The Glory

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-named Count 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.

If you're curious, here's the excellent wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonata_form

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.

That's all on this one. The Waldstein.