Beethoven's powerful appeal to generations of music lovers can be summed up in one word: emotion. His music is not nearly as concerned with formal beauty or the expression of abstract ideas as it is with the direct, powerful, and frequently painful communication of urgent personal feeling. Where Bach's music looks up, and Mozart's outward, Beethoven's almost always looks inward to what was important to him, what emanated from his heart and soul. This is part of what makes Beethoven the single greatest paradigm shift in the history of music. In his music, for the first time, subjectivity and self-expression are established at the center of the artistic enterprise.
Beethoven's music is festive, grand, dramatic, uplifting. But quite often it can be subversive, as well. In some of his most important pieces, the notion of etiquette--that art should adhere to norms of fashion and taste--is not merely undermined but openly attacked and overthrown. Classical rhetoric, which served as a gyroscope for Haydn and Mozart, is knocked off its axis time and again, though never completely ignored, while the confines of 18th-century form are broken wide open. Most impressive of all, perhaps, especially from a composer who was deaf, the sheer power of sound is unleashed for the first time.
In less than 15 years, from 1795 to 1809, Beethoven's five piano concertos took the genre from where Mozart had left it to the threshold of romanticism. In spite of his respect for Mozart, Beethoven allowed his first two works in the form to stand as robust, original, and willful reworkings of the model, marvelously inventive and bold. Soon enough, his thinking became more openly revolutionary--and in his Third Piano Concerto, written in 1803, the piano, like a lion, began to roar. The power and emotional intensity of this work were without precedent in the concerto literature, along with the innovative design and poetic expression of the Fourth and the festive brilliance and majestic scale of Beethoven's final piano concerto, aptly nicknamed the "Emperor."
"5 Piano Concertos"
Vienna Philharmonic; Simon Rattle, conductor;
Alfred Brendel, piano
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"Piano Concertos no 3 and 5"
New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; Rudolf
Serkin, piano
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"Piano Concertos no 20, 21, 23, 24, 25"
Philharmonia Orchestra; Vladimir Ashkenazy, conductor and piano
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Nowhere are Beethoven's gifts as a composer more apparent than in his sonatas and variations for the piano. The piano was, after all, his instrument, and he was constantly pushing its capacities--particularly its range and dynamic gradations--as far as they would go. He continued to do this even when he could no longer hear the results; he simply removed the legs from his instrument, and sat on the floor as he played, so that he could feel what was happening. Talk about a visceral experience of music!
In a sense it was ironic that Beethoven was both a brilliant improviser and a composer who habitually sketched and resketched his ideas before forming them into a work. But both elements--the spontaneous and the structured--are present in the sonatas, giving them a strength and vitality unparalleled in the keyboard literature.
Even in Beethoven's earliest piano sonatas, the touch of a master can be felt. In the years leading up to 1800, his daring imagination and potent emotionalism revealed themselves to the public in one remarkable essay after another, culminating in the extraordinary "Pathetique" Sonata of 1799, with which Beethoven established himself as the Prometheus of the piano in turn-of-the-century Vienna. More startling works quickly followed, including the haunting "Moonlight" Sonata and the first of Beethoven's "middle-period" sonatas--the energetically upbeat "Waldstein" and the terrifyingly intense "Appassionata."
"Piano Sonatas Op 2"
Alfred Brendel, piano
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"Piano Sonatas 8, 14, 23"
Rudolf Serkin, piano
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"Sonatas 'Waldstein,' 'Les Adieux,' 'Appassionata'"
Emil Gilels, piano
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"The Complete Piano Sonatas"
Richard Goode, piano
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Beethoven continued to channel some of his most powerful and original ideas into the sonatas of his final decade, beginning with the symphonically scaled "Hammerklavier" Sonata of 1817-18, a work of towering stature and extraordinary intensity. Even more intense in some ways is the emotional expression of the final three sonatas, which, owing to their extreme compression and concentration, seem like the work of a contemporary composer, or at least someone who has left convention far behind. This is true as well of Beethoven's final large-scale composition for the piano, the "Diabelli" Variations, which perhaps more than any other of his works, in any form, show the extraordinary range of Beethoven's imagination and the unique vitality of his musical thought.
"Die spten Klaviersonaten"
Maurizio Pollini, piano
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"Diabelli Variations"
William Kinderman, piano
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