On July 26th I looked for Beethoven's 26th WoO. Oh my God, you must be thinking, how can I make my life more like his? Well, envy dogs, it gets better. When I entered "Beethoven WoO 26", I got a flute duo.
According to Robert Cummings, the guy who wrote the blurb about the piece for www.allmusic.com, the duo was the last thing he wrote before leaving Bonn for Vienna in 1792. He wrote it for his "law-student friend, Degenhart, to whom he also dedicated the work. In a note on the autograph score, the composer declares the piece is a "souvenir" to mark his approaching departure to Vienna".
I hope his friend Degenhart played the flute. I also hope he had another friend who played flute, since Beethoven was leaving town. It's a bit like giving your friend a tandem bike with a note that says, "Enjoy. I'm moving."
Robert Cummings also wrote "Here is yet another work whose publication Beethoven suppressed throughout his life. It is likely that he would have strongly opposed its posthumous appearance, viewing this duo as an early effort meant for a friend, not the public."
I think Robert's right. And what Beethoven would've been trying to suppress, was his work getting published and played by professionals or amateurs to limited audiences. Imagine if he'd known that, one day, any individual could record themselves playing his music, at whatever skill level they possessed, and then put that recording on a platform viewable by the entire planet.
Like his just-for-my-friend flute duo, played by one guy, with himself:
And in case you want to hear the allegro too, here's the whole thing played by two people:
In 1809, Beethoven was commissioned to write incidental music for a play by Goethe called 'Egmont'. Egmont is a play about resisting tyranny, noble suffering, and love through separation and death. Beethoven's famous 'Egmont' overture, Op. 84, with its echoes of the 5th Symphony, is an astonishing musical argument on the same themes. Beethoven and Goethe - not guys to aim low.
Neither am I. So I listened to it for the first time, standing pantless in my kitchen, doing the dishes. The overture's climax is a great soundtrack for clawing wet Cheerios out of a drain stop. And having listened to it a few times lately, it's also an excellent pairing with folding children's clothes.
The video I'm posting has many joys.
Of course, the Overture, played by the Gewandhausorchester of Leipzig, conducted by the late great Kurt Masur. Also:
At 0:33, a 12 second shot of ceiling porn. THAT'S a ceiling.
At around 1:00, as Masur makes his entrance, I noticed the pinky finger on his right hand is permanently curled in half. My father-in-law Barry lost half of one of his pinky fingers when it got stuck between a trailer and a trailer hitch. To make his grandkids laugh, Barry likes to stick his half-finger in his nostril and pretend the missing half is way up his nose. I bet Masur did that for the orchestra and got huge laughs.
At 1:34, Masur comes in humming just before the orchestra plays its first note. It's a deep old growl. I'm guessing it's the same noise he made when he was eating anything involving milk.
But for pure comedy, at 10:26, in the bottom right of the screen, amidst Germans applauding and looking as happy as Germans can look, a young man in a blue blazer and red striped tie, who would clearly rather be anywhere else on Earth. Even if you don't have time to listen to the overture, cut to this kid. It's worth it.
And as an addendum to this definitive look at the Egmont Overture, here's a link to the Short Film Palme D'Or winning 1965 Hungarian film "Overture" by Janos Vadasz (apologies for the two missing accents).
Wikipedia describes the plot as: "After the opening title card, a white blur in the center of a black screen resolves to the shape of a chicken egg. We penetrate the shell, and watch, in time-lapse, the 21-day development of a chicken embryo, from a germ spot on the yolk to the emergence of the baby chick, compressed into under eight minutes, set to Beethoven's Egmont Overture."
It's a hypnotic little visual poem.
It's also the cause of this blog's awful pun title. Sorry.
When Chuck Berry died on March 19th, my first instinct was to search for parallels between Beethoven and the man who told him to roll over.
I didn't have to look far.
Both men were revolutionary, but not consciously so. They developed what came before them without wanting to torch it. Throughout his life, Beethoven revered and built upon the work of his predecessor Bach, and his teachers, Haydn and Mozart. As Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford says, he was a "radical evolutionary". In slowly becoming himself, he became the Romantic era.
And Chuck Berry arguably fathered rock 'n' roll by taking the country and blues music he grew up with, straightening it rhythmically and transforming it into the driving, sexual, smart, demonic music of youth .
But where they meet most notably, and probably tragically, is that they were both kind of shitheads.
Scanning their bios, over and over, these guys made four-alarm burning-barf messes of their lives and the lives of others while creating some of humanity's most incredible art.
And in plunging my face into the ponds of their lives, I saw plenty of awfulness - abusiveness, violence, pettiness, whoring, sex offenses, theft - a hundred things that are impossible to ignore no matter how great the art. But I also saw one beautiful bit of cosmic comedy glinting in the mud: those two brilliant bastards are stuck in a tiny spaceship together.
In 1977, when Carl Sagan and a panel of experts, were deciding which human artifacts to put aboard the Voyager One and Two spacecrafts, they put Beethoven and Chuck Berry on the same Golden Record, along with tracks from a diversity of cultures and styles. Pointing to the Western-ess of the endeavour, Bach is dominant with three tracks. Beethoven got two, the first movement of his fifth symphony and the fifth movement, or Cavatina, of his string quartet in B flat, No. 13, Op. 130, played by the Budapest String Quartet.
Berry was alive in 1977 and only got one track, which probably pissed him off - "Johnny B Goode". And there was controversy around even including that. Opponents of the song's inclusion horrifically didn't object to Berry being a convicted sex offender, but that the song was "adolescent". To which Carl Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet." And the song stayed on.
In August 2012, Voyager One reached interstellar space. I won't pretend to entirely know what that means anymore than I'll pretend to have a grasp on music theory. But essentially it means Voyager One is more than 20 billion kilometres from Earth, beyond our solar system, shooting through plasma "filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago". It's taken it 40 years to get there. The next closest star is "AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis which is heading toward the constellation Ophiuchus". To give some perspective to what eternity or infinity or vastness or endlessness or whatever you want to call it is, Voyager One will drift within 1.6 light years of that star in approximately 40,000 years.
I can't even.
Our little human "bottle in the cosmic ocean", packed full of all the things that are supposed to best define what we are, that mean so much to us, hurtling through space, plutonium propelled, surrounded by endless indifference. It's so hopeful and human, laughable and tragic.
And if artists live on eternally through their art, I like to picture two of our most crusty meaning-makers, Chuck and Ludwig, squished together, two Major Toms floating in a tin can, living out there longer than humanity will likely survive back on Earth.
Titans on earth. In the cosmos - uncomfortable bunkmates.
Before you listen to the music of theirs we shot into space, I really recommend spending some time on the Voyager website. There's great poetry in its numbers and scope. And in a nice coincidence, the realization that Voyager One had reached interstellar space came as NASA detected the plasma around the craft begin "to vibrate like a violin string".
Just seeing the distance numbers tick by alone is worth an existential laugh or two. You can also access all the recordings and images they put on-board.
My first role on stage was the result of pure coercion. It was my first term of Grade Nine, having shed none of the shyness, fear and fat of my middle school trauma, and the head of drama, Ms. Adams, told me I had to audition for that year's musical, West Side Story.
It was a directive: I was auditioning. It didn't matter that the words "singing and dancing" lit a forest fire of horror in my head. Nor did my repeated pleas of incompetence. She said I had to, so I had to.
It was awful.
My self-worth was an aphid. I could barely stand being seen to walk, let alone dance. And the only play I'd ever been in was one I wrote in Grade Eight about Santa interviewing elves to do Christmas Eve with him. But I did what I was told and went out for it.
I don't remember what happened in that audition room. It must've been a real master class in awkwardness. But I did it. It happened. And whatever happened, got me into the show.
For a boy, there are lots of fantastic roles in that show. Tony, Bernardo, Riff, A-Rab, Gee-tar, Snowboy, Big Deal, Diesel, Baby John, Mouthpiece, Chino - awesome names, great parts, of varying sizes, but all great parts.
I did not get one of those parts. I was given the role of Tiger.
Now, if you know the show and you're trying to remember Tiger, you can stop. There is no Tiger in West Side Story. "Tiger" was created for and died with the 1991 Eastwood Collegiate version. Simply, I think they needed lots of boys to fill in the gaps and were kind enough to give my non-speaking role a name to spare my feelings.
Two days ago, 26 years later, almost to the month, I was walking to rehearsal in a snow storm. It was brutally cold. The walk to the theatre usually takes about 12 minutes, so I thought I could fit in listening to one or two movements of something, which, with my huge headphones, would also serve to keep my ears warm. I hit play on Beethoven's String Quartet in D major, Opus 18, No. 3.
I heard the first two notes and couldn't walk forward. The movement kept passing by, but my insides stopped at the first two notes - an interval as powerful as a scent, bringing me back, body and brain, to that exact time: being 14 in emotional paralysis. The red K-way coats with white tape down the sleeves to make them look like leather jackets. The drag queen heavy show makeup and how it smelled heated up on our skin. The crazy rush of want for all the girls in the show. The inability to do anything about it. The blueness of the lights when Tony was shot. All that crying we did. The coolness of the boy playing Riff. Looking up to and feeling nervous around the boy playing Tony. The jeans. The finger snapping. The scary new feeling of belonging. Yelling "Mambo!" The sound of our teenage orchestra lurching along and my own voice making a noise. The score and story that fucking slayed me then and, clearly, still slays me now, as I learned two days ago, hearing the first interval of the string quartet that also happens to be the first two notes of "Somewhere" from West Side Story.
An interval that, for me, represents the entire haphazard way fates are decided.
Wikipedia says the interval in question is "rarely featured in melodies (especially in their openings)", but here are Beethoven and, (maybe copying him) 150 years later, Bernstein, putting the minor 7th - reaching, hopeful, and begging for resolution - front and centre.
Crawling through the first two chapters of Alexander Wheelock Thayer's drier than dust with a side of hair, 'Life of Beethoven' - I finally got to the beginning of his relationship with Count Waldstein, dedicatee of the Waldstein Sonata.
Thank you Waldstein. You saved me. Noble, musician, soldier, Beethoven's first great patron and, most importantly, my excuse to put down Thayer and re-goolge Waldstein.
The genius who wrote all of Wikipedia says this about him:
I find it sweet that between 1791-92 Beethoven wrote "Eight variations for piano four hands on a theme by Count Waldstein". Four hands! I picture the two of them, giggling, shoulder to shoulder, just as happy as these two:
And lo! through the child-like magic of Tom Hanks, the Beethoven of likeability, we come to the strange thing about WoO 67: apparently it'll make your kid smarter.
Of all the profound, urgent, deep things Beethoven ever wrote, it's this little trifle he wrote for him and his buddy to play that appears about 87 times in Google Play as a baby or child brain development aid. Not actual recordings of professional pianists playing it, no, but specifically one particular recording of a synth harp playing the theme; this weird Celtic robot version seems to be a go-to for making the unborn or recently born way smarter. "Baby Sleep Therapy Club" (featuring a baby in glasses, glasses = super smart), "Early Development of Child ("child" singular - we'll never know which one), "Child in the World of Music" (same child as the last one), "Development and Learning" by Einstein's Music Education, "Baby Music Serenity", and finally "Child's Brain and Music". I wish I could find this version on YouTube so you could hear it. It's so bizarre. If I were a baby and I heard it, I'd probably get smarter just thinking of ways to get the fuck out of there.
But since I can't find it and since we're already on the theme of child, I found a couple of childs playing it here. Meet Dutch piano wunderbrothers, Lucas and Arthur Jussen, respectively, 24 and 20 years old. Obviously they're not actual kids, but they're such cute lil fellas I couldn't help myself. I'll let you be the judge of which brother wins the "Most Moved-by-the-Music Face" competition.
In spite of the brothers' incredible hair and acting, this piece still seems like a playful but respectful spin around the block with the theme. Maybe it was his relative youth or nerves about offending his first real patron, but Beethoven never opens up his full inventive engine - at least not so much to make Waldstein feel embarrassed. He refrains from slapping the theme around and juggling it and mocking it and elevating it like he did, later in life, with Diabelli's. I agree with Sonof Thunder who commented on Youtube: "What a hammy jokester LvB is in that final coda! Love it!!!" Exactly: it's good fun, but it never goes deep.
Unless you're a baby. Then it will enter your mind and make you a genius. Probably an evil one, but still a genius.
Despite YouTube dickily filling movement breaks with ads for Dempster's Honey Wheat Bread and a 'Good Wife' spin-off, Christopher Luten's 1968 film of Beethoven's 'The Ghost' Piano Trio, Op. 71, No. 1, featuring Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman and Jacqueline du Pré, packs a double irony and a double sadness.
The first comes before the trio begins, with this story in yellow text: "In 1808 the composer and violinist Louis Spohr was invited to a rehearsal in Beethoven's house of the D Major Piano Trio Opus 70 No. 1 known as The Ghost, and wrote of the Occasion: "It was not an enjoyable experience. First of all the piano was dreadfully out of tune, which did not trouble Beethoven in the least, since he could not hear it. Little or nothing remained of the brilliant technique which had been so much admired. In loud passages the poor deaf man hammered away at the notes crashing through whole groups of them so that without the score one lost all sense of the melody. I was deeply moved by the tragedy of it all. Beethoven's almost continual melancholy was no longer a mystery to me."
The world's greatest composer struck by deafness is a story everyone knows. But this quote from Spohr really picks the scab off the legend and lets the raw awfulness show: he's rehearsing, but can't hear himself, the piano or the other musicians. He's alone with what he hears in his head, in "continual melancholy".
The second and even crueler giving-then-taking-away is in the person of Jacqueline du Pré. This film was shot May 12, 1970. She was at the peak of her career, her youth, her enormous gifts, power, and talent. But within a year of shooting it, in 1971, du Pré began to lose feeling in her fingers and other parts of her body. As she gradually lost sensation in her hands, she had to co-ordinate her fingering visually and her playing plummeted, publicly and painfully. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By her final public performances in NYC in 1973, du Pré couldn't judge the weight of the bow and struggled to simply open her cello case.
She died at the age of 42.
For more bare-boned facts, here's the wikipedia article about du Pré:
The director of 'The Ghost', Christopher Luten, made several other films about her. This is a posthumus tribute. It's loving and leaves out anything ambiguous or grey in her character or work, but it's worth watching because, while it's brief, it's full of footage that gives a glimpse into her vast gift and the sheer joy she took in sharing it. It's inspiring. It's also a real kick in the pants to use the time that you have well.
At some time during 2004, I bought the Tokyo Quartet's recording of three of Mozart's late string quartets: K575, K589, K590 (the "King of Prussia" quartets, commissioned and composed for Friedrich Wilhem II, the King of Prussia. The King of Prussia is also, incidentally, the largest shopping mall in the USA).
Someone, somewhere, had written or said that the string quartet is the most rigorous and unforgiving form of music to compose, so I went out and bought some string quartets to hear what rigour and lack of forgiveness sounded like.
It's a beautiful album. Once I bought it, just to put a pin on how deeply uncool I am, I had two albums on constant rotation: this album of Mozart string quartets and "How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb" by U2.
So either a total absence of sentiment in the former or a complete sentimental hose-down in the latter. I knew no middle ground.
I still don't.
Anyway, I became a fan of the Tokyo Quartet.
Less than a year later, in 2005, I was doing a play at the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto called 'Take Me Out'. In this show, I played a Latino major league baseball player who only spoke Spanish, while doing full frontal nudity in an actual onstage shower with several other naked male actors.
My wife said she saw the show three times before she realized there was dialogue in the scene.
One winter night I showed up at the theatre, ready to lather up my crotch in front of 800 people while speaking a language I don't speak. I came through stage door and was just approaching the performer's entrance for the Jane Mallett, a smaller theatre in the same building, when there, cello case in hand, was Clive Greensmith, the English cellist for the Tokyo Quartet, whom I instantly recognized from my Mozart CD cover.
I said, "Are you Clive Greensmith??"
He took a tiny step back.
"Yyyes," he said.
He was not used to being recognized in public. I doubt many string quartet cellists are.
"Hi. I'm Cyrus. I'm a huge fan of you guys."
I could see him relax a little. "Oh. Thank you. Are you in the audience tonight?"
I said, "No. I'm doing a play in this building. When you're playing, I'll be naked and covered in body wash."
"Oh! Haha," said Clive.
There was pause, I said something else about how much I love them, he said thank you again and I went off to pretend I knew how to play baseball, my fandom deepened and solidified.
He was so polite and gracious and masked being weirded out so well.
And holy shit, what a great cellist.
So when it came to buying a digital recording of the complete Beethoven string quartets for my phone, naturally I bought the Tokyo Quartet's. Online, there are a million nerd-slam arguments about which recording is best, but I have my loyalties: Clive was nice to me, I buy Clive's CD.
I'm simple that way.
Today I listened to them play Opus 18, No. 2 in G Major.
There are many things I loved about this recording. Of course, picturing my good buddy Clive playing and throwing me a thumbs up in the rests. But also, the surprises in the music itself. 3 min 57 secs into the 1st movement, a perverse odd sneaky section; all the silence and breath in the second movement. And most surprising in this quartet: the third movement is a trio. I almost wished I heard "Psssshhhhttt" as the guy who wasn't playing kicked back and opened a can of Fresca.
The only video on Youtube of the Tokyo Quartet playing the Beethoven quartets is this - them playing the complete quartets. It's over eight hours long and I don't know how you'd keep track of when one ended and the next one began. So I'll leave it here along with a recommendation: buy one of the Tokyo Quartet's albums. Support my best friend Clive. They disbanded in 2013, but I'm sure they'd still appreciate your business.
By way of my friend Damien, I ended up spending an hour of Family Day sitting on a stool, under bright lights, shirtless, being photographed by the beautiful empathic ex-principle-ballet-dancer-turned-photographer/philosopher Aleksandar Antonijevich. (http://aleksandarantonijevic.com) We talked about how we are eternally walking away from ourselves and becoming something else. We talked about love. We talked about desire and sex. We talked about ageing and the cruelty of having our identities tied to what we do. We talked about not-knowing and lack of clarity as virtues. We talked about sweating too much. We talked about difficult choices. We talked about seeing and not-seeing others. We talked about pleasure and time and death and how those things walk together. We talked about whether any of it means anything and whether it's possible to know anything with certainty. We talked about Montaigne's great motto: "Que sais-je?" We talked about stage fright and fear. We talked about the differences between dancing and acting. We talked about loved ones dying. We talked about versions of ourselves dying and whether anyone notices.
It was an incredible hour sitting and talking with a big-souled human who happened to be clicking away.
Total safety with a total stranger.
I left feeling weightless and glad to be alive on a great sunny day.
Tonight I listened to Beethoven's String Quartet No. 1, Opus 18 in F Major. Beethoven wrote this and revised it extensively for over a year before publication. According to his friend Karl Amenda, the second movement was inspired by the Tomb Scene from Romeo and Juliet and one of Beethoven revisions was changing that movement's markings from "Adagio molto" to "Adagio affetuouso ed appassionato": "at ease, with tenderness and passion".
That seemed to fit thematically with this day pretty goddamn well.
Listen to the whole piece when you want, but for tonight...try a little tenderness (and passion) with the second movement played by the Alban Berg Quartet:
The Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2, was a massive hit in Beethoven's lifetime. So huge was its popularity, that Beethoven, baffled, was prompted to say to his friend Carl Czerny, "Surely I've written better things". But whether he had or not, was beside the point: people fell in love with it. With the whole sonata, to be sure, but mainly and most profoundly with its haunting ear-worm of a first movement, the Adagio Sustenuto. And, truly, it's a hard heart that hears the first movement without feeling something. In 1832, ten years after Beethoven's death, music critic Ludwig Rellstab was also moved by it and likened the movement to moonlight striking the surface of Lake Lucerne. Within 10 years of this analogy's coinage, it had grabbed onto the piece and never let go. We still call it "The Moonlight Sonata". I'm writing about this piece today, obviously, because it's Valentine's Day and no work by Beethoven is more associated with love and romance and the human heart than the Moonlight Sonata. The music itself is off-the-charts emotionally evocative and there's also about fifteen volumes of lore around its composition, dedication and meaning that will get its own entry maybe this time next year. For today, I'd like point out something that scholars have frothed about for centuries. Namely, that Beethoven was dead by the time it garnered the name "Moonlight". When he initially published it and dedicated it to the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, with whom he was probably in love, he titled it, "Sonata, quasi una fantasia". Literally translated, that means "Sonata, almost a fantasy".
Love, in this music, is not a fantasy - it's almost a fantasy.
It has its fantastic dream-like elements, but the flesh and the life and death and the real, the truly human, asserts itself over and over and gives us something so much more complex and alive than paper hearts.
Berlioz called the first movement, "one of those poems that human language does not know how to qualify". It think that can be said about the whole sonata and, more to the point, about love. It is unwordable, unqualifiable, unquantifiable and realer than real.
This poem showed up in my inbox today and says all of that so much better than I just did:
It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.
It doesn’t have
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo: I want, I want—
but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.
And here's the great Daniel Barenboim playing the whole sonata, in what I can only guess is his bedroom. When you give the sonata a listen, I'm asking to give some serious love and attention to the second and third movements. Because in the first movement, you get moonlight. But in the second and third movements, you get sunshine and rushing blood and we need those too.
Yesterday I listened to a couple of Beethoven's settings for Irish folksongs.
Today I listened to six more of his settings of Irish, Scottish and Welsh melodies.
They are lovely. They are beautifully performed. Their cultural value is undeniable.
And I am bored out of my fucking skull.
I'm sure there's a way to like it. I'm sure there's something I'm missing. I'm happy to take the blame.
But good sweet God I find it boring.
Which is a problem as the idiot who's committed to listening to all of Beethoven, because I Googled "Beethoven's folksong settings" and found this: the Complete Beethoven Folksong Settings, recording by various artists for Deutsche Grammophon.
This multi-album recording includes all of his folksong settings. Every last goddamn one. And the website selling it casually stated the album's complete running time is...
7 HOURS AND 58 MINUTES!
7 HOURS AND 58 MINUTES!
OK.
I'm gonna get through these gradually, one by one, until 2035 when I finally listen to the last one and weep for my wasted life.
And I'm gonna make it bearable by spreading around some sugar wherever possible to the brave artists that commit their time and energies to performing and recording these songs. (Shudder)
Today I listened to the Neues Munchner Klaviertrio with soprano Julie Kaufmann. The trio plays with beautiful nuance and Kaufmann brings incredible clarity and musicality to these little musical sleeping pills. Even when the lyrics are trite or dull, she makes them crystal clear.
This isn't that recording. This is some other group of people who can't possibly be happy. "No Riches From His Scanty Store" WoO 152, No. 2.
Guinness. Leprechauns. Potatoes. Mood swings. Beethoven. Nothing says Ireland like Beethoven.
George Thomson (1757 - 1851) spent 59 years working in Edinburgh for the Board of Trustees for the Encouragement of Art and Manufactures in Scotland, a body set up to improve Scottish trade and commerce. He also spent the bulk of his leisure time collecting Scottish and Welsh folk melodies, commissioning famous composers to write arrangements around them, then finding poets willing to provide appropriate lyrics. Having published two volumes of Scottish melodies, Thomson's friend, poet Robbie Burns, floated the idea to Thomson of collecting Irish melodies and repeating the process. Thomas was into it, collected the melodies, many from his friends, and reached out to renowned Irish composer, Ludwig Van Beethoven, to write some arrangements. As a proud Irishman, Beethoven agreed to healthy terms of payment, and wrote the songs.
Here's the thing though: he wrote arrangements to the melodies without any lyrics. Thomson added lyrics he thought would be appropriate after the fact. So, kicking every accepted songwriting rule right in the blarneys, Beethoven wrote the music with no knowledge of what lyrics would go with it. I'm sure it happens, but for these songs it was the rule, not the exception. To my ear, the resulting arrangements are beautiful, but don't sound remotely Irish. They're like Irish melodies behaving themselves after getting yelled at by German police. I will listen to them all, but today here's a little romance. The lyrics are a poem by Lord Byron, called "On Parting". The song is called "The Kiss, Dear Maid , Thy Lip Hath Left", Op 224, WoO 153, No. 9. It's an achey song of leave-taking, love, longing, kissing and waiting. I love the heart-beat pulse in the violin line and the sweet light tenor of Robert White really adds to the Irishness, not that Beethoven could be any more Irish.
The kiss, dear maid, thy lip has left, Shall never part from mine, Till happier hours restore the gift Untainted back to thine.
Thy parting glance, which fondly beams, An equal love, may see; That tear that from thine eyelid streams Can weep no change in me.
I ask no pledge to make me blest In gazing when alone; Nor one memorial for a breast Whose thoughts are all thine own.
Nor need I write - to tell the tale My pen were doubly weak: Oh! What can idle words avail, Unless the heart could speak?
By day or night, in weal or woe, That heart, no longer free, Must bear the love it cannot show, And silent ache for thee.
In Persian culture, there is an expression for that piece of food left in a dish that no one will eat at the end of a meal. Everybody goes "I couldn't possibly" or "Too full" or "There just isn't room" and it just sits there. Persians call that unwanted piece of food "the concubine's child". Because - as the saying's clearly awful origins indicate - when you're a concubine, no one wants your kid.
Lately when I look at my list of Beethoven's complete works, I've been having a hard time ignoring his concubine's children. There they are, shivering and shunted down below his works with shiny opus numbers: the WoO. WoO is the abbrieviation for the German: Werke ohne Opuszahl. In English, "works without opus number". According to wikipedia, these are the works "that were not originally published with an opus number, or survived only as fragments."
I feel bad for these little guys. I see them on the list and get the same feeling I get walking around the Adopt-A-Cat section of the Humane Society. "Aawwwww".
Seems that in 1955, two musicologists named Georg Kinsky and Hans Halm (it's also called the Kinsky-Halm Catalogue) felt the same way about these lesser known pieces and fragments and decided to compile them into their own list. This Island of Misfit Toys for Beethoven's music has some 205 items, all squished together with their patchy fur and missing teeth.
Heart-breaking.
So my goal for this blog has changed:
Instead of only listening to his works with opus numbers, I'm going to listen to his WoO as well. That means this blog will continue until approximately 2035 AD - a fact that will affect very few people, but will give me something other than Facebook to do until I'm 61.
To wrap this entry up, I should mention the one WoO that broke from the pack and, through sheer talent and good-looks, became arguably Beethoven's most famous piece of music. Alone it stands, high in its mansion in the Hollywood Hills, having completely forgotten all its friends from the WoO list it came up the ranks with:
WoO 59.
"Für Elise"
And proving its timelessness, this guy dubstepping in his bedrooom to it:
In addition to being what 61% of music boxes and Casio keyboard demo buttons play, "Für Elise" is my wife's favourite piece of classical music and, as if that wasn't enough to make me love it, my daughter's name is Eliza which is, you know...close enough. Here are the facty facts:
For me, football is like World War One without death: inch by inch, yard by yard. Pure attrition. Big men and boredom.
I don't get it. I never have.
But tonight I watched my first Super Bowl. Scratch that. Tonight I watched my first ever football game and it happened to be the Super Bowl 51, New England Patriots vrs. Atlanta Falcons.
I can barely write it, but holy shit that was exciting. I didn't care and then I cared SO MUCH.
In honour of having my football cherry popped, I listened to Beethoven's Opus 51, 2 Rondos. You can find all you need about the game and the rondos on-line.
Around the age of forty, Beethoven composed, to name a few: the Emperor Concerto, the Egmont Overture, Piano sonata #26, Les Adieux, Fur Elise and threw in a string quartet just 'cause.
I'm turning forty in less than two months. My artistic arc has brought me to the point where on Friday I auditioned for a MacDonald's commercial where the character description from the casting director said:
"THIS ROLE FOR SURE EATS AN EGG MCMUFFIN." (I did not add the caps).
After that, I needed a few days off from Beethoven - the compare and contrast was too bruising.
But now I'm back! Ready for full ego dismantlement!
Here's our man at about the age of 25. This is the only portrait I've seen of him where he appears to have an upper lip. His cheeks are rosy, his eyebrows appear neatly plucked, his hair is dark and full and, most strikingly, he doesn't seem grumpy at all. He looks like a porcelain composer doll.
It was at this age that Beethoven composed the song "Adelaide", based on a romantic poem by Friedrich von Matthisson, best known for his poem "Adelaide", because of the song by Beethoven.
As Chocolate Mouse in Youtube comments said: "Love me some 18th Century pop". You know it, Chocolate Mouse.
Beethoven adored Matthisson's poem and laboured over his setting of it for as much as three years. The result: a hit. The song was "24K Magic" popular in Beethoven's day, going through several "editions", which is a crazy thought unto itself. Now, if a song is a hit, it means millions of people consume it digitally. In 1797, a hit meant that many many people bought the sheet music and went home and PLAYED IT THEMSELVES. I find that thought staggering. Not only did musical popularity at that time require at least a portion of the population to be musically literate, a fraction of that portion would have to be skilled enough to play Beethoven's writing.
I'm not saying one is better or worse. I just love the idea of people falling in love with a song and the interpretation they know best might be their own.
Here's the wikipedia article about the song. It includes the poem itself.
My first instinct was to laugh at the poem's gonzo idealization of its subject. Lines like, "In the fields of stars thy face beams forth, Adelaide!" But then my younger self piped up and reminded me of how completely lost I got in people when I was young, how I saw them in everything, how the whole world became them, and I realized - oh, the poem might be ridiculous, but it's true. I'm just getting older.
I like imagining young, intense, idealistic Beethoven recognizing a truth in himself in this poem and dedicating himself to honouring that truth with all his heart. It warmed my shitty older self right up.
I listened to a few versions of the song. The one I offer you is Jussi Bjorling singing. Bjorling is one of my grandfather's favourites and this extraordinary recording is ample evidence as to why. Bjorling's singing is god-like. His control in quiet passages is incredible and how he sings her name at 4:07 gave me goosebumps.
Plus, there's a bonus to this YouTube video buried in the comments section. A petty snipey fight between two guys calling themselves "The Art of Bel Canto" and "Alf Zay" about vocal technique and pedagogy. High comedy.
sing the Greek man and the Greek woman in "Die Ruinen von Athen" (The Ruin of Athens), Op. 113, incidental music Beethoven composed for the play of that title by August von Kotzebue.
Those Achs come at the end of this sadly timeless set of lyrics:
To suffer slavery, though guiltless, is misery! Every day new sorrow to get our scrap of bread! On its branch shines the fig tree’s sweet fruit, not for the slave that tended it but for the cursed master! The people oppressed, bent low by his hand, ah! ah! ah! ah! (Ah! is English for Ach!)
Just listening to the music, it's futile trying to guess what's going on in the play. Zeus is summoned, Mohammed is mentioned, Ka' abah is sung. Going by the title, I'm going to say the Greeks are invaded by heathen Turks, they plead to Gods, the Gods respond favourably, the heathens are vanquished. But to say that guess isn't educated would be spot on.
I was following along with the lyrics on wikipedia and giggling at the gaudy (and god-y) grandness of it all. I wasn't really listening properly. My ears perked up when the music got all faux -Eastern in the fourth movement, but again in response to the goofiness, not the beauty.
Then all of a sudden, Movement 5 - a greatest hit. I was surprised to hear what I always assumed was Tchaikovsky for all the triangle tinging: the famous Turkish March. Give it a listen on its own. At 1:20, you can catch the percussionist at the back just punishing that triangle.
Also interesting is the playwright of The Ruin of Athens, August Von Kotzebue. He was a Rubix cube of contradictions: shit-disturber, politician, subversive, bureaucrat, father of 18, and wildly prolific creator. In addition to his over 200 plays, he wrote stories, autobiography, sketches, novels, history, polemic, journalism, and satire. Does anyone live like that anymore? Can anyone live like that anymore?
Here is the Ruin of Athens (video complete with lots of Greek images in case you forgot: ATHENS)
This morning, my daughter Eliza sat on the floor with her tablet and watched Loonie Toons, while I ignored her and listened to Beethoven.
She'll be fine.
Op. 119, 11 Bagatelles. Written on and off over the course of 30 years, these bagatelles were published between the two sets I wrote about yesterday.
I watch-listened to the first four on Youtube, played by Valery Afanassiev.
I enjoyed his playing, but I was mighty distracted by his resemblance to this guy:
It's moments like this that I realize you can't listen with your eyes.
But the Albino Torturer (Valery Afanassiev) is a fascinating guy. On top of being a concert pianist, which would probably eat up most of my time, he's an exile, a poet, a playwright, and a novelist. He's also known for his unconventional tempos and interpretations of canonical music. I loved what one critic wrote about his take on Schubert's last three piano sonatas:"the perversity encountered here so angered me that I felt I could not dignify what I found here with any kind of coherent analysis".
What else did that critic expect in...THE PIT OF DESPAIR!!!???
I pray a critic writes something like that about my acting some day.
To enable listening without picturing the late great Mel Smith, I found the remaining 7 bagatelles played by Alfred Brendel. I don't have much to say about these, but number 10 was 13 seconds long, which must be some kind of bagatelle record.
Also, as I listened carefully I realized, Brendel was humming! You too, Alfred?? Does anyone NOT hum???
A bagatelle is tiny billiard game, a layered dessert and a French water park.
A bagatelle is a line of leather jackets. For example, the "red scuba jacket":
Bagatelle is a restaurant in the Meat Packing district of NYC. Here's what Mike F said about it on Yelp: "The food was solid. The environment was decent. Then the DJ hit the floor and the place went nuts."
Then there's Bagatelle, Los Angeles. Sammy C of Trip Advisor fame had a great time, but "my date's food came out over cooked. Then after we sent it back, it came back under cooked. I let her finish my meal. The poulet fermier. It was ok. I wish it was brined a little longer."
I feel ya, Sammy.
Bagatelle is also an Irish rockband, unfortunate enough to have started recording around the same time as U2 and unfortunate enough to have named their band Bagatelle. Here's their biggest hit, "Summer in Dublin" (with lyrics). I like the way they awkwardly squeeze a lot of words into tiny musical phrases.
But the bagatelle we're talking about is:
a short piece of music, typically for the piano, and usually of a light, mellow character. The name bagatelle literally means "a short unpretentious instrumental composition" (wikipedia).
Beethoven wrote three sets of these little pieces. Today I listened to two of the sets, the first and the last, Op. 33 and Op. 126. I would've listened to the middle set, Op. 119, but a guy can only consume so many bagatelles in a day.
The first set thoroughly lived up to the wikipedia definition: light, mellow, short. There was nothing in them that immediately made me think, "Beethoven". As several of my top-secret on-line sources pointed out, Beethoven composed these pieces in his early Classical period, which might be why if played alongside Mozart or Haydn, I'd have a hard time saying, "Beethoven".
Then I listened to Op. 126. These were Beethoven's last works for the piano. Analysts believe he wrote them to be played in a row because of a margin note he included for publishing, "ciclus von Kleinigkeiten" - cycle of little songs. "Cycle" suggesting they were a tapestry. Beethoven wrote to his publisher, Schott, that the bagatelles "are probably the best I've written."
Op. 33 was near the beginning of his creative life, these were near the end, two years before he died. They are jaw-droppingly contemporary sounding: haunting, spare, even jazzy.
Here is the fourth in the set to give you a sense of what I mean:
That's Alfred Brendel playing. I picked it mainly because of the droll Woody Allen-ish screen shot. The recording I listened to was Glenn Gould. I liked it better - even with the humming - because, oddly, I found it lacked warmth which emphasized the strange idiosyncracy of this music.
John Steinbeck, in his trademark "This is a cigarette" pose.
I'm reading 'East of Eden'.
On page 130 Steinbeck writes:
"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone...A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men."
I read this the same day I listened again and again and again to Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 21, Op. 53, "The Waldstein".
In the list of Beethoven's most famous named piano Sonatas - Les Adieux, Moonlight, Pathetique, Hammerklavier, Appassionata - "Waldstein" doesn't sound too exciting. It sounds like a sandwich. Or a neighbour: "That's Mr. Waldstein. He has a pug."
Of course, glib shit aside, it is exciting. It is whirling deep masterpiece and very very exciting. The Sonata is named after the many-namedCount Ferdinand Ernst Joseph Gabriel von Waldstein und Wartenberg, a close friend and patron of Beethoven, and what drew me to it was an interest in the sonata. It is a word I've known my whole life but never really known what it meant beyond "a type of musical composition". And this:
(I swear that's the last time I do that.)
I turned again to Aaron Copland's great little book, "What to Listen for In Music". I won't regurgitate what Copland wrote on the subject. The facts are out there: I'm not here to educate. I'm here to provide you with pure unusable subjectivity.
After breaking the sonata down into its traditional parts and explaining its position as "the basic form of almost every extended piece of music", he directs the reader to the Waldstein sonata because of "the utter contrast between the first and second thematic groups".
To paraphrase: unlike many other sonatas, the musical building blocks of the sonata-allegro first movement are quite easily discerned by even the untrained ear (me, maybe you) and therefore the sonata is a useful illustration of the form.
So I did as Copland said and listened to it. And right from the first racing bars, shot through its elegiac stillnesses and dizzy passage work, its unsure seeking second movement, its excitement, its thrill: the glory. Exactly what Steinbeck described: "a man pours outward, a torrent of him". The sheer physical act of playing it, let alone imagining it, dreaming it, wrestling with it, and then, in the age of ink on paper, transcribing what was in his head - thousands upon thousands of notes - onto the page - it is unfathomable. And this is ONE work of hundreds. I know he suffered for it, but my god - the glory. The gift.
I can't imagine the cost.
I couldn't stop listening to it. I'm listening to it now. I listened several times to Maurizio Pollini play it on a Deutsche Grammophon recording, live at the Vienna Musikverein. This was my favourite. Not because of the playing, but because of the coughing. The recording was replete with coughs - raspy ones, wet ones, barky ones, stifled ones. As a theatre actor, it made me writhe. The whole time I was thinking of the poor guy onstage frustrated out of his mind, having his recording fucked up by the guy in row G who should've stayed home.
Fine as his playing was, I loved it out of sympathy and support for Pollini.
Side note: Theatre coughing is a blight. If you cough in a theatre it is the same as abruptly yelling. It is just as loud and just as distracting. So if you wouldn't yell, don't cough. Step outside. Get a goddamn lozenge.
Then I listened to Horowitz. I used to have a burnt CD of Horowitz playing a mix of classical and baroque piano hits and I loved the brightness and clarity of his playing, no matter the tempo; the feeling that there was a great soul and brain behind the playing. I felt like that again listening to him play the Waldstein.
Then I was Youtube shopping for another recording and came upon this one, performed by Mikhail Pletnev. I'm listening to this now.
Now this was fun. I didn't know this existed. Along with Pletnev's thrilling playing, there's a video of the score that page turns at the appropriate moment! So you can follow along!
To my dork mind, a real pleasure.
I'm not fully musically literate, not by any stretch, but literate enough to track the ebb and flow of the piece, to see where the melody passed from the right hand to the left, the call and response, the abrupt changes in tempo and tone - the whole beautiful structure, like standing outside a gothic cathedral.
And it makes me feel like the Emperor in 'Amadeus' ("Too many notes"), but seeing that sky-filling flock of black birds on the page, each one toiled over and revised and perfected, filled me with awe at the sheer labour of making this music.
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