Fresh insight into Eschenbach

Stammer as metaphor:
Beethoven and Eschenbach, reconsidered

DAN COREN

One day recently I was driving home from work in South Jersey, listening to Christoph Eschenbach’s recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, the last one Beethoven wrote. I hit a traffic jam on the Admiral Wilson Boulevard just as Eschenbach started in on the second (and last) movement, a set of variations that inspired a passage in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, one of the most famous descriptions of music in Western literature. Ten minutes later, traffic had hardly moved, and just as well; I was swept up in the rhythmic cataclysm of Eschenbach’s playing and was content to just sit and listen. I had never heard anything quite like it before.

I had come across this performance in the Kimmel Center gift shop; it is contained in a two-disc set of the recordings Eschenbach made in the late 1970s of the last four Beethoven piano sonatas and the Bagatelles, Op. 127. It is not possible to overstate the weird beauty of this stark musical landscape or the technical difficulties involved in traversing it. With these sonatas, Beethoven, after several years of virtual silence and psychological disarray, stepped into musical outer space, a place no composer has ventured before or since. I was eager to see what Eschenbach would do with this forbidding repertory, even if it was recorded more than 25 years ago.

I can’t claim to be a Mann enthusiast. I never read The Magic Mountain, never even made it to base camp. Hell, I didn’t even buy climbing boots. But I did read Faustus and remembered the passage on Op. 111 as being an extraordinarily accurate description of Beethoven’s music.

(In the course of tracking down the passage, I came across a remarkable discussion of the music and Mann’s passage. Follow this link to “Think Denk,” the web log of the young pianist Jeremy Denk. If you do, you may not come back here for a while. It made Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, write “Who needs music critics when performers write like that?”)

Re-reading the stammering professor

It’s amazing how distorted my memory of Mann’s passage was. I remembered the lecture being given by a magisterial professor in a university setting. In fact, it is delivered by Wendell Kretschmar, an itinerant American organist— from Pennsylvania, no less— who suffers from a crippling stammer. Kretschmar speaks before a pathetically small audience in a little cultural backwater of a town called Kaisersaschern. When I first read the passage about 45 years ago, its sardonically humorous tone passed completely over my head.

“His organ-playing was expert and excellent ….A considerable number of people were attracted by his free afternoon concerts, in which he regaled us with organ music by … Buxtehude, and of course Sebastian Bach.”

(Buxtehude again! I thought we’d left him behind with my imaginary trip to Lübeck in June. But in fact, Mann was born of a prominent Lübeck family, and the city played a large role in his works.)

Mann informs us that Kretschmar is “passionately addicted to giving out information,” but his lectures “were a failure, in the first place because our population had on principle no use for lectures; and secondly because his themes were not popular but rather capricious and out of the ordinary; and in the third place because his stutter made listening to them a nerve-racking occupation… .”

But Kretschmar’s description of the second movement of Op. 111 was just as I remembered; Mann’s prose, even in translation, captures the “rage, persistence, obstinacy, [and] extravagance” of the music.

Replicating Beethoven's struggle

It seems clear to me that Kretschmar’s stammer is a metaphor for the struggle Beethoven went through to get the music out onto the page, and Eschenbach plays the movement as if he were Wendell Kretschmar. His focus is on the syncopations and accents that progressively engulf the musical texture; his playing isn’t pretty– he really bangs the stuffing out of the keys— but it surely communicates Beethoven’s pounding against the boundaries of classical form until, as Mann so perfectly puts it, “A moment comes, an utterly extreme situation, when the poor little motif seems to hover alone and forsaken above a giddy yawning abyss— a procedure of awe-inspiring unearthliness,” and Beethoven seems to compose himself right off the edge of the known universe. (Click here to hear a few bars' worth for yourself.)

Beethoven went to great pains to make his exact musical intentions known in the score. There are exhortations to the performer— “l’istesso tempo” (the same tempo!)— from variation to variation; every accent, every bit of phrasing, is written down, and it was easy for me to convince myself that Eschenbach had definitively nailed Beethoven’s meaning. Then I listened to another recording, a recent one by Mitsuko Uchida, the woman who has made her mark not so much by playing Mozart’s music as by channeling it. It’s hard to imagine a more radically different reading, one that shows how paradoxical Beethoven’s attempts at precision were and how ambiguous his notation is despite them.

Beethoven’s tempo is “Adagio molto semplice e cantabile.” Which does “molto” modify? “Adagio” or “simple and singing”? I think he meant the latter, and so does Uchida. She takes the movement as fast as I’ve ever heard it, at about 50 beats a minute, almost a slow andante. Eschenbach takes it about as slowly as it can possibly go, more like 40 beats a minute, so that while Uchida takes a shade over 18 minutes to play the movement, Eschenbach takes more than 22. That’s an enormous difference!

Uchida’s cosmic dance

When I first listened to Uchida’s interpretation, I thought of what somebody once allegedly said about Ella Fitzgerald’s singing: “When she says ‘My man’s left me,’ she makes it sound that he went out for a quart of milk.” It took me a few hearings to hear things Uchida’s way. She plays down the rhythmic conflicts. Her tone is beautiful, everything is lyrical, and her performance is carried by the long wavelengths that are all but obscured by Eschenbach’s obsessive attention to detail. When Uchida gets to that magic moment when everything dissolves, she’s arrived there by the route of cosmic dance rather than Eschenbach’s door-to-door combat.

Take your pick; they’re both thoughtful, powerful interpretations. What the two taken together show is that Beethoven forces a performer to take a stand, to define a philosophy about what his music means, even to define an attitude toward life in general.

Three years after he became the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director, Eschenbach remains an enigmatic figure to me, and this over- the-top performance just makes him all the more so, since his Beethoven in particular this past season struck me as a bit eccentric and surprisingly bland. But when I saw a clip of him conducting something the other day during WHYY’s fund-raiser, I found myself looking at him differently. Imagine that you discovered one day that the fellow a few doors down from you at work— the quiet, unassuming guy whom you’ve never really gotten to know as much as you’d like to— had once been the state middleweight champion. It’s sort of like that. Eschenbach has gone the distance with late Beethoven. You don’t want to mess with him.