(MUSIC) Today’s lecture is on one of Beethoven’s best-known and most misunderstood works: the Sonata op. 53, usually known as the “Waldstein” Sonata. This sonata was written in 1804, in the same twelve month span as the “Appassionata”. The two sonatas have vastly different characters, and yet they share many things: their epic scale, their refusal to be hemmed in by classical conventions or proportions, and perhaps most of all, their ubiquity. These two great middle period sonatas are played, and played, and played. They are played by professional pianists, and, especially, by piano students, over and over, while other marvelous sonatas go more-or-less ignored. In the case of the Waldstein, this is probably due to its virtuosity: it is, on a surface level, a rather “athletic” piece, which makes it undeniably exciting, and also a good test of the proficiency of an advanced student. This focus on the Waldstein’s virtuosic side, though, is a crying shame, because it obscures its many more interesting qualities: it’s a bit like failing to notice the majesty and drama of an ocean, because one can only see that it is blue. The Waldstein Sonata is a work of tremendous mystery, and ultimately spirituality as well. It is also a piece that hugely expands the piano’s range of sonic possibilities: it asks the instrument to shrink to a whisper and to expand into a cathedral, and it uses the pedal in revolutionary ways – this is probably Beethoven’s first piano work to ask the performer to defy the limitations of the instrument, which becomes such a central characteristic in his late period. And perhaps most importantly, the Waldstein truly rewrites the rules of classical harmony in ways that were to send Beethoven on a new path that he remained on for the rest of his life. At the risk of being a curmudgeon, I must say that these qualities all too often fail to come through in performances of the Waldstein. There is probably no better way for me to convey how over- and improperly exposed this sonata is than to tell you about my own peculiar history with it. Normally, before playing any piece in public, I learn it well enough in advance to have time to work on it, put it away, come back to it, and then put it away a second time. That way, when I ultimately do perform it, I’ve had the benefit of two extended periods of time away from the piece, during which the work I’ve done really gets absorbed, by same strange sort of osmosis. Sometimes the time away feels more beneficial – brings me closer to the piece – than the work itself does. I can’t quite explain why this is the case, but I’ve felt it happen time and time again. Well, in the case of the Waldstein, about six weeks before my first performance, I started working on it, for what I thought would be the third time, and was quite astonished to find that I had actually NEVER learned it! I had heard the piece so often – in performances, in auditions, in masterclasses – that it felt as if I knew it from the inside out. And I did, in a sense – I’d spent a lot of time thinking about the piece’s magical qualities, its unique structure, and its many pitfalls. But I still had to learn the thing. It all turned out fine – six weeks is a good amount of time, and I really wasn’t starting from scratch – but nothing remotely similar has ever happened to me. Hopefully, this conveys the extent to which the Waldstein, in the piano world, is simply part of the furniture.
