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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
January 19, 2020
In the Peanuts strip of January 25, 1953, Schroeder spends the first eleven frames doing push-ups, skipping, pumping iron, running, shadow boxing and more before finally sitting at his piano and playing — the opening bars of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata.
This would not be the last time that he played that famous opening, it was to recur three or four times (I do not have the intestinal fortitude to check the seventeen-thousand-odd subsequent strips and, unfortunately, the complete cataloguing of Schulz's use of Beethoven — and, occasionally, other composers — has yet to be carried out), often to relieve Schroeder's frustration over something Lucy had said or done.
Whether or not Arthur Rowe put himself through a Schroederesque regimen of strict training before Sunday's recital I cannot say, but I can say that he certainly showed no signs of fatigue, even at the end of a long and taxing programme.
The "Hammerklavier" still possesses a fairly daunting reputation, despite all of the technical advances in pianism since Beethoven's day, and it is probably among the least-frequently performed of all of the thirty-two sonatas, its importance and acknowledged greatness notwithstanding, simply because of the challenges, technical, intellectual and emotional, which it presents to the player; this is, for example, certainly the first performance I have attended in nearly thirty years of reviewing here in Victoria, although I am quite prepared to accept that I may have missed one or two over that period.
Rowe rose superbly to his self-imposed task, turning in an account of considerable power and depth, from that imperious opening to the stunning fugue which closes the piece. The very opening (in Beethoven's sketchbook accompanying the words "Vivat, vivat Rudolphus!" together with a note that it was to be developed and assigned to a four-part chorus) was not taken particularly fast — Beethoven's metronome markings are nowhere more controversial than in this work — but was undoubtedly massive and weighty. Indeed, Rowe's playing of the entire movement simply underlined what extraordinary music this is, despite its surface conventionality (sonata form opening movement, scherzo, slow movement and finale).
And one of the numerous remarkable facets of the "Hammerklavier" is that each movement is, in many ways, more extraordinary than its predecessor. So the fleeting scherzo combines dynamism and delicacy, both present and correct in Rowe's hands, and contains a remarkable presto trio with an astonishing prestissimo six-octave upward run — virtually the entire span of the instrument at the time.
As an interesting sideline, when Ferdinand Ries was arranging to have the sonata published in London, Beethoven wrote him a letter containing an extra bar containing just two notes, to be added to the beginning of the slow movement. "I confess I could not help wondering 'Is my dear old teacher becoming weak in the head?...To send another two notes for so tremendous a work, which had been revised through and through, and had been completed six months earlier!! My astonishment grew even greater when I discovered the effect of these two notes..."
The adagio sostenuto is both the emotional heart of the sonata and one of the most profound utterances that ever came from the composer's pen. Here again, the performer must choose whether or not to observe Beethoven's metronome markings, using which the movement would last about eight [sic] minutes. Most pianists take between fifteen and twenty-five minutes and, although I very rarely time performances I am reviewing, I did notice that Rowe took around fourteen minutes, which put him in the company of Walter Gieseking, Egon Petri, Maurizio Pollini and Yvonne Lefebure. Not at all bad company.
But that does not mean that there was any lack of profundity: Rowe's total concentration, allied to a beautiful tonal palette, gave the music a tremendous sense of cohesion, making the movement seem both timeless and yet over far too quickly,
Towards the end of his life Beethoven found new compositional inspiration in the fugue, and the pregnant slow opening of the finale leads to one of the most singular examples in Western Music, perhaps (perhaps) only overshadowed by the Grosse Fuge itself. Thomas Mann, in "Doktor Faustus", suggests that in this movement Beethoven seems to view the fugue with something like hatred and a desire to overcome it.
Rowe "nailed it", as I believe the young folk say, with contrapuntal lines commendably clear, and a massive forward momentum.
It has been almost fifty years since I last heard the "Hammerklavier" in the flesh. In Rowe's hands the performance was well worth the wait.
The Sonata in A, Op.101, was also published as "für das Hammerklavier" and yet the nickname did not stick. The music is undoubtedly, in many regards, gentler than its mighty successor, although it, too, is challenging technically, as Beethoven wrote to the publisher Haslinger: "...in particular there are people who vex me about the sonata, which is difficult to perform".
Not that one would have deduced any difficulties in Rowe's hands, as he put not a finger wrong from beginning to end. The lovely opening movement, which features what is surely one of Beethoven's most winning melodies, was taken at a perfect tempo and clothed in gorgeous tones. The scherzo was forceful and dramatic yet superbly controlled.
The slow movement was again quite outstandingly lovely and the moment when the work's opening reappears, to herald the finale, was delicious. That finale, a combination of sonata form and fugue, was joyfully exuberant, with Rowe managing to bring out considerable inner detail, although I have to admit that, having "imprinted" on Artur Schnabel's 1934 recording, I still miss the two rapid thumps which occur about two-thirds of the way through said recording.
It would seem that Beethoven, in his Op.33, was the first composer to use the term "bagatelle" as a generic description. And even though the Opp.119 and 126 sets were described by him, in German, as "Kleinigkeiten", that term means much the same and both sets are invariably also referred to as bagatelles.
The Op.126 set, with which Rowe opened the afternoon, are anything but "trifles"; composed in 1823-24, around the same time as the Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony and "Diabelli" Variations, they are admittedly brief, yet intense character pieces.
In Rowe's reliable hands the first was gently quirky; the second somewhat acerbic and crisply articulated; the third more contemplative; the fourth fiery with contrasting gentler episodes; the fifth consolatory and the last (briefly delayed by the ringing of a phone in the hall) beginning with an outburst of annoyance (remarkably prescient under the circumstances) before leading to its calm conclusion.
Atfer completing his final piano sonata, Beethoven said that he found the piano, "after all, an unsatisfactory instrument". Perhaps if he had heard a modern Steinway (and the School of Music — still, after a dozen years, the only all-Steinway School in Canada — has sixty-three of them) he might have thought again.
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