Driving around recently (and what a lot of it there’s been, just when we need to observe such thrift) I’ve been listening to a recording of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas given me by Maddy, seeing as my old recording was a victim of the Burning. Why particularly late Beethoven just now in the car? Well there may be a tie-up with the mention of the “Forester-spirit”, mentioned in the newly edited chapter 8 of Restitution, that’s all I can think of.
Anyway, it’s an old re-recording by a maestro I never cared for much – too flashy, I used to think – but it’s funny, you get given something by a significant person in your life and that tends to tilt things around – I’m getting to quite like the flashy. Of course these last five (or six, depending on your standpoint) works have been etched into my soul since my teenage years so in a way it doesn’t really matter who plays them – the music can always shine through. On the whole I don’t like to physically see professional performances of “posh” music – generally too histrionic for my taste – but a couple of years ago I came across a Youtube video of a young Korean student playing sonata 31, and that really was a moving experience and dammit I can’t remember her name – I think there was a Jumin or a Sumin somewhere in there – but she seems to have disappeared off Youtube anyway. She was a lanky sort of girl with big spidery hands that she seemed to watch with a kind of rapt awe as they executed unlikely-looking feats on the keyboard, and I very much thought, yes, that’s how late Beethoven ought to be played. They are such singularly exploratory works – they seem to be reaching, like old Tom a Bedlam, “five leagues beyond the wide world’s end” – that you sometimes wonder if they should really be called sonatas in the set-piece sense. Beethoven was mainly known in his time as a pianist whose extraordinary extemporising ability crowds to his recitals, and I guess the late sonatas often feel like they may be memories of particularly good extemporisations jotted down formally for a publisher when the guy needed to make some cash. Of course he was deaf as a post by the time he wrote these works, and you wonder how he went about his business – did he have some sense of the vibrations his piano was making, or was it a pure visualisation thing? Myself, I can get that: because of my own upbringing and training I can really only get a proper fix on a tune if I can visualise it on a piano keyboard, and I look on with reverence as various of my offspring approach a piece of music from a completely other direction – by ear, by feel, I suppose you’d say – though I get pretty frustrated at our inability to communicate over particular points in a piece, in that as far as of music goes we talk essentially a different language.
I dare say having Beethoven around and visiting your house could be pretty annoying: no small talk possible, I assume he’d just drift off to your piano and start extemporising (reminds me of a lot of musicians I’ve met – real musicians that is: I’m more the small-talk sort) which, considering his brain had no volume control could have made it fairly infuriating if you were trying to just chill with your pals. But what really intrigues me about Beethoven in particular – on the piano at least, which is where most of his compositions started – is that his lifetime coincided with some remarkable developments in instrument-making, where technological “improvements” meant that really skilled instrument-makers were frequently held in as high regard as the maestros who performed on them (think of Stradivarius). Beethoven was clearly hugely inspired by these, often purely mechanical, developments – musical machinery? – such that the question has to arise in my mind whether the exploratory feel of his late works isn’t actually less due to some great spiritual release and more the product of a guy just sitting down and fiddling about with a new piece of Tech. And of course the two things may coincide – which is a bit of a kick in the teeth for my luddite sensibilities.
Further to this – and relating to my editing work on Restitution , now at Chapter 8 stage – I have a slightly disturbing thought about the whole nature of what we know as the posher kind of music – of Europe at least, though I dare say there are parallels in the East, certainly in India – well, in jazz too I suppose, I always forget about jazz….. Before the advent of “pure” music, of classical music that’s to say, you could pretty much define music as indicating either song or dance – or processions of various kinds I suppose, and of course a bit of nonsense from the musicians’ gallery if you were entertaining in your castle. I’m not quite sure exactly where “pure” music started off – rich Italian Dads I always think, wanting their daughters to have a rounded education and so insisting that they could at least play a couple of tunes on an instrument (assuming their singing sounded like a peacock braying – if they could sing prettily it’d be a different matter). I think Vivaldi had a whole girls school to deal with, while Domenico Scarlatti just had a single lonely and homesick princess to cater for – though clearly a highly sophisticated musician at that – but it seems like the same kind of deal. Rich people could afford the latest tech in instruments, and the girls, as Boccaccio pointed out in his intro to the Decameron, had a potential life of stricture and boredom to look forward to if they couldn’t develop some amusement to fill the hours, including developing some artistic skill or other, at least if they’d run out of naughty stories to read. So I guess “classical music” was born, and who could have predicted the way this pure music – music without the accompaniment of words or dancing or pacing feet – would then develop and branch out? By “music” I must mean specifically tunes plus variation: things seem to have passed beyond that nowadays, song has surged back as the central musical preoccupation, and “classical” composers are more involved with the exploration of sound, as opposed to what most of us oiks would recognise as music. So we’re talking about a relatively defined period in human musical history – well western, at least, though it’s interesting how this music came to flood modern Eastern consciousness in such a big way – and crucially, for me, this period happens to correspond with the first four centuries of what in Restitution is referred to as the Third Reich. The nature and purpose of the Reichs is, I guess, what the book’s all about, but it divides them into First, which is the age of naked power and brute force, the Second, being the age of the “great religions”, and the Third which is the age of “scientific” technology. Come to think of it, naked power and brute force aren’t that far away in any of them, but I guess it’s nice to think that there might be at least a trace feeling of evolution and development going on. Restitution is equally about the strands and elements and currents that run counter to the naked force of the Reichs, among them the force that pure or classical music took on in the collective consciousness – and not purely the upper classes, either – becoming in and of itself an “other way” of being and thinking, even a constituent of a revolution in consciousness. Only for a while, of course – nothing lasts. Which is why the high-tech aspect of classical music troubles me a bit, though not too much I have to say: I still have faith in the message delivered by Peter’s single combat with the usurper Miraz in Prince Caspian – “there’s a man for you!”, loyal Trumpkin exclaims as Peter, battered and bruised, hauls himself back to his feet – “uses his enemy’s arm as a ladder!”
Anyway, Chapter 8 is up there under the Restitution Notes tab as usual.
AnnaScott
charlesashton
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