Thursday, September 10, 2015

April 6, 2009: The Beethoven cycle concludes

Last night at Davies Symphony Hall András Schiff concluded his two-year eight-concert cycle of the complete piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven with the last three sonatas in the set.  The opus numbers of these works are consecutive (109, 110, 111).  They were composed between 1820 and 1822, placing them in the final decade of Beethoven's life.  In his notes for the program book, Michael Steinberg called these three works a triptych;  but I wonder if Beethoven thought of them this way.  Had they been conceived as a unit, I would have thought that they would have shared a common dedication (if not opus number, like the three sonatas collected respectively under Opus 2 and Opus 10).  However, Opus 110 lacks any dedication, while Opus 109 is dedicated to Maximiliane Brentano (whom, as I had previously mentioned, Beethoven had taught composition eight years earlier as a nine-year-old girl), while Opus 111 is dedicated to the Archduke Rudolph, also one of Beethoven's composition students, to whom the Opus 73 "Emperor" piano concerto was dedicated (and the "Archduke" of the Opus 97 piano trio).  Thus, these sonatas are less a triptych than they are three experiments in departing from the conventions of the piano sonata, sharing certain attributes but each strikingly unique in its own way.

None of these sonatas follows the usual three-movement or four-movement structure associated with the form;  and any presence of the "sonata form" movement is relatively subtlety concealed.  Both Opus 109 and Opus 111 concluded with elaborate variations on an extended theme, pushing the sense of a prolonged duration even further than it had been pushed in the third movement of the "Archduke" trio.  The conclusion of Opus 110 goes back to the fugal process of Opus 106, but with a much tighter structure, a recitative "interruption," and a wild roller-coaster ride beginning with an inversion of the theme and pulling out just about every contrapuntal device while going out in a blaze of glory.

The uniqueness of the three sonatas has less to do with their virtuoso demands, however, and more to do with their introspective nature.  Most of the high energy is concentrated in the final movement of Opus 110 and the opening movement of Opus 111.  For the most part, however, the mood is reflective and thus well served by the theme-and-variations movements.  Opus 109 breaks the ground, so to speak, exploring the potential of mining variations from an extended theme.  Opus 111 then works the ground that has been broken, weaving fabrics as rich in counterpoint as those of the Opus 106 and Opus 110 fugues but now in the service of variation.  Most important, however, is that, after all the explorations, both sets of variations return to the quiet and meditative theme upon which each has been based.  These three sonatas show Beethoven the "reflective practitioner" in the best light, each giving its own voice to the uniqueness and profundity of the composer's reflections.

By taking a disciplined approach to the music as Beethoven wrote it, Schiff made sure that Beethoven's "voice" behind these three sonatas was the center of attention.  Each of these sonatas can be turned into its own "advertisement" for the pianist's virtuosity (which is not to say that Beethoven avoided exploring his own virtuosity).  Schiff's performance made it clear that he wanted us to come to hear Beethoven, rather than Schiff.  When it was a matter of a particular "message" depending on a subtle detail, he made sure that the detail did not get lost in the wash of other notes.  When it was a matter of the "overall experience," he paced that experience to facilitate taking it in as a whole.  It is hard to imagine Beethoven being better served than he was last night, whatever ups and downs the other concerts in the cycle may have displayed.

The final touch, in a way, was Schiff's decision to pass on any encore.  He wanted Opus 111 to be the last word of the evening.  While he had made many innovative encore decisions for the preceding seven recitals, last night he left the "sense of an ending" (as Frank Kermode put it) in Beethoven's hands.

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