ON
BEETHOVEN
LOUIS MOREAU
GOTTSCHALK
(pronounciation: 'close the lips, advance
the tongue, appear a little like whistling, and you will have the key' -
La France musicale)
Beethoven, taken as a symphonist, is the most inspired among composers,
and the one who composes best for the orchestra. The instrumental effects
he combines on paper are always realised in the orchestra as he has conceived
them. As a composer for the piano he falls below mediocrity - the least
pianist of any intelligence, in our days, writes infinitely better than
Beethoven ever did. 'Hue and cry on the robber!' are you all about to exclaim?
You brawlers will never attain that height of admiration which I have for
Beethoven when he is great, and it is through this admiration that I am
forced to see his feebleness. I will explain: the piano is an instrument
that Beethoven knew but imperfectly, and that at the period he wrote was
but the embryo of the piano made by modern manufacturers. The instrumentation
of the piano is a special matter. The point in question is not only to have
ideas, but to know how to adapt them to the piano, and this is what Beethoven
only imperfectly knew. The ideas so beautifully and so marvellously clothed
in all the splendour or all the tenderness that the orchestra affords him
in his profoundest originality are clumsy and often tame when he adapts
them to the piano. The number of formulae he prepared for the piano was
extraordinarily limited, and in many passages we feel what he has wished
by perceiving that he has not attained it. Many of the effects he combined
from his knowledge of the orchestra have failed on the piano, from not knowing
how to translate them into the peculiar language of this instrument.
Imagine Raphael engraving his pictures himself after having painted them.
The lines, the contours, the design of them would always be pure, the first
conception always inspired, but the execution, the details, the tints, the
shadows, the lights, the life, finally - do you think he would have obtained
them? The poorest engraver would have succeeded better.
- Norfolk, Virginia, 4th April 1862. From Gottschalk's
Notes of a Pianist (Philadelphia 1881) edited by Jeanne
Behrend (New York 1964)
Beethoven's Pathétique and Appassionata featured
frequently in Gottschalk's programmes, especially earlier in his career.
AO
THE COMING WEEK'S BEETHOVEN HIGHLIGHTS
A UK ROUND-UP
Saturday 8th April
Imogen Cooper plays the Second Piano Concerto in Croydon's Fairfield
Halls
Saturday 8th April
Philip Smith offers the C minor Sonata, Op 111, last of the canon
of thirty-two, in Sunderland's Tom Cowey Lecture Theatre
Wednesday & Thursday 12th &
13th April
Jean-Bernard Pommier plays and
directs the First and Fifth Piano Concertos in Middlesbrough Town
Hall, repeating the same invigorating programme the following evening in
Newcastle Town Hall
Wednesday 12th April
in Reading Town Hall Yonty Solomon
plays four sonatas, including the
Moonlight and
Gottschalk's favourite Appassionata |
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