Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 8, 14, 21 & 23

In this recording, the pianist is Wilhelm Kempff.

## Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 8 "Pathétique"

Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, commonly known as Sonata Pathétique, was written in 1798 when the composer was 27 years old, and was published in 1799. It has remained one of his most celebrated compositions. Beethoven dedicated the work to his friend Prince Karl von Lichnowsky. Although commonly thought to be one of the few works to be named by the composer himself, it was actually named Grande sonate pathétique (to Beethoven's liking) by the publisher, who was impressed by the sonata's tragic sonorities.

Prominent musicologists debate whether or not the Pathétique may have been inspired by Mozart's piano sonata K. 457, since both compositions are in C minor and have three very similar movements. The second movement, "Adagio cantabile", especially, makes use of a theme remarkably similar to one in the spacious second movement of Mozart's sonata. Close similarities have also been noted with Bach's Partita no. 2 in C minor. Both works open with a declamatory fanfare marked Grave, sharing a distinct combination of dotted rhythms, melodic contour, and texture. Furthermore, the first four notes of the Partita's Andante (G-C-D-Eb, prominently repeated throughout the work) are found in the Pathétique as the first notes of important themes – first in the hand-crossing second subject of its first movement (initially transposed), then in the main theme of the Rondo. It is known that Beethoven was familiar with the works of Bach, studying The Well-Tempered Clavier as a youth and returning to his predecessor's compositional styles later in life.

### Movements

The movements are named as follows:

1. Grave - Allegro di molto e con brio
2. Adagio cantabile
3. Rondo. Allegro

### Reception

The sonata Pathétique was an important success for Beethoven, selling well and helping create his reputation as a composer, not just as an extraordinary pianist. Not only was it instantly popular, it also exposed the world to the characteristics that Beethoven would continue to develop in the coming years.

When the pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles discovered the work in 1804, he was ten years old; unable to afford to buy the music, he copied it out from a library copy. His music teacher, on being told about his discovery, "warned me against playing or studying eccentric productions before I had developed a style based on more respectable models. Without paying heed to his instructions, however, I laid Beethoven's works on the piano, in the order of their appearance, and found in them such consolation and pleasure as no other composer ever vouchsafed me."

Anton Schindler, a musician who was a friend of Beethoven in the composer's later years, wrote: "What the Sonate Pathétique was in the hands of Beethoven (although he left something to be desired as regards clean playing) was something that one had to have heard, and heard again, in order to be quite certain that it was the same already well-known work. Above all, every single thing became, in his hands, a new creation, wherein his always legato playing, one of the particular characteristics of his execution, formed an important part."

## Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 "Moonlight"

Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, marked Quasi una fantasia, Op. 27, No. 2, is a piano sonata. It was completed in 1801 and dedicated in 1802 to his pupil Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. The popular name Moonlight Sonata goes back to a critic's remark after Beethoven's death.

The piece is one of Beethoven's most popular compositions for the piano, and it was a popular favorite even in his own day. Beethoven wrote the Moonlight Sonata in his early thirties, after he had finished with some commissioned work; there is no evidence that he was commissioned to write this sonata.

### Movements

3. Presto agitato

## Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 21 "Waldstein"

Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, known as the Waldstein, is one of the three most notable sonatas of his middle period (the other two being the Appassionata, Op. 57, and Les Adieux, Op. 81a). Completed in summer 1804 and surpassing Beethoven's previous piano sonatas in its scope, the Waldstein is a key early work of Beethoven's "Heroic" decade (1803–1812) and set a standard for piano composition in the grand manner.

The sonata's name derives from Beethoven's dedication to his close friend and patron Count Ferdinand Ernst Gabriel von Waldstein of Vienna. Like the Archduke Trio (one of many pieces dedicated to Archduke Rudolph), it is named for Waldstein even though other works are dedicated to him. It is also known as L'Aurora (The Dawn) in Italian, for the sonority of the opening chords of the third movement, thought to conjure an image of daybreak.

It is considered one of Beethoven's greatest and most technically challenging piano sonatas. The first section of the rondo requires a simultaneous pedal trill, high melody and rapid left hand runs, and the coda features glissando octaves written in dialogue between the hands.

An average performance of the entire Waldstein lasts about twenty-five minutes.

### Movements

The movements are named as follows:

1. Allegro con brio
2. Introduzione. Adagio molto - attacca:
3. Rondo. Allegretto moderato

## Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 23 "Appassionata"

Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 (colloquially known as the Appassionata, meaning "passionate" in Italian) is among the three famous piano sonatas of his middle period (the others being the Waldstein, Op. 53 and Les Adieux, Op. 81a); it was composed during 1804 and 1805, and perhaps 1806, and was dedicated to Count Franz von Brunswick. The first edition was published in February 1807 in Vienna.

Unlike the early Sonata No. 8, Pathétique, the Appassionata was not named during the composer's lifetime, but was so labelled in 1838 by the publisher of a four-hand arrangement of the work.

One of his greatest and most technically challenging piano sonatas, the Appassionata was considered by Beethoven to be his most tempestuous piano sonata until the twenty-ninth piano sonata (known as the Hammerklavier). 1803 was the year Beethoven came to grips with the irreversibility of his progressively deteriorating hearing.

An average performance of the entire Appassionata sonata lasts about twenty-five minutes.

### Movements

The movements are named as follows:

1. Allegro assai
2. Andante con moto - attacca:
3. Allegro, ma non troppo - Presto

## Program Note - Alone with the Music

He was born in 1895, the same year as Paul Hindemith and Carl Orff, on 25 November, in Jüterbog near Potsdam, and died on 23 May 1991, in Positano in southern Italy. Pianist, organist, composer and author, Wilhelm Kempff was the son of an organist and a child prodigy who improvised fugues and variations. As a schoolboy he studied with Heinrich Barth, a pupil of Hans von Bülow; as a young man he wrote operas, symphonies, lieder, choral music and incidental music for the theatre. He travelled the world as professor, and when he retired from the concert hall at 85 he continued to teach in his adopted home in Italy. His unheroic, sensitive, lucid interpretation of Beethoven was admired even more greatly in France, Japan and South America than it was in Germany. He made his first recordings of Beethoven in the 1920s. A "Romantic" he valued the wonders that could be done by the gramophone: "This medium enables us to reach people who would otherwise have scarcely any opportunities to listen to music." He approached Beethoven's piano sonatas as superior improvisations, fantasies which had been worked out and committed to paper, monologues which the pianist re-created. "No other musical instrument is as wonderful as the piano. One is alone with the music."

The direction "piano" is found far more frequently in Beethoven than "forte". Kempff interpreted this as an instruction to play with as much shading as possible. He was imitable in the number and variety of nuances that he achieved between brilliance and darkness, consecrated seriousness and quirky humour. However many young pianists attended his master courses - "I always tell my pupils not to imitate my style but to find their own way" - Wilhelm Kempff was an unconditional individualist who founded no school or movement. "The interpretation has fulfilled its purpose if the listener is persuaded by it. ... I have reached the conviction that music must sound rounded and as it were weightless. I am rigidly opposed to the idea that music can be ugly, that notes can stick out jaggedly, that tension and effort must intrude. ... I remember that Wilhelm Furtwängler once said to me that he could only conduct if the music sounded beautiful."

Wilhelm Kempff's roots were in the expressive world of the turn of the century, especially in his performances of Beethoven. He was said to combine the challenging *élan* of Eugen d'Albert with the cerebral clarity of Ferruccio Busoni. Both these pianist-composers influenced Kempff's approach. Kempff created an atmosphere when he sat down at the keyboard. As early as the 1920s, the Munich critic Alexander Berrsche wrote: "Kempff has the magical gift of a touch which works like a persuasive rehabilitation of the much mistreated and much despised piano, and he is so conscious of this gift that one is often tempted to wonder if he takes more pleasure in Beethoven or in the magical sound of the instrument."

In the course of the six or seven decades he spent playing the piano, Kempff sometimes performed this piece or that a little differently, but he never lost his passionate attachment to interpretational freedom, to poetic touch and imaginative shading. To talk of joy in music is a cliché, but it is most nobly and beautifully true of Wilhelm Kempff. He enjoyed his command of the manual technique of playing the piano or the organ, which freed him to concentrate on the essentials of music. There were no crises in his career; he was not interested in musical fashions; he bore the almost total neglect which befell his compositions with characteristic tolerance and serenity. Kempff considered his greatest praise to have come from Jean Sibelius, when he played a Beethoven sonata for the aged Finnish composer just before his death in 1957: "You didn't play like a pianist, you played like a human being."

*Karl Schumann*

*(Translation: Mary Whittall)*

## Reviews

He made his first recordings of Beethoven in the 1920s. A "Romantic", Wilhelm Kempff valued the wonders that could be done by the gramophone: "This medium enables us to reach people who would otherwise have scarcely any opportunities to listen to music." He approached Beethoven's piano sonatas as superior improvisations, fantasies which had been worked out and committed to paper, monologues which the pianist recreated. "No other musical instrument is as wonderful as the piano. One is alone with the music."

Wilhelm Kempff loved playing in the Beethoven-Saal in Hanover. As he approached 70 he returned there to record the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven. It is from that cycle, first released in 1965 and praised by the Penguin Guide as "a yardstick by which all others are judged", that the present performances are taken: the "Pathétique", the young Beethoven's outstanding work for the instrument; the so-called "Moonlight" Sonata, faithful to its title "Sonata quasi una fantasia"; the "Waldstein", known as "L'Aurore" in France, luminous in its classical radiance; and finally the "Appassionata"; the most sombre and fierce of all the 32 sonatas.

## Links

For the playlist of the album, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clcfI0lx7tw&list=OLAK5uy\_lkSGAZ-0vf5w4hsarZA70DrmeGK3llt4c

For more details on the album, click here: https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/beethoven-piano-sonatas-8-14-kempff-6133

For the official Deutsche Grammophon website, click here: https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en

## Notes

* Art Direction - Hartmut Pfeiffer
* Composer - Ludwig van Beethoven
* Engineers - Heinz Wildhagen, Klaus Scheibe
* Executive-Producer - Otto Gerdes
* Liner Notes - Karl Schumann, Hélène Chen-Ménissier, Manuela Amadei, Mary Whittall
* Photographer - Rudolf Betz
* Pianist - Wilhelm Kempff
* Producers - Karl Faust, Wolfgang Lohse
* Sound - Stereo
* Recording dates - January 1965 (8th & 14th Sonatas), September 1964 (21st & 23rd Sonatas)
* Recording venue - Hanover, Beethoven-Saal
* Total duration - 79'10