SEASON 3 EPISODE 13
ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
Good afternoon and thanks for tuning in to Little Rock Public Radio and Classical KLRE-FM, 90.5. I'm Eric Harrison, I write about arts and culture at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and I’ll be your host for the next two hours.
You're listening to ‘Major and Minor Masterpieces,’ where we will focus each week on a broad range of classical music, from chamber music to choral works to full symphonies and maybe even a touch or two of opera.
Today’s show focuses on “Beethoven in c minor,” pieces by Ludwig van Beethoven in his favorite minor key.
Beethoven chose the key of E-flat major for many of his most buoyant works, including his “Eroica Symphony” that you heard in an earlier show. He chose the companion key of c minor to write many of his most dramatic works, four of which you will hear on this program.
One Beethoven’s best-known piano sonatas is his No. 8 in c minor, op.13, titled “Pathetique.” As with most such titles, it didn’t come from the composer: It was affixed to the work by its Franz Anton Hoffmeister, the sonata’s first publisher, in December 1799, and turned out to be a marketing coup. As with the similar title that Pyotr Tchaikovsky gave to his sixth symphony, it does not translate as “pathetic,” but as representing “pathos,” sublime, intense emotion — “between the expression of inner pain and the resistance of the moral conscience,” as one scholar puts it.
The opening, which Beethoven marks as “Grave,” or very slow, is as intense a musical moment as you will find in any Beethoven composition; he follows it with an almost heroic theme in the tempo marking of “Allegro di molto e con brio,” fast and briskly — in fact, many of Beethoven’s opening c minor movements are marked “allegro con brio,” including the Third Piano Concerto and — oops, spoiler alert, the Fifth Symphony.
The second movement, “Adagio cantabile,” is a song with a now-famous melody in the key of A-flat major. The third movement, a Rondo, features a theme built upon the second subject of the first movement.
And on a personal note, this sonata represents the peak I reached in my few years as a student of the piano, which I gave up, alas, in my mid-teens.
Pianist Mari Kodama plays the “Pathétique” Sonata, No. 8 in c minor, Op. 13, by Ludwig van Beethoven.
(LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN’S “PATHÉTIQUE SONATA”)
Mari Kodama played the “Pathétique” Sonata, part of a Pentatone recording of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas.
Beethoven wrote 10 sonatas for the violin-piano combination, three of which were published together as his op. 30 and represent the beginning of a shift to more equality between the two instruments. The second, in c minor, is probably the biggest of the 10 in feel and scope; it is also one of only three (the others are numbers 5 and 10) with four movements rather than the standard three.
As is typical of the composer’s works in this key, the first movement is full of violent contrasts, starting quietly and ending in fury. Like the piano sonata you just heard, the slow, beautiful second movement is in the key of A-flat major. Beethoven shifts to the key of C major for the third, a playful Scherzo with a contrapuntal middle Trio. He returns to turbulence for the finale, with connections to the first movement, marked by relentless dramatic tension and emotional strife that reflects the conflict between Beethoven's youthful spirit and the illness that was gradually causing his deafness.
Violinist Christian Tetzlaff and pianist Lars Vogt team up to play the Violin Sonata No. 7. op. 30 No. 2, by Beethoven.
(LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN’S “VIOLIN SONATA” NO. 7, OP. 30, NO. 2)
Violinist Christian Tetzlaff and pianist Lars Vogt played Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7. op. 30 No. 2, in c minor on “Major and Minor Masterpieces” here on Little Rock Public Radio and classical KLRE-FM, 90.5.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
—PROGRAM BREAK—
[EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
SARAH BUFORD, PRODUCER:
Hey listeners, welcome back to Major and Minor Masterpieces. I’m your producer, Sarah Buford, and it's time for our show’s little educational session, in which we break down some of the terminology we use when describing classical music and its history.
Eric, I’ve heard you use the term “cantabile” before and every time you mention it, it reminds me of “cadenza” (a fun, less structured MOMENT in a performance where a soloist gets to show off their inventiveness or improvisational skills. They get to flow. Where does “cantabile” fit into this?
ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
Well, Sarah, “cantabile” (like so many musical terms, it’s from the Italian) means to perform in a “singing style” — particularly that the player or players should practically “sing” what they’re playing. The melody should stand out above the accompanying sounds and the general effect should be free and flowing. So Sarah, yes the flow idea is similar but “cantabile” is an expressive marking while a “cadenza” is a section.
Frequently you will see a composer label the tempo of a movement of a quartet or a symphony as “Andante cantabile” — at a walking speed and in a singing style. The most famous, perhaps, such use might be as the second movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1; the movement is often played separately by a quartet or a string orchestra or in some other arrangement for other instruments, under the title “Andante Cantabile.”
SARAH: Excellent, Eric. Let’s get back into the flow of things and tune back in to more Major and Minor Masterpieces.
[END OF EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
ERIC: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a piano concerto — No. 24 — in c minor, K. 491, with which Beethoven was certainly acquainted; he also was very familiar with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in d minor, K. 466 — reportedly he owned Mozart’s original score, and wrote cadenzas for it that are still in standard use today.
So we can see Mozart’s influence, but also how Beethoven was beginning to break from it, in his 1803 Piano Concerto No. 3 in c minor, which scholars hold up as a prototype of the piano concerto genre for much of the rest of the 19th century.
Beethoven was scheduled to be the soloist at the premiere of this concerto at the Theater an der Wien on April 5, 1803, on a program that also included the premieres of his Second Symphony and the oratorio “Christ on the Mount of Olives.”
The piece received a second “premiere,” a year later, in July 1804, with the piano part finally written out for Beethoven’s student Ferdinand Ries, who was the soloist for the occasion.
Let’s hear Olli Mustonen at the piano and also conducting the Tapiola Sinfonietta in this Ondine recording.
(LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN’S “PIANO CONCERTO” NO. 3)
Olli Mustonen at the piano and also conducting the Tapiola Sinfonietta performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in this Ondine recording.
And now for what is unquestionably Beethoven’s most famous piece in C minor, and one of his most frequently performed works in any key: His Fifth Symphony, so familiar that it’s generally known as “Beethoven’s Fifth.”
The four-note, da-da-da-DAH, opening sequence is equally one of the most famous of musical passages, not least because the rhythm was used to represent the letter V in Morse code (V being the Roman numeral for “five”) after Winston Churchill started referring in his speeches to “V for Victory,” and because the BBC, subsequently during World War II, prefaced its broadcasts to Special Operations Executives with that rhythm using drumbeats.
Beethoven used that same four-note motif in several of his compositions and it dominates the first movement of this symphony. The second movement is a set of variations on two themes, the first a song for the violas and cellos, the second transforming that song into a march that brings in the trumpets and timpani. Beethoven brings back the four-note motif for the mysterious scherzo, which, after a secondary fugue, transitions in purely revolutionary fashion without a break directly into the grandly sweeping finale.
The Philadelphia Orchestra,with Christoph Eschenbach conducting, performs Beethoven’s Fifth in this live 2006 performance.
(LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN’S “SYMPHONY NO. 5” C MINOR, OP. 67)
Christoph Eschenbach conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in this live performance of the Symphony No. 5 in c minor, op.67, by Ludwig van Beethoven in a live 2006 performance, released on the orchestra’s own label, on today’s edition of Major and Minor Masterpieces.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
Thanks for tuning in this week. I've been your host, Eric Harrison, of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Our producer is Sarah Buford. And our transition and credit music is by our friend Wojciech Chiselinski.
Tune in again next week for Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio and classical KLRE-FM, 90.5.