Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas are venerated for their range, originality and depth. The 19th-century pianist Hans von Bülow famously dubbed them the New Testament of the pianistic Bible (the Old Testament was Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier). A 20th-century successor, Louis Kentner, suggested that they should be presented to the first Martian visitor as proof of the achievements of Earthling civilisation. Both remarks are a reminder that Beethoven's sonatas have long possessed a status that goes beyond the notes on the page.
A performance of the complete cycle, like the one being undertaken by Daniel Barenboim in the Royal Festival Hall from late January, is therefore a major musical venture. But it is more than that. In venerating Beethoven's achievement in this extended way, something beyond the music is being asserted. There is a moral and even religious element to the ritual.
No pianist of modern times is as prominent a figure as Barenboim (pictured, below right). Whether as Reith lecturer or as one-man middle east peace process, let alone as the widower of Jacqueline du Pré, Barenboim has acquired a public status that transcends even his formidable ability at the keyboard—a status he has in some respects sought as much as acquired by accident. Characteristically, his Beethoven cycle is to be accompanied by three public discussions under the title "Artist as Leader."
Yet the music matters too. I doubt that Barenboim would be pondering the artist as leader if he was playing the complete works of Mozart, Brahms or Debussy. Though concert audiences are familiar with cycles of the works of particular composers—like the Mahler symphonies that Valery Gergiev is performing in London this season—Beethoven projects occupy a revered place, and the piano sonatas the most revered of all.
This would have surprised Beethoven. Not because he did not think highly of his sonatas, but because, during his lifetime, hardly a single movement of any of them was performed to a paying audience in the modern manner. The American musicologist Mary Sue Morrow found no evidence of any solo piano sonata being publicly performed in Vienna between 1750 and 1810. Admittedly, Beethoven had not written the last six of his 32 sonatas by 1810, but the finding is a reminder that the sonatas were overwhelmingly written for private study and domestic performance.
The idea that a paying audience might sit through even one sonata, by Beethoven or anyone else, took root slowly. As so often, Felix Mendelssohn was the instigator of the performance revolution, programming the complete Moonlight at a public concert in Berlin in late 1832. The most renowned pianist of the age, Franz Liszt, was more circumspect. Though he performed the supposedly "unplayable" Hammerklavier in front of an invited audience in Paris in 1836, Liszt only played two of the sonata's four movements when he next scheduled it six years later.
Beethoven had been in his grave for half a century by the time the modern idea of the piano recital as a source of public reflection and improvement began to rival the more entrenched view of it as an entertainment. By the late 19th century, this haut-bourgeois seriousness exceeded even today's approach. In Wilhelmine Germany, the ultra-reverential Bülow frequently programmed the last five Beethoven sonatas in an evening—and sometimes played the entire Appassionata sonata as an encore. (As a conductor, Bülow also played the 9th symphony twice in an evening, to allow audiences to appreciate it better.)
Much has changed since then, but we still inhabit an era in which Beethoven sonatas are offered up for public blessing. Too much so, in the view of the pianist Kenneth Hamilton, whose new book After The Golden Age chastises modern pianists for "the fusty rituals of modern concert-giving, in which the music is served up with the superciliousness of a sneering sommelier offering overpriced wine." That's not a charge you can make against Barenboim. His Beethoven cycle is set to be a noisily resonant event. He clearly intends his audience to feel, as Tony Blair said in a different context, that the hand of history is on their shoulder when he reveals Beethoven's sonatas once more to the faithful.
Mahler at St Paul's
Speaking of the Gergiev Mahler cycle, booking has opened for his performance in July of the 8th symphony, the so-called Symphony of a Thousand. This is the least performed of all the Mahler symphonies, given the cost of hiring and rehearsing the choirs and enlarged orchestra. All Mahler lovers must be tempted by the prospect. But there is a snag. With forces of this size, a performance in the Barbican, the London Symphony Orchestra's normal venue, is out of the question. So Gergiev and the LSO will mount the 8th in St Paul's Cathedral on 9th-10th July. It is an irresponsible choice. Whatever its other attractions, St Paul's has a terrible acoustic. The LSO should have relocated the 8th to the Albert Hall for the start of the Proms. What a wasted opportunity.
