Beethoven vs Mendelssohn in the Piano Concerto

My post yesterday provoked a couple of interesting comments so I would like to do a follow up. Please go and read the post and especially the comments:

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/03/beethoven-canonic-iconoclast.html

What I was doing in the post was contrasting Beethoven, at the core of the classical music canon, with Mendelssohn, a composer whose position seems to be sinking a bit, and Shostakovich, a composer who is rising in the musical world's estimation. My commentators presented some statistics on the one hand, showing that Mendelssohn is performed quite a lot, and with some words in support of Mendelssohn's piano concertos and of Hummel, a rather neglected composer. Let's set Hummel to one side for now and look at the piano concertos of Mendelssohn alongside those of Beethoven.

But before getting into that, I want to briefly note that mere statistics of how often a composer is performed can be deceiving. As I said in my comment, it is where and by whom that is more important. For example, when Leonard Bernstein conducted the Symphony No. 9 of Beethoven on the occasion of the falling of the Berlin wall, that was acknowledgement that Beethoven, and that work in particular, is at the heart of Western musical culture. When Igor Levit, one of the most promising young pianists today, made his recording debut on Sony he chose to record all five of the Beethoven late piano sonatas. This coming summer, the Salzburg Festival is programming all of the Beethoven piano concertos in one mammoth concert--oh, and Levit is playing all the sonatas in a series of eight recitals. Sure, this is partly because of the Beethoven 250th anniversary. But programming all the sonatas, or all the string quartets, or all the symphonies is not that unusual in a serious European festival. When I was there as a student they had the Alban Berg Quartet playing all the string quartets in a series of concerts and it wasn't any kind of anniversary.

Mendelssohn does not get the same attention. Yes, during 2009, the 200th anniversary of his birth, there was some celebration--a performance of the rarely-heard Symphony No. 2 "Lobgesang" at the 2009 Proms, for example, and a conference at Oxford University. But, very telling, the conference was devoted not just to Mendelssohn, but to four composers who all had an anniversary that year:

This conference combined a consideration of four major composers Purcell, Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn. Each composer had a relevant anniversary in 2009 – Purcell, 350 years after birth; Handel, 250 years after death; Haydn, 200 years after death; and Mendelssohn, 200 years after birth...

Let's get to the music. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Here is the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Mendelssohn with Stephen Hough and the Radio Philharmonic:

Let's put that alongside the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Beethoven, here played by Krystian Zimerman and the Vienna Philharmonic:

Now, try and remember the opening theme of the Mendelssohn. No? I think that the most salient element in a really outstanding piece of music is its individuality and hence its memorability. Sorry to say, but the Mendelssohn seems almost generic next to the Beethoven. The pianist is playing a forest of notes, but to little effect. Is this just my subjective impression? Do you agree? I don't want to sit down and start analyzing the scores and I think that we can easily hear the difference. How about a different pair of concertos? Here is Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 2:

And Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3, chosen because it is also in a minor key:

Hm, well, more of the same. Undistinguished music from Mendelssohn and really memorable themes from Beethoven. But don't take my word for it. Here is what Robert Schumann had to say about the Mendelssohn:

This concerto, to be sure, will offer virtuosos little in which to show off their monstrous dexterity. Mendelssohn gives them almost nothing to do that they have not already done a hundred times before. We have often heard them complain about it. And not unjustly! ...

One will ask how it compares with his First Concerto. It's the same, and yet not the same; the same because it comes from the same practised master hand, different because it comes ten years later. Sebastian Bach is discernible in the harmonization. The rest, melody, form and instrumentation are all Mendelssohn.

Beethoven: Canonic Iconoclast

As we swing into the Beethoven 250th anniversary year (I tried to put that into Latin a while back with mixed results), it might be interesting to look at the current reception of the Viennese master. The celebration itself is a bit of a slap in the face to the new musicologists who poo-poo the whole notion of a canon. Beethoven, like Bach, Mozart and Schubert, looms so large that no matter what you say about him, he will continue to be at the core of the canon.

I define "canon" as simply those works of music that are truly indispensable, ones that are performed very frequently and that all young players have to come to terms with. Ones that listeners consistently seek out decade after decade. The canon is always in flux, of course, as composers wax and wane in the estimation of musicians and audiences. Concert promoters and orchestra managers are always reviewing attendance figures to see what music and what performers are popular. If your music remains unpopular or receives unenthusiastic response for long enough, you will slowly fall out of the canon.

I think that this is what is happening with Mendelssohn, though this may be just a personal opinion. What is happening with him is that he used to be in the front rank of composers based on a lot of very charming music and a wide appreciation of his whole oeuvre. More and more, however, much of his output has fallen by the wayside. Some of his symphonies are rarely performed. His "Songs Without Words" for piano used to be much more popular than they are. What does get performed is a pretty short list consisting of the Violin Concerto, the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, a couple of symphonies and the Octet. This is how a composer fades, with only a few works remaining in the active repertory. (Please vehemently disagree with me in the comments.)

Some other composers slowly fight their way from obscurity to prominence and one of these is Shostakovich. I was having lunch with a patron of the arts last week and she declared that Shostakovich was one of her favorite composers. This was not always so! When I was an undergraduate he was never studied and rarely mentioned except in connection with a supposed satire of him in the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra. Now his symphonies, concertos and string quartets are performed in virtually every concert season and music festival.

Schubert, now in the very front rank of composers, was once considered to be second rank at best. He was known only for a couple of symphonies and a host of lieder. But in recent decades his stature has grown and grown as his chamber music and piano music has become better and better known.

But Beethoven, since his debuts in early 19th century Vienna, has been, along with Bach, simply the most important composer in classical music. With the exception of opera, where he only wrote one significant work, he looms large in every genre: his symphonies are unexcelled, as are his string quartets, piano sonatas and concertos. He is at the center of musical thought and the only reason that more musicologists are not cranking out books on him is simply that they have written so many already. The one piece of music that seems to lie at the core of classical music is the Symphony No. 9 of Beethoven whose theme is used as the anthem of the European Union. I am rather looking forward to hearing the Vienna Symphony perform it in August at the Salzburg Festival as I have never heard it in concert.

While other composers rise and fall, for the last two centuries Beethoven (yes, along with Bach and Mozart) persists. He will be with us for a long time to come. So why do I call him an "iconoclast"? For a long time, the basic narrative assigned to Beethoven, based on some empirical evidence, was that he was a revolutionary, someone who uprooted music and rewrote all the rules. This, while containing a grain of truth, is only part of the story. If we consult Donald Francis Tovey we find the other side of the coin: for him, Beethoven's music was built on a solid foundation of musical "normalcy" not tortured dysfunction. What Beethoven did more and more as he developed as a composer, was delve into the very depths of musical expression and structure. As his music became more transcendent it became more profound--just one of those contradictions we find in art.

This is Riccardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony:

The Lost History of Music?

I ran across an article heralding an upcoming report for the National Association of Scholars titled: The Lost History of Western Civilization.

Thirty-two years ago, this country was divided by Stanford University’s decision to ditch its Western Civilization requirement in favor of a multicultural alternative. Claims that Stanford had built a racist curriculum around the likes of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Marx, Freud, Voltaire, and Darwin made for a sensational cultural side-show. Today, the Stanford dust-up has become our politics.

This is specific to the United States, of course, but there are echoes of this in other developed Western countries, certainly including Canada and the UK. The author, Stanley Kurtz, goes on to say:

The report draws on a deep refutation of academic “deconstructions” of Western Civilization to develop a new way of looking at the battle between multiculturalism and traditional American conceptions of citizenship. The report then explains the link between the relativist skepticism of academics and the moral certainties driving constant accusations of racism and bigotry on campus and beyond. By unearthing the work of great but long-forgotten historians who taught generations of Americans about Western Civilization, the report also casts a new light on the meaning of American exceptionalism.

I have a bit of a problem with "American exceptionalism" because it is not quite as exceptional as is usually claimed. Western civilization ultimately derives from two ancient sources: Jerusalem and Athens, was given a profound alteration during the High Middle Ages by people like Thomas Aquinas, was further developed by a host of Europeans during the Renaissance and Enlightenment (try and imagine Western art without the Renaissance or Western politics and philosophy without the Enlightenment). True, the Founding Fathers of the US were a brilliant group with both courage and will, but the so-called "exceptionalism" consisted in adopting ideas, such as the separation of powers from the French thinker Montesquieu, the "laissez-faire" free market system from thinkers like Adam Smith and Jean-Baptist Colbert and the whole of the English common law tradition to name just a few examples.

As a Canadian, whenever I hear about American exceptionalism I want to say, hey, we're a bit exceptional as well! But never mind, my point is just that the US is not the only heir of the traditions of Western Civilization--indeed, there is a large group of nations that share the benefits.

Two questions come to mind: is Western Civilization being lost and if so, can it be rescued before it is too late?

I tend to be an optimist. For one thing I have lost my taste for dystopian fictions. I find none of them believable. What I do find plausible is a continuation of the amazing success of Western Civilization over the last five hundred years. I also find less and less credible all those artworks that depend on a deep belief that we are on the verge of a horrific future. Makes for a nice story, but a lot of fiction by people like Joe Haldeman I just find unreadable now. And wow, is there ever a lot of dystopian narratives on television and Netflix these days. The Walking Dead, for example. In order to find these stories plausible you have to stop believing in the competence of scientists, doctors, and a host of other professions. Now I admit I am pretty skeptical about a lot of the so-called "clerisy" these days, as they seem to have a seriously flawed set of assumptions, but still the accumulated human capital of Western Civilization, even if a bit worn around the edges, is astonishingly immense. (Joel Kotkin has a very illuminating essay on the "clerisy" at Quillette.)

Another problem for me is that a lot of the right-wing critique of the culture is based on a variety of anecdotal evidence: Stanford University cuts the Western Civilization requirement, another university drops the requirement that English majors actually study English poets, and other examples do not really prove that the history of Western Civilization is being lost. I know the field of music best of all and I really don't see any evidence that music schools are dropping the requirements of music theory, ear-training and history. They may have added some courses in pop music, but the others are still central. In fact, our understanding of the history of music is better now than it has ever been. Not only that, but there is near universal access to recordings and scores of this history. What would concern me would be solid data on dropping enrollments or the lowering of standards of admission. Haven't seen that either.

But it is very likely the case that the familiarity with classical music of the general public, at least in North America, has diminished. How much? It would be good to know, but I don't seem much research in that area. All that being said, I will have a look at the upcoming report to see if has much to contribute.

We haven't had much Schubert for a while. Here is Grigory Sokolov with the Impromptu No. 1.

Friday Miscellanea

Friday is when we put up the funnest stuff, like this performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on baroque lute:

I once heard Jakob Lindberg play "Across the Universe" on baroque lute as an encore after a solo recital. Baroque lutes and the Beatles must be a thing. "Helter Skelter" anyone?

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Anthony Tommasini has an interesting review in the New York Times of recitals by two pianists: Two Pianists Test the Meaning of Virtuosity

Yuja Wang and Daniil Trifonov have different artistic personalities. But they’re similar in how they recently took audiences on unusual musical journeys.

I'm big on the metaphor of music as a journey, it is one I used myself in a recent talk.

In a program note and recorded message played before the concert, Wang explained that she would not perform the works in the order originally listed; instead, she would give the recital “its own life” by responding to how she felt in the moment and playing whatever piece struck her. This raised some difficult questions that have stayed with me, and it seemed to leave many audience members shuffling through their programs trying to figure out what they were hearing — especially with less-familiar fare by Berg, Monpou and Scriabin.

I believe that should be "Mompou" the Catalan pianist and composer? I kind of like the idea of playing the music in a different order each concert. It adds a level of spontaneity and challenges the audience to identify the piece (the works are listed in the program, but not the order of performance) a bit like a blind tasting of wine. Yuja Wang has been playing this program in a number of recitals lately. Daniil Trifonov is playing an all-Bach program:

The main offering, though, was “The Art of Fugue,” which was left incomplete at Bach’s death. It includes 14 elaborate fugues, about an hour’s worth of the most riveting, complex and astonishing contrapuntal music ever written. I have never been so impressed by Mr. Trifonov’s virtuosity — the most musically comprehensive kind, which is what it took for him to play this work so magnificently.

I have a ticket to hear him in Salzburg in August where he is playing an all contemporary concert from Berg to Adams.

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From Slipped Disc, a troubling experience for Yuja Wang:

On arrival at Vancouver International Airport on Friday, I was detained for over an hour and subjected to intense questioning which I found humiliating and deeply upsetting. I was then released, giving me very little time to travel to the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. I was left extremely shaken by this experience.

When I was dropped off at the venue for my recital that evening, my eyes were still visibly red and swollen from crying. I was in shock. Although I was traumatized by what happened, I was determined not to cancel the recital, but to go ahead with the performance and not to let the audience down, which included my dear teacher Gary Graffman. I decided that wearing sunglasses was the only way to prevent my distress from being seen, since I wasn’t yet prepared to make a statement about what happened.

I have occasionally experienced rude and inconsiderate behaviour from immigration officers--even in Canada where you might expect a certain amount of courtesy. Touring musicians have always faced challenges, but this seems to have been a particularly unnecessary one!

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This piece in The Guardian, 'It's hopeful and generous': Thurston Moore's experimental record shop, asks the poignant question:

who in their right mind would open a record store now? There is no money in it. Even on this gentrified street there are empty shops, the rents are extortionate and landlords are keen to turn properties over to property developers. What about profit? “What about artistic profit, creative profit, intellectual profit?” replies Moore.

To which I would add: "who in their right mind would be a composer? Or classical musician generally? Or a poet? Or work in any field in which aesthetics, not profit, is the prime motivator?"

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Speaking of musicians and touring, here is a compendium of disasters: ‘I’ve seen a forklift go through a guitar case’: Musicians share their air-travel horror stories.

In 2014, Christopher Wilke, a lute player and University of Cincinnati music professor, had his $10,000 instrument destroyed on a Delta flight. Wilke was fastidious with his instrument, even placing a humidifier inside the case to prevent drying. Delta paid for repairs, but he put the blame for these incidents squarely on careless policies from both TSA and the airline.

“The apathy of the TSA and airlines to protect rare instruments from harm greatly hinders the opportunity for musicians and audiences to connect,” Wilke said. The experience shook him so deeply that, despite recent collaborations with rock and hip-hop artists and offers for national tour dates, he won’t baggage-check his instrument and can’t afford the cost of an extra airplane seat, and therefore doesn’t perform beyond a day’s driving distance from Cincinnati.

I had a number of unpleasant incidents travelling with a guitar on Canadian airlines and so was apprehensive about a trip from Mexico to Toronto to make a recording a year ago. My travel agent printed out the Aeromexico policies which clearly stated that a guitar case was within the dimensions of carry-on luggage and as it turned out, everything went smoothly. But for many years I simply would not travel with a guitar.

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Here is something interesting: Chords and discords.

Classical music is a rare remaining area where citizens of countries that are at loggerheads (or worse) with one another can interact in a productive manner. “The most important aspect we’re missing in the public debate today is the ability to listen. Listening is fundamental in music-making,” Noseda, an Italian, told me. Indeed, long before the US State Department coined the phrase Track II Diplomacy—encounters between hostile states involving think tank and other civil society experts—in the early 1980s, classical music was Track II. “The world needs to find a layer where we can talk, and that layer is music,” Noseda suggested.

True and very heartening, but this transcendent aspect of music is exactly what is put at risk by the contextual approach of the "new" musicology. Music for them is not above the social context, indeed, the identity of the performers, composers and listeners is crucial. But if this were so, then the assumptions of the above article would be challenged. You can either see music as a kind of transcendent bridge between places, peoples and cultures, or you can see it as entirely the product of particular places, peoples and cultures--which one is more true? Or more beneficial?

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I think we should have some lute music today, don't you? This is master lutenist Paul O'Dette playing all the galliards by John Dowland:

Tonality and Dissonance

These two concepts are often confused, I suspect. We learn about tonality and dissonance in theory class, but we don't think much about how they are related or if they are related. Dissonance is a fairly easy concept, but one that is historically inflected. What is considered to be dissonant varies over time. A long time ago, thirds were considered too dissonant to use in a final cadence. In common practice harmony, almost any interval can be used, as long as it is resolved correctly. In a V7 - I cadence, the dominant chord contains the very dissonant tritone, but with the leading tone resolving up and the seventh resolving down, all is well.

In 20th century music a lot of dissonances were explored including clusters of semitones and even microtones.

Tonality is harder to define, but it usually involves the concept of "functionality." I gave the example of a V7 - I cadence. This is an example of functionality. A cadence really defines tonality. The function of a cadence is to define the key, the tonal center. The function of a leading tone is to lead to the tonic. The function of a seventh is to create a dissonance that is resolved into the tonic chord. Every note and every harmony has a role and function in common practice harmony. Schoenberg even thought about his twelve-tone system as being a huge extension of tonality.

Dissonance has a function within tonality, in fact, tonality depends on the use of dissonance.

But here is the thing, we sometimes think that what led to the obsolescence of tonal music was the over-use of dissonance, but you can have music that is not functionally tonal that also does not use a lot of dissonance. So-called "modal" music is an example. Modes, typically lacking leading tones, have a lower level of dissonance than tonal music. You could have musical structures that simply avoid both tonality and dissonance. For example:

Click to enlarge

That is the opening of Petroushka by Stravinsky and while what is going on there is not nearly as simple as it looks, one thing for sure, it is neither dissonant nor tonal. What we have is an oscillation between two harmonies with a melody above that that suggests a different harmony. One of the things that weakens the notion of a tonal center is the rhythmic structure. Fundamentally, in order to define a key in common practice tonality, you have to have some kind of dominant resolving to some kind of tonic and it needs to go from an upbeat to a downbeat. Pieter van den Toorn describes what is going on here as "oscillating simultaneities." The fact that they are a whole-tone apart means we don't really hear either as a "tonic" and that is despite the leap of a fourth from A to D that would often signal a dominant-tonic relationship. Look at that cello melody: we do get a C# but it is not heard as a leading tone because it is in a metrically weak position and because it leads away, not towards the D. Everything is "up in the air" which what makes this opening so exciting.

Let's have a listen:

The Decline of Aesthetics

Older folks get a reputation for being cranky and disagreeable. I think this is because when you have several decades of experiences to ponder, you notice changes and trends that a younger person is unlikely to. As an example, I notice that the pursuit of goals related to aesthetics is in severe decline. I wish I had statistics to cite, even though we know how deceptive they can be, but I don't. I just have an impression that very few young people are attracted by careers that involve aesthetics.

Let me define aesthetics, first of all. I think that the standard definition of aesthetics as found in Wikipedia for example is rather outdated:

Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that branched from aesthetics). It examines subjective and sensori-emotional values, or sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste.

As far as music goes, both beauty and taste are no longer central to the idea of aesthetics. For one thing, they are hard to define and composers and performers do not primarily aim for the creation of beauty according to the taste of the listener. Challenge me if you like on this, that would be a productive discussion. But I know in my own experience that while I am certainly seeking the realization or expression of something in a composition, I would not describe it as "beauty." I am looking for something dynamic, expressive, compelling, captivating and so on. A passage that is perhaps "beautiful" is merely one sort of strategy. A passage that is "ugly" might be equally useful. So that is my testimony. I suspect other composers might agree.

Now, regarding the decline of aesthetics, my thoughts on this were sparked by a couple of recent conversations. I ran into a young person who is studying at one of the universities I used to teach at. In answer to the question what was she studying, the answer was "computer engineering." Just one data point, of course, but it makes me recall that this or a similar answer was what I have heard for years and years now. People are studying international business, criminology, economics, business administration, psychology and various areas in science and technology. I suspect that people that would have been attracted to something related to aesthetics in the past are now in the "studies" areas: women's studies, gender studies or others relating to colonialism and identity. In other words, people used to write poetry, now they are social justice warriors--or studying something job or occupation related.

Well, ok, that's just the changing world. The other conversation related to my song cycle that a friend has just been listening to. The song cycle, which I wrote about a decade ago, is titled Songs from the Poets because it consists of twelve songs using poems that I particularly like. When we were talking about the songs I realized that he was not relating to the poetry very much. This is partly a language issue: his second language is English and nearly all the songs are in English. But more significant is that he is young, just twenty years old and it seems that people of that age no longer read (or write) poetry. That made me realize that poetry (aside from lyrics to songs and hip-hop) is pretty much a dead medium. When I was a young person, many of my friends wrote poetry and most of them were familiar to some extent with poets like T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. Now I doubt if most young people could even name a poet. I would be hard-pressed to name a living poet! There are almost no places where contemporary poetry is published these days. Recall that the two most prominent prizes in literature recently were given to a rap artist and Bob Dylan.

The other problem for my friend is that it is hard to hear the poetry clearly in the recording. Perhaps some of this is my fault as the composer, though I am not sure how. But part of it is the singer. We talked a lot about making the words as clear as possible with some success. But with female voices it always seems harder to hear the words--perhaps this relates to the higher pitch of the female voice. One thing I do know is that there are only two singers that I can think of that really make the words clear: one of them is retired and the other is dead! Thomas Quasthoff recently retired and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died in 2012. With the latter in particular, you can hear not only every word clearly, but every syllable--no, every letter!

The looming question is, why the loss of interest in aesthetic pursuits? Somehow they have become less meaningful to young people. Is this a consequence of the idea that all aesthetic judgements are relative? If it is in principle impossible to achieve anything of objective value, then why bother? Perhaps you should spend your time fighting climate change instead. Is this what is going on?

Over to you commentators.

Here are a couple of songs to listen to while you ponder. The first is "Listening to a monk from Shu" from my song cycle setting a poem by Li Po:

The second is "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" from Dichterliebe by Robert Schumann sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

The Netherlands Bach Society

I have mentioned them before, but the Netherlands Bach Society is doing really good work. They are in the process of recording ALL OF BACH in good quality video and audio on original instruments and posting them on YouTube. They have done a lot of the cantatas already:

These are excellent, accomplished musicians with not a celebrity to be seen. They do not spend a lot of time on hair and makeup. The performances are clean and unfussy. Great stuff. You can help them by subscribing to their channel (I have) and perhaps making a donation (I haven't yet!).

Here is their B minor mass and it is amazing how full the sound is with the fairly small group of musicians and singers.