BeatFirst BeethovenFest
Beethoven, we're told, was a revolutionary. So let me follow his lead by breaking my blog's rule of not reviewing concerts. This evening I attended the season's first BeethovenFest program, featuring the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.
I didn't want to go. "Because Beethoven," as they say. I love Beethoven, of course, but who needs to pay $50 to hear pieces as familiar as the Beatles, which you can hear on YouTube and Spotify in tremendous performances, for free, without the hassle of parking, or dressing, and while sipping a Scotch lying down on your couch? It took a lot to sell me on a concert that enshrines Beethoven in a way that digs classical music ever deeper into its 200-year-old grave.
But when I learned that the PSO would be recording these concerts for a commercial release, I thought it could be fun to be there live, to be a little part of history, as I was for some of the San Francisco Symphony Mahler recordings. And the day before, the PSO had been nominated for a Grammy for their Dvorák/Janácek recording. And it was near the beginning of the month, so there was a fat bank account. And my friend was in the mood to go out. And I almost scored some complimentary tickets from another friend. And I had, after all, recently attended an equally canonical Shakespeare play. And I hadn't blogged about the PSO in a while. And the semester just ended so it was time to celebrate with a night out. I could go on and on with all the rationalizations I needed to hear this concert.
Apparently the PSO needed some rationalizations, too--at least for the public framing of the programming. At first it was part of a multi-year series called the Beethoven Project. Now apparently the "project" has been transformed into something less clinical and more celebratory: a fest. This concert was initially called "BeethovenFest: Fifth and Seventh Symphonies," while the second and third concerts in this season's BeethovenFest were called "Mozart's Influence" and "Finale--Ode to Joy!" These, too, have been rethought. Now the three concerts are called, in turn, "The Revolutionary," "The Hero," and "The Immortal."
These recastings are an improvement from the perspective of marketing, but they also repeat clichés in what, at first, appear to be irresponsible ways.
The "Revolutionary" Beethoven featured Symphonies Five and Seven. The upcoming "Heroic" Beethoven offers the "Eroica," of course, plus the First Piano Concerto and Honeck's own arrangement for string orchestra of the first movement of the String Quartet in C Minor, op. 18, no. 4 (recalling Steinberg's arrangement of the Verdi String Quartet for string orchestra in 1963). The "Immortal" Beethoven includes the Violin Concerto and the Ninth Symphony.
From a perspective that respects the canonized threefold division of Beethoven's works into an early, middle, and late period, this new historiographical schema seems, well, revolutionary--or at least mischievious. The early period extends up to about 1803 and shows Haydn's influence far more than Mozart's. As Haydn dances, so does Beethoven; Mozart sings, but not Beethoven. (Bernstein once challenged his readers to sing a tune from the Seventh.) The second period has often been called the "heroic" period; beginining in about 1816, after his final version of Fidelio, Beethoven's style become less public and more idiosyncratic. This "late" style is rather recondite, characterized in part by experimentation, imitative counterpoint, and Beethoven as the "composer's composer," rather than the "people's composer."
In chronological order of composition, the works on the BeethovenFest concerts this season typically belong to the following style periods:
EARLY
Piano Concerto No. 1 - 1797
String Quartet, op. 18, no. 4 - 1799
MIDDLE
Symphony No. 3, "Eroica" - 1805
Violin Concerto - 1806
Symphony No. 5 - 1808
Symphony No. 7 - 1813
LATE
Symphony No. 9, "Choral" - 1824
Once again, here are Honeck's divisions, now with the traditional periodization labeled in parentheses:
THE REVOLUTIONARY
Symphony No. 5 (Middle)
Symphony No. 7 (Middle)
THE HERO
String Quartet, op. 18, no. 4 (Early)
Piano Concerto No. 1 (Early)
Symphony No. 3, "Eroica" (Middle)
THE IMMORTAL
Violin Concerto (Middle)
Symphony No. 9, "Choral" (Late)
Honeck's revisionary historiography both disregards the traditional style periods (mixing early with middle and middle with late) and renames the periods in unexpected ways. The term "revolutionary" ordinarily would go hand-in-hand with the term "hero": where there are revolutions, there are heroes, such as Napoleon. Furthermore, the word "immortal" riffs on the buzz around Beethoven's mysterious "Immortal Beloved," the epithet he gave in 1812, during his "heroic" period, to the woman he loved, whose identity has long been contentious, with leading contenders being Bettina Brentano and Josephine Brunsvik, among others. Funny, then, that the featured "immortal" work comes from Beethoven's late period rather than his middle period. The works don't refer to Beethoven's beloved and the late period works, taken as a whole, hardly are responsible for his claim to fame.
But funny only from a chronological and musicological view. Honeck's view is very likely a marketing view; that is, these name games likely have more to do with the Marketing Department rather than the Artistic Viewpoint Department. As such, they have a great deal to with the reception history of Beethoven's music. That is, they show how people at one time and place have remade Beethoven in their own image, according to their own views. The Fifth and Seventh are "revolutionary" not because they relate to the French Revolution--the Third does quite directly in its original dedication to Napoleon--but because Beethoven Five is musically revolutionary: to an unprecedented degree, it is made all of a piece. One motif (short-short-short-long) unifies the entire symphony. It is as taut and powerful as Bruce Lee. It also adds the piccolo, trombone, and contrabassoon to the symphony for the first time, extending the genre's highs and lows and its range of colors. Why is the Seventh revolutionary? It's extraordinary for its rhythmic obsessions--but why indeed? How about the "heroic" quartet, concerto, and symphony? The quartet is in a minor key that lends itself to drama and heroism; the concerto has a solo protagonist; the symphony is named for Napoloeon--that's why the concert is heroic. Finally, why are the Violin Concerto and the Ninth "immortal"? The word has nothing to do with Beethoven's beloved and everything to do both with the fame of these works and with the marketing machine of the BeethovenFest, which has also championed Beethoven as a "genius."
In short, the PSO has either given a handful of Beethoven's works an irresponsible new epitemological category, or it has dipped into the lexicon of Beethoven hagiography to find words that may characterize Beethoven's works using new wine in old wineskins.
So did the concert sound revolutionary?
It began with a shocking mistake when a bass player entered on Honeck's explosive downbeat, which was supposed to be silent. (Beethoven's Fifth famously starts with a rest, followed by the famous Ta-Ta-Ta-Tum.) Taking a nearly breakneck tempo, Honeck turned most of the first movement's quicksilver motivic game of hot potato into aural mashed potatoes. Instead of the four-note motif jumping from instrument to instrument, all that could be heard in the Family Circle was a rapidly unfolding chord that created a dense texture. Instead of Beethoven Five - Paragon of the Motif, it became Beethoven Five - Paragon of Wool. This is not to knock Honeck entirely: one of Beethoven's revolutionary achievements was to introduce texture alone as an expressive medium, a medium where melody and rhythm became subsidary to the expectant drama of a constant noise. Perhaps the microphones above the stage will capture the individual motifs that blended together in Heinz Hall. From my seat, however, it sounds as if different sections entered at different dynamics and with different emphases: the first violins articulated the very first note of the motif, but this note was nearly inaudible in the subsequent iterations in other sections, rendering the imitative counterpoint into textural mush--but authentically and revolutionarily Beethovenian mush.
In brief, Saturday night's Beethoven Five was good but uneven. The woodwinds and brass typically gave highly individualized colorations to the orchestra, with Honeck emphasizing the expanded brass section. The brief oboe solo in the first movement stopped time itself in order to cry and wail as it would. In the third movement, the strings gelled in their sections, giving nimble, supple, focused, and rather lengthy detaché tones to one of the first movements of Beethoven's "texture" music.
The Seventh was heaven. I'd never heard the PSO strings quite as strong. As the winds flaunt their clarinetness and their oboeness, they sounded like strings--not an unfocused, indefinite, pitched cloud of sound, but a uniform and intense burnished buzz of stringiness, sensitive like an aspen in the wind, like a starling in a murmuration. With a continued focus on the forceful brass and on texture and rhythm over melody and grace--and yet with numerous thoughtful details of phrasing and timing that only the PSO pulls off like a champion string quartet--Honeck led a Beethoven Seven that would do Pittsburgh proud on record. Brisk, unrelenting, and miraculously muscular yet intimate in sound (the PSO trademark), this Beethoven was elemental in its rhythmic force and instrumental timbres, while in its precise and passionate expressivity it was perhaps even revolutionary.
