Beethoven's "Appassionata' turning point

Growing up as a snotty intellectual, I had never considered Vladimir Horowitz as one of Beethoven's great interpreters. Instead I thought of Horowitz as something of a superficial crowd-pleasing virtuoso. And under the influence of one of Glenn Gould's many eccentric opinions, I somehow dismissed the "Appassionata" as a bombastic and overrated work.

But just the other day my father called me to say that he'd just received (from Amazon.com) two Horowitz disks— a mid-1950s recording of Beethoven's "Moonlight," "Waldstein," and "Appassionata" piano sonatas, and a second recording of the same three works by Horowitz in the mid-1970s.

"You have to listen to these," Dad raved. "They are just phenomenal!"

The two Horowitz performances of the "Appassionata" are, indeed, simply spectacular. As you'd expect, the sound quality of the second recording is better than the first. But I find myself gravitating to the earlier recording, where the younger Horowitz (but not really young; he was born in 1903) was more willing to revel in Beethoven's extremes. Perhaps the greatest praise I can give these recordings is to say that getting reacquainted with the "Appassionata" through Horowitz made me think more about the circumstances that brought the sonata into being and less about Horowitz himself.

Emphasizing the weirdness

For example, take the beginning of the recapitulation of the first movement. Here's the earlier version, where Horowitz seems to go out of his way to emphasize the weirdness of Beethoven's sonorities.

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And here's a somewhat more restrained reading of the same passage from 1974.

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But I find it far more striking that Horowitz's interpretation remained so stable over nearly 20 years. The tempos of these two excerpts are almost precisely the same, and both performances are completely infused with the "Appassionata's" unrelenting ferocity"“ so unrelenting, in fact, that upon hearing either rendition, you might reasonably ask: Is it really appropriate to pound the crap out of the keyboard like this?

Beethoven's demands

To answer that question, just look at the score. It's hard to believe that the welter of notes on the page is written using the same notational system that served Mozart's needs; Beethoven is trying to wring more from it than anyone had ever attempted before. The first movement ends with a puff of smoke, marked ppp (perhaps the first use of ppp in the literature) Beethoven writes ff again and again, on occasion writing in directives like sempre ff— "still fortissimo!"— and sempre piÓ¹ forte in places where one wasn't really likely to forget.

Here, for example, is the sempre piÓ¹ forte end of the first movement, from the 1974 recording.

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One of the many anecdotes about Horowitz has him answering the question, "Why do you play those bravura passages so loudly?" by saying, "Because I can!" In the case of "Appassionata," he could just as easily have responded, "Because Beethoven told me to!"

From virtuoso to great composer

In 1803, Beethoven— in the public's mind and, probably to some degree at least, in his own— was a great improvising piano virtuoso first and a composer second. He was already in the throes of dealing with his increasing deafness when, in August of that year, the Érard piano company sent him a state-of-the-art instrument.

It's easy to call up the image of Beethoven sitting down at the keyboard and pounding out something like the previous examples with a manic intensity on the edge of craziness, testing the limits of his new instrument and also, perhaps, desperately trying to reassure himself that his hearing was fine after all. In fact, the popular image of Beethoven as tragically afflicted madman/genius probably took root around this time.

The "'creative madman' myth

A wise psychiatrist I know has on several occasions remarked something to the effect of: "You know that sentimental romantic idea about the creativity of madness? It's pure bullshit. Really crazy people can't think straight enough to make a shopping list, let alone create a great work of art."

So while Beethoven may have been on the edge of madness and despair"“ how could he have not have been?"“ today we see him as a hero because of the way he was able to channel these emotions into disciplined creativity.

Far beyond Mozart

It seems plausible to me that the "Appassionata" might have had its roots in improvisation. But for Beethoven, discipline meant penetrating deeper and deeper into the language of Classical tonality, finding new key relationships, devising more violent rhythms than had ever been heard before, and using these new tools to construct enormous musical edifices filled with a level of intensity far beyond what Mozart would have considered the boundaries of good taste. It was if Beethoven had devised the musical equivalent of nuclear power.

The result was a musical mountain range that sprang up virtually overnight. The "Eroica" Symphony, the "Waldstein" and "Appassionata" Sonatas, and the Fourth Piano Concerto didn't yet exist in 1803. By 1806, they were all there, walling off the musical world of Mozart and Haydn from the 19th Century as definitively as the Alps separate France and Italy.

Not for amateurs

Beethoven also created another kind of barrier with these two piano sonatas, one that a pianist like me is keenly aware of. My own pianistic abilities would have fit in very well with the musical life of late-18th-Century Vienna; I can get a great deal of pleasure out of practicing practically any Mozart or Haydn piano sonata, and can even tackle some of Beethoven's earlier ones. I like to think of myself as a Liebhaber, one of the amateurs whom K.P.E. Bach addressed in his sonatas for "Kenner und Liebhaber." But my chances of ever playing the "Appassionata" are about as good as my prospects for competing on the NASCAR circuit.

Now listen to Horowitz playing the closing passage of the "Appassionata," a musical playing field famous as an arena where only the greatest warriors dare compete.

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The "Appassionata" and the "Waldstein" created the need for a new caste of musician samurai: pianists who must dedicate their entire beings to their art and who, at least psychically, take their artistic lives in their hands whenever they dare play these works in public. How ironic that Vladimir Horowitz, one of the greatest virtuosi of all, was famously consumed with self-doubt about his own pianistic abilities and was, one reads, subject to terrible panics at the prospect of performing.♦


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