Beethoven and Your Dumb Baby

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Ferdinand_Ernst_Gabriel_von_Waldstein

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.

Eight Little Notes!

There is nothing I can add to this. 

du Pré and the Ghost

Jacqueline du Pré

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_du_Pr%C3%A9

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. 

Oh, Clive.

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 sounds like this album:

http://www.tokyoquartet.com/artist.php?view=record&rid=560

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. 

Picture Day

The incredible Aleksandar Antonijevich

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:

Almost a Fantasy

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:

Heart to Heart Rita Dove

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.

The Lieder Bored

 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.