Classical Canon random selection #12:

124

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Opus 15: Piano Concerto (No. 1 in C major)

composed: 1795, revised 1800 (age 25, 30)
[although recent scholarship suggests composition may have been as early as 1793, age 23]

published: 1801
first performance: December 18, 1795, Redoutensaal, Vienna
[recent scholarship, again, thinks perhaps that concert featured the “Concerto No. 2,” and this one was actually premiered in 1796 on tour, in Berlin, Pressburg (Bratislava), or Pest (Budapest)]

dedicated to Princess Barbara Odescalchi (née Countess von Keglevics)

That’s two Beethovens in a row, if you’re counting.

I have a whole bunch of these Classical Canon pieces to respond to but I’ve been held up because I just don’t have much to say about this one. But that’s okay, right? Isn’t it okay not to have much of a response to something?

I guess. But the obligation to write is supposed to be my incentive to up the ante. When you put some shoulder into in it and push upstream against lazy, duck’s-back indifference, you almost always find something. Not finding anything is usually just a symptom of passivity. So going with my shrug feels like a cop-out, even if it’s sincere.

But some things are more shrug-worthy than others.

When we say that something has made no particular impression on us, what we mean is that the impression was already made on us, earlier in life, by something else. Everything makes an impression on a blank-slate newborn, but as the impressions build up, the mind begins to construct categories, and then subcategories, and so on and so on. And then it finds itself here, as me, listening to a piece and thinking, “yeah, this just sounds like some classical-era music,” and then trying to listen closer, and thinking, “yeah, this just sounds like a classical-era piano concerto,” and then — let’s skip to the finish here — “yeah, this sounds like an early Beethoven piano concerto.” That’s a sub-category in which there are only two items. And yet it still feels like a category and not an identity.

A talking point that I’ve brought out in several conversations past: how many Road Runner cartoons are there? Yeah, Wikipedia says 45, but that includes a bunch of latter-day nonsense; the ones you’d ever see on TV end around 40, and that includes a whole series of shoddy, cut-rate ones from the 60s. The Chuck Jones ones, which are the only ones you actually think of when you think of Road Runner cartoons, number only about 22. The point is: some fairly small finite number.

Yeah, believe it or not, I’ve used this as an example before. So, it’s not a great one; so sue me. I still think of it when I think of this issue of type versus exemplar. There is no amount of specific familiarity with those 22 cartoons that I could gain and not still think of Road Runner cartoons as a type, an unbounded set. Or so I suspect. I’m not going to try.

I have come to accept that in listening to music, I am personally most sensitive to kinetic qualities: how much energy it’s exhibiting and how, what happens to movement, whether it’s gathering force or dissipating, smaller impulses driving larger ones, etc. My memory of music I’ve only heard a few times will frequently trick me by replacing harmonies, melodies, or rhythms with other ones that “accomplish” the same thing, kinetically, because that’s what I’ve identified as essential. That kind of awareness comes without any thought or effort, and is quite full. But for me to become sensitive to the particularities of line, or harmony, or form, beyond their most aggressive features, requires either strenuously willed attention, or a score to concretize everything so I can work with my eye and not just my flaky ear.

Or I have to hear a piece many, many times, until every detail has wormed its way into my memory. But that kind of knowledge feels a little superficial in its own way — when you care about some accidental squeak on a recording as much as you do about the sequence of notes, your familiarity is not specifically musical. John Cage would say otherwise, but I think he’d be wrong. You can become very familiar with a recording of a person’s voice speaking in a language you do not understand; that’s different from becoming very familiar eith the text being spoken. Objectively and cognitively different in type, not just character. Being able to hum my way through a piece still doesn’t mean I “get it,” just like being able to walk the route to elementary school didn’t mean I knew anything about the geography of my hometown.

Without evidence to the contrary, I’d assume that everyone experienced music this same way: motion and texture above all, then tunes, then everything else. It just feels so inevitable to me. But I know it’s not so. Beth, for one, remembers melodies very accurately after only one or two listens, and is amazed how often I — “a musician!” — sing back melodies incorrectly, subconsciously recomposing phrases in ways that feel to me “functionally equivalent” to the originals. To her ear there’s nothing “equivalent” about it; I’m just getting them wrong, period. But her memory for accompaniment and rhythm seems to be vaguer than mine.

It seems likely that these kinds of predilections are determined by the musical languages to which we are exposed as children, just as our ability to distinguish phonemes seems to correspond to the language we are brought up speaking. An English speaker has a hard time learning to hear and speak Mandarin vowel sounds (right?) but no baby brought up speaking Mandarin has any serious problem. Maybe. On the other hand, people’s precision of enunciation varies greatly within the same culture. Beth’s brother, who grew up in the same household, lets all his phonemes melt together without apparently hearing it or caring; she doesn’t. So there’s probably some genetic component as well. For what it’s worth, I know many fine musicians who are terrible mumblers, and many actors who can very attentively and carefully mimic speech patterns but not musical ones. Yeah, I know, that’s a whole other bicycle of fish.

I personally grew up hearing a mix of classical music, theater music, and pop — and most importantly, of course, TV — but pretty idiosyncratic selections from each. Most people with classical music in their lives seem to have been exposed to various composers and pieces approximately in proportion to their general cultural prominence, but my exposure was mostly based on what my father’s casual, eclectic interest happened to have focussed on in any given month. I heard Mozart and Beethoven, but only a few pieces by each. I probably heard more pieces by Bartok than by Mozart. There was no obvious way for me to know that the five or six Mozart sonatas that I knew were actually to be understood in the context of a whole coherent musico-linguistic culture circa 1785 in Austria, whereas Bartok came from a time of iconoclasts — he was surrounded by influences but no true contemporaries. In my childhood, I recognized that each composer had a personality that united their pieces, but otherwise each piece stood alone. The fact that Mozart and Beethoven had sort of similar styles, all things considered, was if anything a count against them both. Why write more of that kind of stuff when we already have the 10 pieces that I know?

Pop music was similar. I never sought it out and never put on the radio, so I just heard the albums my parents bought and listened to — a couple every year but not a lot more. Plus the extra copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that they let me play on my Fisher Price turntable. As with classical, I didn’t have a full enough spectrum of material to form a sense of a shared language. Other than the basic chords and rhythms, each band seemed to be coming from its own universe. The only genuinely whole musical “culture” I knew was the TV, which probably accounts for stuff like this being in my brain today.

The point of this digression is that I think whatever strengths my musical mind developed were those that were useful in distinguishing this range of musical fragments from one another. The musical culture to which I and nobody else belonged (well, except maybe my sister, for a while) was the one which contained a few isolated pieces by the Beatles, and Bartok, and Mozart, and the theme for the evening news, and only a few hundred other things.

Every spoken language emphasizes different kinds of discrimination — our American-English ears don’t seem care too much about a lot of vowels, but we place greater emphasis than the rest of the world, it seems, on distinguishing our “R” from other sounds near it — and the same is true for musical cultures. Beethoven and Mozart wrote for listeners who were apparently expected to care very much about the character of line, even at a very small scale. Most of their listening was presumably to virtuoso vocalists whose elaborate flourishes were the point. Even after a bachelor’s degree and several decades of attentive listening, my ears almost always just hear “music that believes in flourishes,” which is sufficient to distinguish it from, say, the 3-2-1 Contact Theme, and mostly disregards the specific flourishes, just like we all mostly disregard the difference in character between the decorative gook growing on the front of the one dollar bill (classical, leafy, modest), and the decorative gook growing on the back (baroque, sinuous, alien). We just see “dignified, intricate old-timey decoration.” And part of us always will, no matter how many design classes we take.

I must accept that before I put on my “18th-century-make-believe” helmet and hunker down hard with a score — and even afterward — I am going to hear Beethoven in competition not with Albrechtsberger and Hummel (who?) but with Debussy and Prokofiev and “Theme from the Jetsons” and “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”

This problem is — OBVIOUSLY — the main reason why classical music is hard to popularize nowadays, but nobody wants to talk about it because there’s no solution other than to give up on all but a very few pieces from any given era.

One of my esteemed music professors once played a Bach “surprise” cadence on the piano and ostentatiously savored how wonderfully spicy and shocking it was, and then bemoaned the fact that today most people need to be beaten over the head to elicit any sense of surprise, and attributed it, with an Ivy League shake of the head, to “the coarsening of our culture.” Which is, at face value, actually a very good metaphor for what’s happened, but he didn’t mean it that way — he meant that these horrible people today are getting more and more vulgar and lowdown, ugh. I said that I thought it was simply because we’ve been exposed to contexts where that chord isn’t shocking at all; that if we heard that very same chord progression in a work by Schoenberg, we would have been principally struck by how uncharacteristically bland and rote and old-fashioned it was. These things are all contextual, and we aesthetes and aficionados are all play-acting, to a degree, when we pretend to live in those contexts, whereas the coarse people around us who admit not to being surprised by a totally characteristic “surprise” are just being honest. And he had absolutely nothing to say to that. We just went on to something else.

I think. It’s possible my memory has distorted the moment, to make me more of a lonely prophet of sincerity in a vale of pretension. Thanks, memory!

This is all to say that this piece is hiding behind some other pieces from around 1800 that I already know, and won’t come out no matter how much I coax it. Here, kitty kitty. Even if I commit the whole thing to memory, will it ever really come out?

My recent entries here have been long and dull and it’s because I haven’t been writing as much lately. Juices need to be gotten flowing. A lot of this is, I suspect, like reading the loop-de-loops of someone getting a dry pen started.

So I’m going to be bold and just end it here. Wait, what about, like, Beethoven’s Concerto No. 1? You can listen yourself if you want. It’s a decent but unremarkable piece based on decent but unremarkable material. It’s not in the 1001 Recordings list and more power to them. I think David Dubal just wanted to list all five concerti because Beethoven’s such a damned demigod.

Honestly, it’s better than this entry lets on. You might like it.

Dubal told me to listen to:

Fleisher, Cleveland Orchestra, Szell: CBS M3K 42445
Schnabel, London Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sargent: Pearl PEA 9063
Arrau, Dresden Staatskapelle, Davis: Philips 422149-2

I hit the Schnabel, not the others.

I listened to
Murray Perahia, Concertgebouw Orchestra / Bernard Haitink (1985)
Artur Schnabel, London Symphony Orchestra / Malcolm Sargent (1932)
Rudolf Serkin, Philadelphia Orchestra / Eugene Ormandy (1965)
Melvyn Tan, The London Classical Players / Roger Norrington (1988, on period instruments)
Sviatoslav Richter, Boston Symphony Orchestra / Charles Munch (1960)

Man, that’s a lot! Who knew. I don’t remember which ones I liked; it was a long time ago.

Maybe someday my conscience will come haunting me and I’ll force myself to have more thoughts specifically about this piece, but that seems highly, highly unlikely.