easy to get where you needed to go to play or teach.

Their apartment is relatively small, and we see "Jules," as she is called, practicing in her bedroom. It's hard to imagine where Alex, their daughter, might have fit in that apartment, but when we learn that the Fugue was on tour for eight months out of the year, I imagine that the three Gelbarts didn't spend that much time together there.

The apartment of Daniel, the first violinist, has an area by a bay window where he makes bows. There are bow makers who play quartets, but I can't think of any quartet violinists with serious performing schedules who have the time to make bows. I suppose that his bow making shows that he doesn't have much of a life outside of music. He begins a bow around the time of the beginning of his relationship with Daniel and Juliette's daughter, and the relationship comes to an end after he presents a finished bow to her as a present. The making of the bow measures their relationship.

Daniel's apartment is austere, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and that bay window, which normally would give warmth to a living space, simply supplies light for his bow-making equipment. It could be anywhere in the city, anywhere where you could keep a car.

We see Daniel's car parked right outside Alex's apartment, which is probably in Brooklyn, because nobody could find that kind of "Doris Day Parking" in Manhattan. Everything about Alex is colorful and bright (and beautiful). She has a striped violin case and a really brightly colored apartment that she moves into after returning from what I imagine would have been four years at Curtis in Philadelphia (where the getting in isn't easy for anyone, and the tuition is free). Alex is presented as a serious violinist with aspirations to become a successful quartet musician herself, but she seems more serious about rebelling against her mother, who bears the brunt of everyone's "issues," in addition to coming to grips with her own life-long sense of loss. That's often the position of a violist in a quartet musically, and it's the position of many violists who are involved in musical life "à quatre."

The Fugue Quartet rehearses in Peter's house. It must be a house because it has two floors, and the whole downstairs seems to be panelled in wood. It's old-school (like him), and in nearly every frame taken in his house there is a framed picture of Miriam, his late wife. She died one year before the action of the film takes place, and her presence and absence in Peter's life is palpable. Peter, who is supposed to be in his later 70s or early 80s, seems to be surrounded by death. When he and Juliette (who love one another like father and daughter) go to the Frick together to look at Rembrandt self portraits, he sees them as living things that look at the people looking at them. Towards the end of the movie, we see him holding an LP cover and listening to a recording that the quartet made with his wife, who was a mezzo-soprano. He (and we) have a vision of her singing (it's Anne Sophie von Otter), and the piece she is singing is from Korngold's Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City).

It is tempting to think about the way the seven-movement structure of Beethoven's Opus 131 could correspond to the film's seven major characters. The members of the Fugue are the central four, and Alex, Miriam, and the Flamenco dancer all pull at the fibers that hold the ensemble together. Calling the ensemble "The Fugue Quartet" is a stroke of brilliance. (Quartets take their names from composers, cities, people, mythological characters, and musical expressions, but I can't think of another quartet that took its name from a musical construction). A fugue is, of course, made of four voices that are highly dependent on one another, echo one another's material in ways that good composers present in uncanny ways, struggle with one another (the stretto is a major component of most big fugues), chase one another around, and keep asserting their identity by stating the subject and countersubject in their different voices. Adding more voices to a fugue complicates things.

Beethoven's Opus 131 begins with a fugue. As far as I know, it is the first string quartet ever written that begins with a fugue. The first movement changes keys several times (also unusual), and when the fugue is over, both the meter and tempo change. We know that the second movement has started. The third movement is kind of an interlude (it accompanies the "interlude" between Robert and Pilar, the flamenco dancer), and the fourth movement develops and reverses the motive of the interlude. Director Yaron Zilberman uses the fourth movement as the background of the meeting between Juliette and Daniel on a bridge in Central Park, and bits and pieces from it (it is a very long movement with a lot of material and many changes in tempo and meter) punctuate other parts of the action. There are grand pauses between fragments towards the end of the fourth movement, and the fifth movement feels like a scherzo but behaves like a rondo. Then everything goes all ponticello, and all the members of the quartet start bowing on the bridge and making eerily ghostly sounds. The sixth movement acts like a slow introduction to the seventh movement, which seems to take many of the seemingly disparate themes and motives of the movements that preceded it, and present them with a sense of unity, as if byegons are byegons, and all is well, albeit in C sharp minor.

The last scene of the film happens during a concert. Robert has been living in a hotel room because Juliette kicked him out of the apartment. Robert reacted to Daniel's relationship with his daughter physically, and things are not good between them, but they still have the first concert of their new season to play and Opus 131 is on the program. Peter is really suffering from the early stages of Parkinson's, but has agreed to play anyway.

The Fugue Quartet plays the beginning of each movement (edited nicely), and we get the sense that in spite of all they have been through and how they may feel about one another, they can still do what they are there to do. After the beginning of the seventh movement, Peter suddenly stops playing. He stands up and tells the audience that everything is moving too quickly for him and that he cannot continue. Then he asks Nina Lee, the cellist of the Brentano Quartet to take his place. She walks on stage from the wings, cello in hand. Robert and Juliette have a brief, spontaneous, and tender reconciliation (perhaps it was the power of playing Beethoven together in concert), and Nina sits down to play.

Robert (the risk taker in the ensemble, who has threatened the unity of the quartet by suggesting that the two violinist take turns playing first violin) made it clear in the beginning of the movie that he has always wanted to perform Opus 131 from memory (a few quartets have done this, but it is not common quartet practice). After Daniel stands up to tell the audience that you can't "ride the horses" of the seventh movement without being prepared by the sixth movement, he spontaneously decides to close his music and play to the end of the piece from memory. Robert reacts by closing his music, and then Juliette closes her music. It looks like Nina might even have closed her music (she must have played the piece with them before). Since Nina is a real cellist, something kind of magical happens when she puts bow to string and plays. The non- (or novice) string player actors react physically to her physical presence on the instrument, and it made me laugh out loud, because they all became more physically engaged than they had in all their carefully-choreographed playing scenes from earlier in the movie.

There is one detail that I found quaint and rather of implausible. Robert and Juliette go to an auction to buy their daughter a violin. The instrument they are interested in is a Gagliano. Robert "plays" a single phrase of Ziegeunerweisen on the instrument, and decides it is good for his daughter. The bidding begins, and it ends with a guy in a business suit bidding $25,000 for it, and Robert and Juliette storming out after they were outbid. $25,000 for a Gagliano? Regardless of which Gagliano the instrument was made by, only in a fantasy world would it sell at auction for that little. $250,000 would be more like it!

Review: A Late Quartet

I had the great fortune to watch a preview of Yaron Zilberman's A Late Quartet, a film that will be released in theaters in New York and in Los Angeles on November 2nd. If you like string quartets (the music and those who play it), I imagine you will find watching this film as enjoyable and worthwhile as I did.

The movie is about (I'm not giving any plot spoilers here) The Fugue, a highly-successful New York-based string quartet that has played together for 25 years. Their oldest member, a cellist named Peter Mitchell (played by Christopher Walken), is diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, and has made the decision to retire from the quartet. This change, along with influences from people outside of the quartet, begins to erode the delicate balances (musical and familial) that allowed the quartet to function as a successful musical organization.

Walkin plays the elder-statesman-musician very well. Peter Mitchell does not seem to be modeled on a particular cellist or, for that matter, on any musician in particular, but he has qualities of humanity, humility, wisdom, generosity, and morality that many of us like to expect from our chamber music mentors (some have actually lived up to our expectations). Daniel Lerner, the quartet's first violinist, is played by Mark Ivanir. Lerner came to Juilliard as a foreign student, and formed the quartet with Mitchell and two of his equally-young colleagues. He is a self-absorbed perfectionist who makes bows as a hobby. Robert Gelbart, the second violinist in the quartet (who takes risks in his private life and wants to take risks in his musical life as well) is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. He is married to Juliette Gelbart, the quartet's violist, who is played by Catherine Keener. They have a 24-year-old daughter named Alexandra, played by Imogen Poots, who takes lessons from Daniel Lerner and plays in a quartet that is coached by Peter Mitchell.

Much is made of the unorthodox seven-movement structure of Beethoven's 13th Quartet, his Opus 131. It frames the film, beginning with the opening fugue subject from the first movement, and ending with the final Allegro. Opus 131 accompanies and punctuates much of the action (there is also some non-Beethoven music) and becomes almost like a character. Motives from the first four movements serve as leitmotives for the various relationships between pairs of characters during the exposition. The relationships reveal themselves gradually, and though they end up being quite complicated, they are never implausible.

These quartet musicians are human, and some of them make very human (and often risky) mistakes. I believe that this film does a lot to show people who are not musicians how delicate the personal balances can be in a chamber music ensemble. They are as delicate and as fragile as the complications and balances in the music itself.

The superb actors have clearly spent time becoming familiar with their instruments. Their left hand positions, and the way the vibrato looks compared to what it sounds like might bother some string players a bit, but it is not enough to interfere with my enjoyment of the movie. After all, this is a movie about who we (string players) are and what we do, and these excellent actors are taking certain risks by entering our world and exploring the music that we love and the kinds of relationships that we have. I am particularly grateful for the care that the actors, their coaches, and the camera people put into focusing on the beauty of a straight bow stroke, whether the strokes are made by the actors or "bow arm doubles." Some of the off-the-string strokes show a valiant effort (it takes a good 20 years to develop a fully-functional bow arm). The synchronization between the actors' fingers and the actual sounds, made by the very fine Brentano String Quartet (celebrating their 20th year together), is very good, and the instruments (supplied by Rare Violins of New York) are simply beautiful.

After watching the film I opened my score to Opus 131, and I have to say that the film helped me to "see" it in a new way. Although Opus 131 is not the ideal starting place for people new to Beethoven quartets, the film serves as a perfectly good gateway to the kind of lifetime obsession that many musicians and music lovers through many generations have had with these 16 enduring and constantly-relevant masterpieces.

What better "lay" spokespeople for Beethoven and for string quartets could we ask for than this particular group of actors and actresses and this director?

Watch the Trailer.

Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet and Beethoven's Quartet Opus 59, No. 3

Here's a nice way to see (and hear) how Beethoven used Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet, K. 465, as a model for his Opus 59 No. 3 Quartet. I love the domestic settings of these two videos. This is, in my mind, the kind of setting where chamber music should be played, and I really like the way both of these quartets (the Italian Quartetto Lyra for the Mozart and the American Jupiter Quartet for the Beethoven) play these first movements.





You can go back and forth between the two windows, which is a real luxury. You can also follow the score for the Mozart and the score for the Beethoven, and compare them.

I kind of like running them simultaneously and tuning in and out of one or the other. And it is even fun to listen to them playing at the same time.

Szell's reorchestration of Beethoven 5!

I love Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It's one of my nine favorite Beethoven Symphonies. The new edition of the textbook we use at my community college replaced the 1987 Concertgebouw recording with Haitink with a 1964 recording by Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, and that is the version I played for my classes today. Imagine my surprise when the transition motive that is played by the horns during the exposition wasn't played by the bassoons in the recapitulation. Szell must have decided to replace the bassoons (or enhance, perhaps) with horns. I find the doubled bassoon color there such a fine example of Beethoven humor, and I'm shocked that Szell took it out. You can hear it at 5:32 of this film.

[Unfortunately the film is no longer on YouTube, but it might be available elsewhere in the future.]

Have a look at the score!



There are other bold Szellisms in the 1964 Cleveland recording, like the slow tempo and heavy quality of the Scherzo, and the way the microphone seems to be trained a single violin during the pizzicato section near the end of the Scherzo (to give the illusion of absolute cleanliness, perhaps?).

Here's a wonderful clip of Szell rehearsing the first movement of the 5th. Unfortunately Szell doesn't make it to the recapitulation in this rehearsal, but he does say "that's good" to the brass who play the motive in the exposition. A complement from Szell? I have heard that is rare indeed. Perhaps he was playing for the cameras.

Dr. Beethoven, assisted by Drs. Gingold, Oistrakh and Oborin

I must confess that seriously underestimated how personally important it is for me to keep this blog, and am humbled to know that it has meaning for people who read it. Thank you for your comments, e-mails, phone calls, and concern. I had a rough few days. I learned that abandoning this connection to the collective you (anonymous and otherwise) is not something I want to try again.

It's worth remembering that the process of going through emotional rough spots allows us to understand the breadth and scope of music. Somehow Beethoven came along just in time to remind me that honest and personal experience with the full spectrum of emotions is as necessary for us to grow as musicians as practice and study. We are thermometers and barometers of emotion, whether we perform music or write music, and whether we want to admit it or not. Perhaps it is the only reason that we do what we do.

This morning I listened to a fantastic 1963 recording of Josef Gingold playing the Violin Concerto with a university orchestra, and then I taught a class about Beethoven's sonatas (piano sonatas, violin sonatas, and cello sonatas). I feel almost like new.

I thought I'd share this almost complete film of Oistrakh and Oborin playing the "Spring" Sonata to help brighten up your day. Oistrakh's bow arm is a wonder of nature.

Sincerity and Satisfaction

I played one of the most satisfying concerts of my life today. Actually, I played a very satisfying concert yesterday as well, but today's concert was even better. Perhaps it was because the hall was packed with somewhere around 1,500 elementary-school-age children, and perhaps it was because they listened and watched the concert with total attention. What could have held 1,500 kids' total attention? It was Beethoven.

The format of the program was a total surprise to the orchestra and was a total surprise to all of the teachers. Everybody kept the proceedings a secret. All the orchestra members knew was that we had segments from Beethoven's Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Symphonies to play, as well as the beginning of the Emperor Concerto. We knew that the concert would be conducted by Jack Ranney, who conducts all of our children's concerts. It is always a pleasure to work with Jack, and it is always a pleasure to play Beethoven.

Di'anu.

[I'm trying to add an element of mystery here, and give a nod to the holiday at the same time.]

We began Beethoven's Sixth, and after about a hundred measures our usual conductor, Steve Larson, walked onto the stage dressed as Beethoven. He gave a few suggestions to Jack Ranney, and introduced himself to the audience as Beethoven's ghost. He had a terrific costume, a terrific wig, and truly looked like Beethoven. He spoke to the audience with great passion and great sincerity about the music we played (there were also a couple of piano pieces: the beginning of the "Tempest" Sonata, and the "Rage for a Lost Penny"), and made a great case for music that glorifies brotherhood rather than music that glorifies war. He discussed his deafness in a way that children of all ages could understand, yet he never "talked down" to the audience. There was none of the traditional "hello boys and girls" stuff. Beethoven would have addressed the audience as a group of intelligent people who were eager to experience something wonderful, so that's what Steve did.

Steve, who is a conductor and not an actor, truly enjoyed his chance to "channel" Beethoven, and he made Beethoven present for everyone in the hall, including the members of the orchestra and the conductor. It was indulgent and extravagant, but because of Steve's sincerity it was "schtick" free. Steve loves Beethoven deeply, and his unschooled and passionate impression made Beethoven all the more human--and all the more believable.

Everyone in the viola section had the same reaction after we finished: this was probably the most important, satisfying, and relevant concert we have ever played. I know that those 1,500 kids, their teachers, and the ushers from the orchestra guild (not to mention the 2,000 that came to yesterday's concerts) will never forget the 45 minutes they spent with Beethoven.

The Numbers in Beethoven's Manuscript of the Fifth Symphony

There is an incomplete early manuscript of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony available through the Petrucci Library that presents something I have never seen before. Instead of using clefs or names of instruments, Beethoven puts numbers next to each staff as an indicator of which instrument is playing which line. This is how I translated his code:


8 = Violin 1
9 = Violin 2
10 = Viola

4 = Flute
5 = Oboe
6 = Clarinet
7 = Bassoon

3 = Horn
2 = Trumpet

1 = Timpani

11 = Cello
12 = Bass


This order lasts until page 41, when he starts using 16-stave manuscript paper. Here's a shot of page 42, and you can see that he has a new number-for-instrument code (this page has a couple of corrections).



From what I have been able to tell through the sources available to me, Beethoven didn't use this system for any of his other symphonies. I would love to know what people of the logic behind his numbers. I'm pretty baffled. I do like the fact that the timpani is number 1. I wonder if it has some special significance?

Mostly Kreutzer, Much of the Time (the other Beethoven's Ninth)

Music forces me to forget myself and my true state; it transports me to some other state which is not mine. Under its influence I fancy I experience what I really do not feel, that I understand what I do not comprehend, that I am able to do what is completely beyond my power.

When writing this little morsel from "The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo Tolstoy, who was not a violinist, might not have realized how much he was describing what it feels like to practice this piece. Learning it well enough to make it from the state of "me" to the desirable state of "it" surpasses even the most enjoyable of earthly experiences.

The narrator's wife In Tolstoy's 1891 story must have been quite a pianist. The piano part of this piece is as difficult as the violin part, and they work together in the most intimate ways. If you haven't read this story, you can read it right now, on line.

It took me years to get around to reading the story, and it took me years of building up technique and musical experience to get up the courage to really work on Beethoven's Ninth Violin Sonata. I used to joke that in order to play the piece you have to be able to play all the Kreutzer Etudes. For a while there, I was wondering if Kretuzer might have written his etudes in order to develop the technique to play the piece, but it seems that the Kreutzer etudes predated the Sonata.
Beethoven might have used bits of Kreutzer's etudes in the piece (#13 sure sounds like this passage in the development of the first movement), but his dedication of the piece to Rudolphe Kreutzer was an afterthought. There's always the opening of that obscure little piece of Bach that could have been known to both Kreutzer and Beethoven.

Beethoven actually wrote his Ninth Violin Sonata for George Bridgetower, the English violinist (of West Indian and Polish parentage) who came to Vienna in 1803.

Unfortunately Bridgetower ended up insulting a woman Beethoven knew, so Beethoven took back the music, and he withdrew his dedication of the Sonata to his former friend. Beethoven then sent the music to Rudolphe Kreutzer in Paris, who deemed it impossible to play.

Some Suggestions About Listening to Beethoven String Quartets

A lot has been said and written about the sublime nature of Beethoven's late string quartets, but it seems that some people interested in listening to them might not know how to begin to appreciate or even understand the qualities that make them great. Some people might find it intimidating when someone like Cornel West casually tosses his love for Beethoven's late string quartets into his discussions about philosophy. "Understanding" a logical argument is very different from "understanding" a piece of music, because music strives to organize emotion and emotional experience in time. It would be interesting to hear a discussion about Beethoven between Cornel West and someone like Maynard Solomon. West might end up appearing to those "in the know" like the way Leonard Bernstein appeared when he attempted to talk about linguistics.

For string players the Beethoven String Quartets are like what the Pentateuch is to theologians: a constant source of study and wonder. Each one is like a complicated person who becomes an intimate friend. We all know that the more you try to understand the people closest to you, the more of a mystery they become. When you throw love into the mix, it is nearly impossible to really "know" somebody. By the same reasoning, it is nearly impossible to "know" any of the Beethoven Quartets, but it is sure compelling to keep trying. My purpose here is not to provide analysis and insight. It is simply to make an introduction and suggest a listening order. It is similar to the order that I use to introduce his quartets to my students, and it is extremely personal.

The best way to "understand" Beethoven's later quartets is by becoming familiar with his earlier quartets. One thing to bear in mind is that the six quartets of Opus 18, Beethoven's first set of quartets, are not "less mature" Beethoven. They do use many of the 18th-century conventions used by Mozart and Haydn, and the Opus 18 Quartets do show Mozart's and Haydn's influence, but they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, imitations. Not being able to "better" either Mozart or Haydn, Beethoven re-invented the string quartet with his Opus 18. He began his string-quartet-composing life at the age of 30, and he ended it at the age of 56 with his final Quartet, Opus 135, six months before he died.

The six Opus 18 Quartets are all in four movements. They were written at the turn of the century (18th to 19th), and each one lasts about 25 minutes (following the conventions of the time). The fourth Quartet of the opus (not following the conventions of the time) has two movements in ternary form, a Scherzo and a Minuet, and the third Quartet doesn't have a movement in ternary form at all.

I would begin listening with Opus 18, but I would start with #4, the very intense Quartet in C minor. Next I would listen to Opus 18 #1 in F major, leaving the rest of the opus for later listening. I would next suggest listening to the third of the Opus 59 Quartets, but I would first listen to the Mozart Quartet K 465 (the "Dissonance Quartet"), the last of the six string quartets that Mozart dedicated to Haydn. Beethoven's Opus 59 #3 is an out-and-out tribute to the Mozart. Listen to the introduction of the Mozart, then listen to the introduction of the Beethoven. You may not know how to put it into words, or how to analyze it, but you will understand the relationship immediately.

The other two Opus 59 Quartets are a bit longer than the Opus 18 Quartets, and they incorporate some very exciting Russian folk material. I would listen to #2 before listening to #1, but that's just personal (it's the order in which I first learned them). Go on to Opus 74, the "Harp" Quartet, and notice how, like two of the Opus 59 Quartets, the line between the third and fourth movements blurs. The tempo changes, but there is no pause between movements. Go back and listen to the rest of the Opus 18 Quartets. You will notice a distinct difference in style from the Opus 59 Quartets and the Opus 74, but you will not notice a change in quality: all of Beethoven's string quartets are masterpieces.

Now it's time for Opus 95, the "Serioso" Quartet. Written in 1810, and clocking in at 20 minutes, it is the shortest of the quartets. It is also one of the most intense, because there is just so much packed into those 20 minutes. There is also a bit of shape shifting going on here, with a sudden connection between the second and third movements, several abrupt changes in key, and a final movement that seems to have several different personalities. We have now arrived in the world of late Beethoven.

At this point, I would advise people new to this to start from the "back of the book." Opus 135 is only 26 minutes long, it's in the key of F major, and, aside from the final movement (called "Der schwer gefasste Entschluss"), it follows the shape of the quartets in Opus 18. I would advise listening to it with the score. Even if you don't read music, you will appreciate having it for the last movement. Go back and listen to Opus 18 #1 (here's the score), and then listen to Opus 95 again.

Beethoven wrote the Opus 127 Quartet in 1824, after taking a 14-year hiatus from string quartet writing. This piece sounds like the polar opposite of the Opus 95 "Serioso" Quartet, the last string quartet he wrote before his hiatus (during which he wrote his later Piano Sonatas and his 9th Symphony). Opus 127 is as expansive as the Opus 95 is contracted, and for me it marks Beethoven's leap from the more concrete to the more abstract in quartet writing.

Now it's time for Opus 132 in A minor. It takes 42 minutes or so, and there are a lot of tempo changes, key changes, and even more changes of mood. Allow yourself to hold onto the reins of the movement segments that seem to follow the laws of gravity, and allow yourself to be suspended when the music suspends you. The logic behind the structure of this one is all Beethoven's. You can't second guess him (even if you are playing). Sometimes when listening to this piece you can't even remember where you have been.

Opus 131, in C-sharp minor, is a deeply serious work. Unlike anything we have heard in this particular order, it begins with a really long Adagio that serves as an introduction to a very short Allegro. During the piece's 37 minutes or so, it changes tempo thirteen times, and all of the movements are played "attacca" or without a pause between them, so it can be really difficult to keep track of where you are. The fourth movement, which is divided into several sections, and has the only repeat mark in the whole quartet, is almost a quartet within a quartet. You might recognize the fifth movement has a motive that Beethoven quotes in the last movement of his last quartet, Opus 135. If this quartet boggles your mind, you are not alone. You have generations of equally-boggled listeners. After repeated hearings, it often comes out as a real favorite.

Now we have arrived at Opus 130, which, complete with the Grosse Fugue, takes more than 50 minutes to perform. After listening to Opus 131 you should find this six-movement Quartet rather tuneful and easy to follow. It begins with a slow introduction (if you have heard any of the earlier Quartets of Mendelssohn, you will find it strangely familiar), and continues tunefully along. After the loveliest of Cavatinas, Beethoven tops this quartet off with a 16-minute fugue that is almost as difficult to follow by ear (or by score) as it is to play. This is one of the movements that scares listeners away from late Beethoven. I first heard it when I was in a class with David Diamond at Juilliard, and I didn't know what to make of it. Now I love it, but it has taken a long for that love to develop. It took me more than twenty years just be able to follow the workings of the counterpoint, so don't despair.

Beethoven's audience didn't like the Fugue, and his publisher suggested that the piece should be published with an alternative Finale. The Grosse Fugue was published as a separate opus (133). My preferred way of listening to this piece is with both the Fugue and the Finale!

I own many sets of Beethoven Quartets, so I can make a few recommendations:

The Borodin set on Chandos is one of my current favorites, as is the Alban Berg's set, which has also been recorded on DVD. The Leipzig String Quartet also has an excellent set. The Vegh Quartet's 1952 set is exceptional, as is the Quartetto Italiano's set. I like the Colorado Quartet's set a lot (they observe all of Beethoven's repeats), and I like the Eroica Quartet's set (they use 19th century instruments).

My favorite recording of Opus 130 (with the Grosse Fugue) is the 1984 Vermeer Quartet recording on Teldec. I don't know if it is still available on CD, but I did find an LP on ebay.

There are a lot more Beethoven Quartet performances on YouTube, and all the scores are available (for free) right here.

2019 UPDATE: Stephen Malinowinski and the Alexander String Quartet have made a complete cycle of Beethoven Quartets with graphical score animations (so you can see the score in colored animation as you listen) which is available on this YouTube page.

Musing on music for the times

I have been listening to a lot of Beethoven lately. When I need reassurance about the state of the country or the world, the string quartets give me the balance I need. His deep sense of tension and release from tension and his grasp on the musical truth (which is, of course, THE truth as far as I'm concerned) provide the energy I need to go on with my day, and embrace at least a part of humanity while I am listening.

Why is it that I never grow tired of Beethoven?

Think of the times he lived in. Some of the things that he was fighting for (and against) in his lifetime were, in a way, the same kinds of things that we are fighting for (and against) in our lifetime. They just have different names and faces. People wore different clothes, didn't bathe as often, didn't use indoor plumbing or electricity, and they made their way around Europe by horseback or by carriage instead of making their way around the world by way of a computer terminal. Of course women didn't have a chance to be in positions of any kind of authority (or have a voice in any kind of political process), unless they were very rich, titled, or both. Money talked in Beethoven's day, and it certainly talks today. Greed, deceit, lust for power, and the abuse of that power are still every society's greatest embarrassments.

Word got around slowly during Beethoven's lifetime, and likenesses needed to be drawn or painted. Because of this, people who wanted to capture a visual image learned how to draw, which took time and patience. Music needed to be played by people who were actually in the room, and there was always a need for new music, especially if it was good music, and there was always a need for musicians. There were, of course, people (like Napoleon) who were unable to tell good music from not-so-good music, but he was balanced out by people who knew exactly how lucky they were to have known Beethoven, and it is thanks to those people that we can still have Beethoven in our lives.

There will never be another Beethoven because there doesn't need to be one. I believe that we would have a better world if more people would take the time to listen to (and play, of course, if they can) the music that he wrote. It is medicine.

Copying Beethoven

I just finished watching Copying Beethoven, which suffered from being historically inaccurate, having a horrible script, and having actors and actresses who spoke in a stilted style to suggest that the film was set "back then" in a "foreign" place. The costumes and sets were excellent though, as was the camera work. Ed Harris, the actor who played Beethoven, even managed to look plausible playing the violin. He was shirtless (he was for a good chunk of the movie), and if there were a set of other arms and hands playing the subject of the Grosse Fugue on the violin, I didn't see them. The piano he used sounded pretty authentic, but the representation of him as being someone who could not hear was very inauthentic.

Musically speaking, the movie had some excellent performances. The Kecskeméti chorus and orchestra played a great "hearer's digest" version of the 9th Symphony, but the addition of the pseudo-love interest copyist, who reminded me a little of Tinker Bell, sitting in the middle of the orchestra showing Beethoven what he should be doing as a conductor, made it hard to appreciate the excellent camera work and enjoy the performance of the piece.

I wish that the DVD had larger print in the credits so that I could have read that the excellent string quartet was the Takács Quartet (I had to consult Amazon). The IMDb lists all the drivers, gaffers, and boom operators, but they neglect to list the real stars of the film, the Takács Quartet.

Beethoven for Novices

There are times when I am really grateful that, as a community college instructor (which I am on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8:00 until 2:15, with breaks for practicing and lunch), I get to teach a course that has material that cannot be "dumbed down." I do incorporate certain elements of "history lite," "analysis lite," "theory lite," and "musicology lite" in my highly generalized commentary, but most of the class time (75 minutes) is spent listening to music. That means that the students who have come to all of the classes so far have listened with guidance to between 1000 and 1200 minutes of music, or 18-20 hours. And the music is not "music lite." It is the real thing. There are no cliffs notes. There is no way to "skim." When a performance is successful it goes "in" to the prepared mind, like wine goes "in" to the flavor of prepared vegetables when de-glazing a pan.

By the time we reach Beethoven the students have had the maps of classical forms outlined for them so many times that they can begin to follow the structure of individual movements. They can also, in a small way, understand the fact that every Classical ("Classical" with a capital "C" refers to the Classical Period) piece they hear deviates in some way from what we might call the "norm." They also have a small-but-functional vocabulary of musical terms, so that when I point out something that is fugal, for example, they understand what I'm talking about.

I like to introduce Beethoven to my students by way of his string quartets, outlining circumstances in his life and work from Opus 18 through Opus 135. Then, in the next class, we go on to his piano music. We usually start with the Pathetique Sonata because it is in the textbook (at least the first movement is, but we listen to the whole thing), and then we usually listen to a couple of songs, and a few excerpts from piano concertos, violin sonatas, and other chamber music. Since I found this performance of the first movement of Opus 111 played by Sviatoslav Richter, I thought it would be nice to follow the structure of the String Quartet class and let them hear Beethoven's last piano sonata.

Listening to this performance is like reading (and understanding) Faust in the original, or watching a great performance of King Lear. And then we followed it with this wonderful performance of Coriolan conducted by Carlos Klieber. I felt a little guilty about filling my students' hearts and minds with such substance (particularly the students in the 8:00 class), but I did wonder if during the rest of the day some of them--or even one of them--might have had the fugue subject of Opus 111 pounding in his or her head and heart like it did in mine. And maybe yours.