Beethoven

Gerald Barry once licked Beethoven’s carpet. At least, that’s what he told me, and I’m as sure as any interviewer of Gerald Barry can be that he wasn’t pulling my leg. While showing him round a museum, a guide pointed out said floor-covering. Whereupon — Barry being Barry — he was overcome by an urge for tangible, physical contact with a relic that had, after all, once been trodden by the Master. ‘So, once everyone was out the room, I got down and had a quick lick.

There’s a moment in the finale of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata when the frenzied piano writing turns unexpectedly jolly. The late Antony Hopkins described it as a bit of an anticlimax, ‘a little too near to the traditional Gypsy Dance that appears so often in the less probable 19th-century opera’. I’m not sure whether I agree — but one thing I can tell you is that this is the perfect moment to tap the Uber icon on your phone if you want to be whisked away during the first burst of applause, before the pianist has had the chance to play an encore. That’s the effect Maurizio Pollini’s playing has on me.

Nothing pleased Iannis Xenakis more than a great big rattling storm. The sound of a thunderclap would have him running out of his home half naked to join the elements. If he was at sea, he’d sniff out any lightning and sail his yacht directly at it. The Greek composer was what we might call a hard bastard — a musical Ray Mears. As part of the Greek resistance during the war — battling first the Nazis then the British — Xenakis lost an eye to shrapnel. His compositions betray the same traits: those of the adrenalin junkie, the adventurer, the kamikaze. What would happen if I composed a piece solely made up of the swooping sounds we call glissandi, he asks in Mikka ‘S’ (1976). Apart from make the audience seasick?

‘Brahms and Liszt’ is a lovely bit of rhyming slang, but it doesn’t have the ring of authenticity. Can you really imagine cockney barrow boys whistling tunes from the Tragic Overture and the Transcendental Études? Also, the Oxford English Dictionary reckons it only dates back to the 1930s. It always made me snigger, though, because it conjured up an implausible vision of pompous beardy Johannes and the social-climbing Abbé rolling around legless. Not so implausible, it turns out. The other day I was reading a review of a new life of Liszt by Oliver Hilmes that reveals ‘hair-raising episodes of drunkenness’ in his later years.

There’s a folder in my computer’s external hard drive in which you’ll find 24 complete recordings of the Bach Cello Suites, 100 recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 97 of his Sixth, 107 of his Seventh, 65 of Bruckner’s Seventh, 26 of Debussy’s La Mer, 44 Fauré Requiems, 25 Mozart Requiems, 79 Mahler Sixths and 45 Rachmaninov Second Piano Concertos. That sounds as if I’ve moved beyond anorak collecting to compulsive hoarding; or maybe I have delusions of presenting Building a Library on Radio 3 (‘… but only Tennstedt, with his impulsive diminuendo, grasps that the second subject is tragically compromised by the shift to C sharp minor’). Actually, I didn’t really collect them. Someone else did.

This year marks the centenary of a pianist whom London orchestral players nicknamed ‘Ashtray Annie’. Only at the keyboard did she have a cigarette out of her mouth. Annie Fischer (1914–1995) was one of those female pianists who, despite their spinsterish appearance, possessed far richer imaginations than splashy male virtuosos. Clara Haskil and Marcelle Meyer also come to mind. Of the three, only Haskil — a physically frail Romanian celebrated for her purity of line — is today given the recognition she deserves: Pope Francis recently named her as his favourite Mozart pianist. Meyer, who as a young woman played for Debussy, had a technique of such refinement that she could liquefy trills and arpeggios without any loss of accuracy.

When I was first learning about classical music, 50 years ago, the scene was more streamlined than it is now. Beethoven was king, with Brahms and Mozart next in line, and Haydn slowly establishing himself. Mahler was the new kid on the block; Bruckner was largely unknown and mistrusted. If one wanted the full symphony orchestra experience in late romantic music, it was to Tchaikovsky that most promoters turned. Tchaikovsky cycles, Beethoven cycles, Haydn’s ‘London’ symphonies, Mozart’s last three symphonies were the way to guarantee a crowd, with general knowledge of all Beethoven’s music — string quartets, piano trios, Lieder — at an all-time high. Now Bach is king.

Not long ago the great conductors of classical music were general practitioners. They expected to give satisfactory interpretations of music written from the beginnings of symphonic composition to the present day, and audiences took it for granted that, if they knew what they were doing with Mozart and Beethoven, they could be trusted with Handel and Stravinsky. Their orchestras adopted the same approach and, within a narrow definition that bespeaks a more innocent age, everyone was content.

Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata is thrilling and brain-twisting. Its nickname derives from the fact that it was published as a sonata ‘for the hammer-action keyboard’, which just means a piano. But the notion of hammering suits this work. It’s his longest sonata — a late one, No. 29 in B flat, Op. 106 — and a mighty piece of machinery. I’ve been listening to it for 40 years and I’m not even close to grasping its details. It’s far more of a mental puzzle than the sublime last trio of sonatas, Opp. 109–111, whose construction is less tortuous. The Hammerklavier has been in and out of my CD player a lot recently, for two reasons. I’ll explain later.

Last weekend my iPad sucked me deeper into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony than I thought possible. Deutsche Grammophon and Touch Press have released an app devoted to the work that rendered me slack-jawed with wonder, like a Victorian on his first visit to a cinema. The app gives you four complete performances of the Ninth: by Ferenc Fricsay with the Berlin Philharmonic (1958); Herbert von Karajan with the same orchestra (1962); Leonard Bernstein with the Vienna Philharmonic (1978); and Sir John Eliot Gardiner with his preposterously named Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1992). Icons for the performances are next to each other, and the gentlest touch will transport you to and fro. The technology is a marvel.