Richard Goode plays late Beethoven

Richard Goode's annual piano recital in the Philadelphia Chamber Music series is always one of the hottest tickets in town, and for good reason. The unassuming Mr. Goode, who's never known the flashy career of some high-profile recital artists, nonetheless enjoys great esteem among his peers and discerning audiences.

His performance at the Perelman Theater of the last three Beethoven sonatas, with the contemporary set of Bagatelles, Op. 119, as a puckish addition, was particularly anticipated. These works— along with Beethoven's own Hammerklavier Sonata and Diabelli Variations, Bach's Goldberg Variations, and, perhaps, the last three sonatas of Franz Schubert, D. 958-960— are the summit of the piano literature.

Whoever ventures them had best have paid his dues. He had also better be very, very good.

By his mid-30s, Beethoven had reinvented the piano sonata several times. The Pathétique, Op. 13, the Tempest, Op. 31, #2, the Waldstein, Op. 53, and the Appassionata, Op. 57, had in succession extended the range, sonority and technical, intellectual, and emotional possibility of the form beyond anything that had gone before.

Hearing Eroica for the first time

This is not to scant the innovations of Mozart or the perfection of his achievement; but Mozart is always another matter. Hearing the Appassionata for the first time must have been like listening to the premiere of the Eroica Symphony. You just couldn't have imagined that such a sonic world was possible.

(I'd add the first Rasoumovsky Quartet, Op. 59, #1, to this list of revolutionary compositions that transformed a seemingly established genre.)

After the Appassionata, Beethoven set the piano aside in a way he did not to the symphony or the string quartet. The Appassionata's successors over the next decade were all smaller-scaled, less ambitious, and, technically at least, less challenging.

Not until the Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106, did he explore completely new territory, producing a work so potent and strange that it scared off pianists and audiences alike for a century, and occasionally still does. Liszt, perhaps, wrote some music of comparable technical complexity, but no one produced work of such sublimity— except for Beethoven himself, who went on, in the final three sonatas and the Diabelli Variations, to scale peaks not on any map and dwell on summits almost too rare for breath.

Dismissed for his deafness

Contemporaries sometimes put down what they could not comprehend to Beethoven's now total deafness, and its effects not only on his sonic judgment but his notoriously difficult temperament. They said that the old man— then all of 50—had lost his touch.

Now we appreciate that Beethoven heard better than any of us, and explored states of consciousness never conceived before. The Hammerklavier is a Himalayan range unto itself, but the sonatas Opp. 109, 110, and 111 comprise a kind of set that lies within the span of a single recital, if a pianist has the boldness and the stamina.

Op. 109, in E major, opens with a theme that, deceptive in its simplicity, takes us at once into a new realm of musical elation. The sense of this journey deepens as the work progresses, and carries over into the A-flat Sonata, Op. 110, though one senses rifts and gulfs as well: The empyrean turns out to be a complicated place (as are most things in Beethoven), with turbulence and activity as well as sweet repose.

Diabelli's challenge

Above all, one has the sense here of a mighty spirit communing with itself as the only fit object of its contemplation— what the philosopher Plotinus called the "Alone with the Alone." Freed of the constraints of sonata form, the later Diabelli Variations, Op. 120 would reach even higher levels, though mounting in slower stages.

But the sonata has its own virtues, one of which is immediacy of statement. The Diabelli Variations are built on a trivial tune that the composer Anton Diabelli invited various composers, Beethoven included, to write a single variation on as part of a composite work. Beethoven took his time, and produced 33 variations. What his fellow composers produced is quite forgotten.

In both Opp. 109 and 110, Beethoven gets right down to business; you're at once transported. The fugue with which Op. 110 concludes, announced by great suspended chords that halt the progression of the Arioso dolente section of the finale— rudeness is one of Beethoven's great strategies— anticipates the very different C minor Sonata, Op.111, a two-movement work with a fiercely coiled Allegro that unleashes music of stunning concentration and energy, and a long Arietta which carries us again to bliss before depositing us, with great simplicity, back where we began. The work has a superficially disparate quality, as if the Hammerklavier had been grafted to the Diabelli Variations, but as always Beethoven's inner logic makes it cohere as a dynamic whole.

A performer's job

Before launching into the C minor Sonata, Goode slipped in the six brief Bagatelles of Op. 119, a commissioned work contemporaneous with the three great sonatas. They're chips from the master's block, musings rather than compositions, but touched with elusiveness and mystery; as with Chopin's miniatures, you can play them competently and completely miss the point. Here they served to rinse the palette and prepare us for the storm of Op. 111.

Goode's playing was clear and limpid from the outset, although I thought it took him a while to settle into Op. 109. Once he did, however, he was fully immersed in the music and took his audience with him. There's no one way to realize any piece of music, but when a performer makes you forget the problem— or at least relegates it to a side issue— then he's doing his job.

Of course, all that requires is a lifetime of study and a technique equal to any challenge. Goode brought both.