Beethoven: The Pianist
I was reading the book by Edmund Morris, "Beethoven: The Universal Composer" the other day and read the most beautiful paragraphs about Beethoven the pianist. Here is what I read:
At the piano keyboard--black and white engaging with black and white--the convulsive energy that made Beethoven a peril to fine china smoothed out. "His bearing while playing," Carl Czerny wrote, "was masterfully quiet, noble, and beautiful, without the slightest grimace." He sat quietly before the instrument, and produced a large volume of tone without apparent effort. His technique was remarkably coordinated, with a relaxed wrist that could discharge chords as quickly as scales, fluid are rotation, and skips of pinpoint accuracy. One of his specialties was a triple trill: four fingers of one hand oscillating in pairs at hummingbird speed, plus two more in the other, the volume of all swelling to forte before quieting to an almost inaudible vibration. Nobody could match his velocity in filigree passages, or his full-voiced sonority in slow movements. Years of playing the organ had given him perfect legato. He connected any number of inner and outer voices with ease, except when, in an effect of eerie delicacy, he purposely played the bass line staccato. Each dry not, as it died, transferred its overtones to the open strings, making them resonate unstruck--further evidence that the young Beethoven had one of the sharpest ears in musical history. He accomplished such miracles, one eyewitness recalled, "with his hands so very still... they seemed to glide right and left over the keys."
Beyond technique, there was and indefinable dignity to his playing, a grandeur more of soul than style, free from pomposity, devoid of display, chaste in the best Classical sense. Splendidly though he played Bach, Handel, Gluck, and Mozart, he was most persuasive in his own compositions. Czerny was not the only listener to use the word noble in trying to describe his pianism. "I found myself so profoundly bowed down," the Czech compose Vaclav Tomasek wrote after hearing him, "that I did not touch my pianoforte for several days." More than forty years later, Beethoven remained for him "the giant among piano players."
This did not mean that every attendee at Lichnowsky salon was similarly beguiled. Devotees of gallant music making recoiled from Beethoven's occasional tendency to be brutal. They wondered why these explosions always seemed to occur at moments of maximum beauty. There seemed to be something perverse about these willful young man, as though he wanted violate his own talent. To their watercolor notion of "composition" as something clear, pretty, and small scale, he was a dauber in oil, making slash strokes on canvases too big for the prince's drawing room.
At the piano keyboard--black and white engaging with black and white--the convulsive energy that made Beethoven a peril to fine china smoothed out. "His bearing while playing," Carl Czerny wrote, "was masterfully quiet, noble, and beautiful, without the slightest grimace." He sat quietly before the instrument, and produced a large volume of tone without apparent effort. His technique was remarkably coordinated, with a relaxed wrist that could discharge chords as quickly as scales, fluid are rotation, and skips of pinpoint accuracy. One of his specialties was a triple trill: four fingers of one hand oscillating in pairs at hummingbird speed, plus two more in the other, the volume of all swelling to forte before quieting to an almost inaudible vibration. Nobody could match his velocity in filigree passages, or his full-voiced sonority in slow movements. Years of playing the organ had given him perfect legato. He connected any number of inner and outer voices with ease, except when, in an effect of eerie delicacy, he purposely played the bass line staccato. Each dry not, as it died, transferred its overtones to the open strings, making them resonate unstruck--further evidence that the young Beethoven had one of the sharpest ears in musical history. He accomplished such miracles, one eyewitness recalled, "with his hands so very still... they seemed to glide right and left over the keys."
Beyond technique, there was and indefinable dignity to his playing, a grandeur more of soul than style, free from pomposity, devoid of display, chaste in the best Classical sense. Splendidly though he played Bach, Handel, Gluck, and Mozart, he was most persuasive in his own compositions. Czerny was not the only listener to use the word noble in trying to describe his pianism. "I found myself so profoundly bowed down," the Czech compose Vaclav Tomasek wrote after hearing him, "that I did not touch my pianoforte for several days." More than forty years later, Beethoven remained for him "the giant among piano players."
This did not mean that every attendee at Lichnowsky salon was similarly beguiled. Devotees of gallant music making recoiled from Beethoven's occasional tendency to be brutal. They wondered why these explosions always seemed to occur at moments of maximum beauty. There seemed to be something perverse about these willful young man, as though he wanted violate his own talent. To their watercolor notion of "composition" as something clear, pretty, and small scale, he was a dauber in oil, making slash strokes on canvases too big for the prince's drawing room.
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