Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier”
Notes by TŌN cellist Alfred Western
In all of musical history, you would be hard pressed to find a figure more dedicated to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven than Austria’s own Felix Weingartner. A composer and editor in his own right, Weingartner was also the first conductor to record all nine of his idol’s symphonies. Alongside his own compositions of operas (nine, including a trilogy after Aeschylus), symphonies (seven), string quartets (at least five) and lieder (many, many more), he orchestrated Beethoven’s most formidable piano sonata, the Hammerklavier, an idea first posited by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1878. While not a universally popular decision—renowned pianist, writer, and scholar Charles Rosen deemed any attempt to translate the sonata from piano to orchestra “nonsensical”—Weingartner’s orchestration at worst provides more opportunities for the work to be performed and heard, and at best gives Beethoven fanatics and novices alike a chance to experience a symphonic reimagining of one of the great’s greatest achievements.
In four movements, Beethoven exploits a gargantuan dynamic, motivic, and sonic range. From the beginning of the first movement, booming, declarative, B-flat major chords in full orchestra that make our home key known are almost immediately contrasted with a delicate, lullaby-esque, pastoral melody in the strings and winds. This juxtaposition is expanded on throughout the remainder of the movement in typical Beethovenian fashion. The second movement, a scherzo, moves away from the grandiosity of the first in favor of an electric, off-balance race through related keys and melodies that the strings and winds rally back and forth before dissolving into the third movement, the most expansive of the work’s four. A devastating, hymnal beginning gives way to more hopeful melodies that struggle against the sadness surrounding them before inevitably succumbing again to the depths of despair, only to finally find the light in the final bars. The fourth and final movement begins with some uncertainty, with some vaguely rhapsodic elements before bursting into one of Beethoven’s most adored forms: the fugue. The chaotic motor is unrelenting from here to the end (aside from a quick trip back to a familiar pastoral hymnal tune), and culminates in an at-first contemplative coda that explodes in the closing chords, sure to keep audiences on the edge of their seat until the final bell.