Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

There is a special category when it comes to Beethoven; a catalogue that doesn’t include complete symphonies, sonatas, concerti, string quartets, etc., but just single movements. This is the catalogue of great Beethoven slow movements. Beethoven’s slow movements are like a great Tolstoy novel. They span the gamut of human experience and also reach beyond it, into something we cannot understand but all somehow perceive. Simply put, Beethoven often seems to know us better than we know ourselves. This brings me to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. Unlike those late quartet slow movements, the slow movement of the Hammerklavier is not about ecstatic contemplation. Instead, it is a movement of pure and profound despair. It has been described as “a mausoleum of the collective suffering of the world,” and “the apotheosis of pain, of that deep sorrow for which there is no remedy, and which finds expression not in passionate outpourings, but in the immeasurable stillness of utter woe.” This is not a movement I would necessarily enter into lightly as you go about your day—it requires you to take a moment and enter a world unlike any other. Today, in Part 2 of this Patreon-sponsored exploration of this great, in all senses of the word, Sonata, we’ll go through this slow movement in detail. Then we’ll tackle the life-affirming and maddeningly complex last movement, which is not quite the antidote to the slow movement, but perhaps it is the only possible answer to the questions the third movement so profoundly asks. Join us! 

Beethoven once wrote to his publisher: “What is difficult, is also beautiful, good, great, and so forth. Hence everyone will realize that this is the most lavish praise that can be bestowed, since what is difficult makes one sweat.” If this credo manifests itself most powerfully in any one of Beethoven’s works, it might be the piece we’ll talk about today, the piano Sonata Op. 106, nicknamed, “Hammerklavier.”  It is the longest Sonata Beethoven ever wrote, which essentially means that it was the longest sonata anyone had written up to that point. It marks one of the pivot points between Beethoven’s so-called heroic period and his late period, where his music became even more cosmically beautiful than before. It is certainly his most ambitious Sonata to that point, and his most difficult. The scale of the Hammerklavier sonata is hard to describe; in around 45 minutes of music, Beethoven explores the full gamut of human emotion. The intensity, the difficulty, and the concentration that this sonata requires from the pianist and listener alike has led to many people, as the pianist Andras Schiff says, to “respect and revere this Sonata, but not love it.” Most of the articles and analyses of this sonata that I found in researching this show emphasize its difficulty, its scale, its obsessiveness, and its impenetrability. But I must say that when I talk to musicians abut this piece, their eyes light up. Yes, this sonata is difficult, but what have we just learned from Beethoven? What is difficult is also beautiful, good, great and so forth. Join us as we begin a two part exploration of this remarkable work together.  Thank you to Jerry for sponsoring this show on Patreon! Recording: https://youtu.be/yBtJF_4msqw?si=bIznKSGuRyXDbFaT    

The collaboration between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht is rightly legendary. The two men could not have been more different from each other, and like the Brahms/Joachim relationship I mentioned in my recent show about the Brahms Double concerto, the friendship between Weill and Brecht was stormy to say the least. The two collaborated on some of the most memorable works of the Weimar era in Germany, such as the Threepenny Opera, which features a pretty famous tune called Mack the Knife. Their final collaboration was on the “sung ballet” The Seven Deadly Sins. This is a piece that was written at a point of remarkably high tension within Weimar Germany. On an artistic level, the 1920s and early 1930s had seen a veritable explosion in the world of culture, with art, dance, theater, and music all featuring artists who were pushing the boundaries with wild experimentation and a kind of ecstatic fervor that produced some of the world’s greatest and most memorable cultural achievements. On a parallel track however, the rise of the Nazis cast a pall over all of this. By 1933, both Brecht and Weill(who was Jewish) knew that Germany was not a place that they could stay safely. Weill ended up in Paris and then in the US for the rest of his life, while Brecht bounced around Europe before returning to East Germany after the war, hoping to be a part of the Marxist Utopia that he believed had been founded there.  The simmering combination of Weill’s mastery of transforming popular forms into a unique kind of classical music along with Brecht’s pointed satire and brilliantly inventive libretti resulted in the Seven Deadly Sins, a piece that that brutally satirizes extreme capitalism and the degradation of the human soul that supposedly results from it. This is a nakedly political piece, and I should make it clear that by talking about it, by choosing to feature it on the show, and by regularly performing it, I don’t necessarily endorse its views. Brecht was extreme in all ways, as we’ll get to today, and the power of this piece in my opinion doesn’t come from its politics, but from its remarkable and devastating portrayal of a human soul and the tragedies that can befall it. This is one of my favorite pieces of the whole 20th century, and I’m so happy to share it with you today. Join us!

I so enjoyed making this latest episode in my collaboration with G Henle Publishers. I talked with two absolute experts in their fields, Norbert Mülleman and Stefan Knüpfer, all about how to edit Ravel's music, and how to create the Ravel sound on the piano. This episode definitely veers into some very nerdy territory, but Norbert and Stefan are both so brilliant at explaining very high level concepts in a way that anyone can understand, from a person who has never looked at a score to a professional performer. I think everyone will learn a lot from this episode and I don't think you'll ever hear Ravel the same way again after listening! Enjoy!