Subtlety and Innovation: Op. 28

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Del curso dictado por Curtis Institute of Music

Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

484 calificaciones

Curtis Institute of Music

Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

484 calificaciones

Our relationship to Beethoven is a deep and paradoxical one. For many musicians, he represents a kind of holy grail: His music has an intensity, rigor, and profundity which keep us in its thrall, and it is perhaps unequalled in the interpretive, technical, and even spiritual challenges it poses to performers. At the same time, Beethoven’s music is casually familiar to millions of people who do not attend concerts or consider themselves musically inclined. Two hundred years after his death, he is everywhere in the culture, yet still represents its summit. This course takes an inside-out look at the 32 piano sonatas from the point of view of a performer. Each lecture will focus on one sonata and an aspect of Beethoven’s music exemplified by it. (These might include: the relationship between Beethoven the pianist and Beethoven the composer; the critical role improvisation plays in his highly structured music; his mixing of extremely refined music with rougher elements; and the often surprising ways in which the events of his life influenced his compositional process and the character of the music he was writing.) The course will feature some analysis and historical background, but its perspective is that of a player, not a musicologist. Its main aim is to explore and demystify the work of the performer, even while embracing the eternal mystery of Beethoven’s music itself. This season's Curtis courses are sponsored by Linda Richardson in loving memory of her husband, Dr. Paul Richardson. The Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation supports Curtis's lifelong learning initiatives.

De la lección

New Paths

Beethoven’s conception of the sonata was perpetually in flux, but the year 1801 is a particularly experimental one. The four sonatas Op. 26 through 28 (Nos. 14 through 17, chronologically) feature the most concrete innovations among the sonatas written up to that point, and are the focus of this lecture. There will be discussion of the relationship between the movements in a classical sonata, and the radical shift it begins to undergo at this point. We will also examine the ways in which these sonatas were influential to future generations of composers, which the earlier works, great as they are, were not. As a special feature for this lecture, a recording by a current Curtis student of the first movement of Op. 28 will be available on Curtis Performs.

Moving Beyond the Early Period8:33

Re-shaping the Sonata: Op. 2619:18

Blurring the Lines Between Fantasy and Sonata: Op. 27, No. 16:23

Psychological Extremity in Music: Op. 27, No.215:13

Subtlety and Innovation: Op. 289:18

Conoce a los instructores

Jonathan Biss
Neubauer Family Chair in Piano Studies
Performance Faculty

[MUSIC]

Given the opus number and the time of its composition,

Beethoven clearly viewed the Sonata Opus 28, the "Pastoral"--

not nearly as noxious of a name, although still not the composer's--

as the last of a series of four, following

the three we've already discussed. I've always been a bit bemused by this,

because whereas Opus 26 and 27 seem out to break as many rules as possible,

Opus 28's mission seems to be to show just how much

room there still is for innovation and imagination in the old model.

It is, in its way, very daring, but it embraces

the tradition that the previous three works so emphatically rejected:

sonata allegro, followed by a slow movement, scherzo, and ultimately rondo.

Probably the most remarkable feature of

Opus 28 is its nearly uninterrupted placidity.

It is, ironically, single-minded in its placidity.

Unlike the "Moonlight," there is genuine character

contrast, as well as drama within each movement.

But there is a general since of peace,

of a touch of reserve which persists for nearly the entire work.

This is the reason that the title does feel appropriate--

and the same, by the way, holds true for the more famous symphony of the same name.

In both these works Beethoven was content for

the harmonic content to unfold sometimes very slowly.

And "unfold" is the key word here.

It's not just the rate of harmonic motion is often very slow.

It's the sense that Beethoven is able to convey that this motion is

taking place naturally, without him pulling the strings.

And Beethoven was often very content to play puppet master,

moving his music in directions which seem anything but preordained, inevitable.

The sonata is in D major, and the work begins with a D pedal point.

This note is repeated an amazing 74 times in

the bass, before he finally moves away from it.

So, even though there is harmonic

movement over that period, we remain tethered to the tonic--

which Beethoven will leave only when he's

good and ready, only with really great reluctance.

[MUSIC]

The quiet insistence of this pedal point,

plus the immensely long, arching melodic lines, are what makes this special,

what give the movement such a sense of inevitability.

Beethoven also shows amazing skill in his overlapping of the lines.

The opening phrase, for example, is a somewhat irregular ten bars long.

And though I've been playing this sonata on and off for nearly 20 years,

I've never been able to decide

definitively whether these ten bars divide into

4 + 6, or 6 + 4, or if the first two form an upbeat.

Ultimately I've come to feel that the

ambiguity is deliberate, that because we so rarely

feel in a clear-cut way that we are

at either the beginning or the end of a phrase,

he is able to create the illusion of endless melody.

Again, pastoral.

The slow progress of the harmony in this work comes to the

fore in a rather remarkable passage in the development of the first movement.

After an impassioned episode, in which the tonality actually

changes rather quickly, Beethoven firmly lands on an F-sharp, and

holds onto it-- again a pedal point-- for an unbelievable 38 measures.

And, for most of this time, there's nothing else.

First he eliminates other harmonies, then melody disappears.

Finally, he all but removes rhythm from the equation.

We are just left with this relentlessly repeated F-sharp, which

is not the tonic, not the dominant, not the sub-dominant,

but really, a harmonic visitor from a foreign country.

[MUSIC]

In a work which is primarily becalmed,

this is just extraordinary. In its own quiet

way, this passage is just as disorienting as anything in the "Moonlight" Sonata.

By taking us to a harmonic place we don't expect to be,

keeping us there remorselessly, and then

depriving us of all other musical elements,

Beethoven is using the construct of the sonata form to maximum effect.

He is playing with our expectations.

And in doing so, without any great fanfare, he makes us feel utterly lost.

I cannot think of any other classical work that has a pedal point this long.

Which is to say, it would be extraordinary even

if it were simply on the tonic, but by putting it in F-sharp,

the mediant in D major, this really brings it off the charts.

Now, at the very end of what I just played, which is the end of the pedal

point, Beethoven writes a fermata, asking the pianist to hold the final chord

indefinitely. When the chord is finally released, this is what happens.

[MUSIC]

This is very, very beautiful, even moving in its simplicity.

But still there is something perfunctory about it.

As we talked about in the first lecture, the final V - I of the

development is supposed to be one of the main events in the sonata form.

Here though, after stretching an ostensibly

less critical moment beyond all reason,

he almost trivializes the return of the tonic, the return of the opening theme.

This again may suggest that the conventions of classicism,

of sonata form, were growing a bit wearisome to Beethoven.

But most of all, it is yet another

amazing example of Beethoven's capacity for manipulating time.

When the moment we are conditioned to wait for goes by

without fanfare, whereas a moment that needn't exist at all, is given all

the space in the world, our perception of the way time passes is altered.

That Beethoven does this in the middle of a movement, a

movement that seems to promise total rhythmic regularity at its outset,

makes the effect all the more spectacular.

People often talk rightly about Beethoven and infinity, and

I think this is one of the principal reasons.

More than any composer before or since, he's able to bring

us into an altered state, an altered mode of perception.

And as we see in this sonata, he can

do so without being, in any obvious sense, radical.

There are other terrific moments in Opus 28, such as the

very end in which the work's potential energy finally turns kinetic,

with caution finally thrown to the wind. It's a novel idea,

at least at this point, that the

coda of a multi-movement work should address something

that has been so far unresolved, not just in that movement, but in the whole work.

And again, it shows Beethoven even if in a

more modest way, tinkering with the structure of the sonata.

But each time I play this work or listen to it,

it is that amazing endless F-sharp that lingers in my memory.

It really acts as a metaphor for Beethoven's stubbornness,

his individuality, and ultimately his force of will.

So despite its more traditional trappings, Opus 28 still

finds Beethoven looking for new meaning in the piano sonata.

Never again from this point on was he to write a sonata

that did not, in one way or another, point the way forward.

We will see plenty of evidence of that next

week when we look at the sonatas of 1809.

See you then, looking forward.

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