2/7 Artur Schnabel's Beethoven Hunt

Artur Schnabel:
WANTED
For Tempo Robbery

One Beethoven pianist who eluded me for awhile is Artur Schnabel. Schnabel was a friend to both Johannes Brahms and Arnold Schoenberg, and even had a chamber group with Paul Hindemith. His own compositions were fairly atonal. However he was the first pianist to record all 32 of Beethoven's piano sonatas (in 1935)  - he recorded most of the bagatelles and variations as well. After moving to Vienna at age 2, he lived in Berlin, then the United States and finally died in Switzerland in 1951.

I resisted his Beethoven piano cycle at first because the sound quality of the recordings I first heard were frankly awful - mono and with Niagara Falls in the background...or it may have been the piano that was in the background. Additionally I heard he made mistakes in these recordings and I thought it would be a waste of time to hear "wrong" versions. After a year of listening to "correct" versions, a friend recommended the Schnabel again and I decided to give them another go. Wow - was I surprised! My past recollection was of a very dusty interpretation of no great distinction - listening to it now it sounds exciting, practically reckless! And most importantly, full of life. I did notice some rough phrasing, especially in some of the denser runs where Schnabel tends to "mush" them together in a kind of tonal smear - but I've really grown to love this unique facet. And despite that these recordings were 75 years old, I came across a restoration which removed pretty much all the hiss and so I could actually hear the music. The version I'm speaking of is the set out on the EMI label - on Amazon it's been kind of criticized for being "flat" or "overly-restored" but I compared it with a couple other sets (Pearl and Historical) and those are just too hissy, sorry. The hiss on those is probably louder than most string sections on a piano concerto recording...

If the EMI set is out of your budget however (I wonder of I should start "monetizing" this blog one of these days with all these recommendations) you can actually download the Schnabel set for free from archive.org - but these are transfers from 78 rpm records to expect a little hiss (sometimes). Nonetheless purists stand by them and these are very listenable and enjoyable.

Here's a couple examples:

Sonata No 16 in G major, Op 31 Nr 1 
Beethoven. Piano Sonata # 16 in G, Op. 31, No. 1. In three movements: Allegro vivace, Adagio grazioso, Rondo (Allegretto).


Sonata No 18 in G major, Op 31 Nr 3 "The Hunt"
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 18 in E flat, Op. 31 No. 3. In four movements: Allegro, Scherzo (Allegretto vivace), Menuetto (Moderato e grazioso), Presto con fuoco.


I don't think the Schnabel set would make a "perfect" representation of Beethoven's piano sonatas but they are very deep and very human.  Beethoven would have given them 2 thumbs up.

Artur Schnabel at NotableBiographies.com

Schnabel's book

1/14 The Art of Beethoven: Close-Up

I don't know why I love Beethoven's hand-written scores so much.  Maybe it's because there are so many corrections and cross-outs - I can relate to him as a human being.  That's the thing regarding Beethoven's music - it incorporates victory, tragedy, intimacy and sublimity and much more.  Anyways, I decided to do a microscopic examination of B.'s actual penmanship today...kind of a "pop-art" view of his manuscripts.

Here's a video I made of a good selection...
(music excerpt from Artur Schnabel performing Opus 111, 2nd mvmt)


and here's my album of "Close-up Beethoven" (with which I made the video above).

Manuscript Art of Beethoven

8/3 The Ludwig Code

Beethoven's compositions are notorious for having some "paradoxical" instructions.  Kind of like the square root of a negative number .  For example, B. sometimes has a note in a piano piece where you are supposed to hit the note and then swell like in a crescendo (without hitting another note).    Unless you are playing a midi piano with a breath controller that simply is not possible.  What do the pros do?  Well, see Daniel Barenboim's answer below at around 1:58.


Did you follow that?  Me neither.  I think he said something like "use a petronus spell". Or something about will.

Check out this mysterious instruction from bar 27 of the Grosse Fugue string quartet:

Those 2 eighth notes are slurred together.  That's means 'slide' from point x to point x.  Played literally, it sounds like 1 quarter note.






So why didn't Beethoven just write 1 quarter note?  Because he meant 2 eighth notes slurred together.  But then what's the difference?   Michael Tree from the Guarneri Quartet says:
"We all agree that something should be done, but not on what should be done.  Interpreters of Beethoven have struggled with this question for more than a century and a half."  
Curious.

Here's a good one from Piano Sonata 31, Opus 110, kind of similar:






The two slurred 16th notes are the same as one 8th note.  To make sure you know something is happening, B says to use your 4th finger for one note and your third finger for the next, as if that makes any difference (and the lone 16th note where he asks you to hit one key with 2 fingers is almost straight out of the John Cage playbook).
Artur Schnabel:
"The key which is touched by the 3rd finger should produce a tone hovering between reality and imagination - but must be heard nonetheless."
OK.  You just heard it from the most revered Beethoven pianist of the 20th Century.  So let's see how he actually played it in 1935:
 

Hmmmm.  You know, I think I actually heard something magical in there.

One last odd mystery is something I heard in the somewhat recent film "In Search of Beethoven" by Phil Grabsky.  In it, Emmanuel Ax explains how in one of B's piano compositions he specifies a fingering that is literally impossible for a human to play.  The keys are too far apart for one hand to reach.  He thinks it might have been a joke....or maybe Beethoven was an alien....ludwig coooode....

(The Michael Tree / Artur Schnabel quotes are from The Art of Quartet Playing, interviews with the Guarneri Quartet, by Michael Blum.  Recommended.)