Last week, unable to stop listening to Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat Major, I took the next logical step. I found the music online and am now trying to learn this amazing piece.
As typical in an endeavor of this sort, I come up against my impatient personality and some basic questions: How many mistakes can I tolerate? How correct must I be? I have no teacher to suggest fingerings and dynamics. I’ll rely on YouTube and my own rusty technique.
The music has been in my head since the concert in Providence. Now I must get it into my fingers. I’m starting small, a page or two at a time. If I can even semi-master the first movement up to the repeat by the end of the summer, I’ll declare victory.
The composer Franz Schubert wrote his Moments Musicaux between 1823 and 1827. These short pieces are some of the composer’s most popular. He wrote them to give his public what they wanted, a chance to play music at home. He gave them much more; he gave them a masterpiece.
Yesterday, I heard pianist Jonathan Biss play Schubert’s three last sonatas. He performed them flawlessly, viscerally, emotionally. The last piece on the program was the Sonata in B-flat Major, Opus 960, which begins so melodically, with such depth and richness, that another world seemed to open with those notes and harmonic shifts.
We sat around the piano, about 200 of us, and at intermission the piano was flipped so that those who saw Biss’s hands in the first half of the program saw his face in the second half. I’m not sure which was more moving. Biss’s hands never stopped, even in “rest,” but his face was transporting.
I was lucky to watch it during the final piece, the Opus 960 Sonata. Biss then became a conduit for Schubert, lying on his deathbed, sending his last notes to the world. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so moved by hearing a piece of live music. It was my “moment musicaux.”
In honor of Brahms 192nd birthday today I just listened to a podcast about the composer. I learned that he was shy, self-conscious, and hard on himself. No wonder I love the guy.
Brahms was such a perfectionist that he spent much time, especially later in his life, hunting down and destroying the music he’d written earlier. Pieces he considered sub-par did not make the cut. Who knows how much more of his music we’d have if he hadn’t been so self-critical.
It took Brahms 20 years to write his first symphony. He kept a bust of Beethoven on his desk, just to ratchet up the pressure. The result? Some of the most sublime music this side of heaven. Turn up the volume when you listen to this piece, the finale of Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture.
(A clean-shaven Brahms. He didn’t grow a beard until his mid-40s.)
It was only a few measures snatched from the radio but I’ve been humming them since Wednesday: the opening phrases of Bach’s English Suite Number 5. Who knows why a melody lodges itself in your mind, but this one made itself at home in mine.
Usually I’ll forget a piece in a few days — or, if it’s persistent and for the piano, find the music and play it. This time, miraculously enough, I already owned it. I pulled it out yesterday and started practicing.
To learn a piece from scratch is to probe the heart of it, to marvel at the intricacies of meter and harmony, the contrapuntal wonder of it all. I did that yesterday with Bach … only remembering this morning that March 21st is his birthday.
I can’t think of a more fitting reminder of his genius than to try and play one of his piano works, taking it apart and putting it back together again.
Happy Birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach! Your suite is humbling me.
His birthday was yesterday, but my mind was elsewhere when I wrote Monday’s post — mostly in the clouds, I guess.
But Mozart was in the air all day, courtesy of my local classical station. I heard symphonies and sonatas and divertimentos. I caught the entire 21st Piano Concerto and for fun pulled out my music and followed along. There in pencil were my teacher’s notes: “Play softer!” “No pedal!” I still can’t believe that I was able to memorize and play the first movement of this piece with my high school orchestra. But apparently I did, and I have the music to prove it!
Mozart was with me then and in the months and years leading up to that concert. And he was with me yesterday, wafting through the airwaves, pulsing through my earbuds during a late-day walk. My day may not have been totally Mozart, but it mostly was.
(Photo: Musikverein in Vienna. Title: With apologies to Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, recently renamed.)
The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols I know is the one that takes place in King’s College Cambridge on Christmas Eve. It’s the one that begins with these words “Once in Royal David’s City,” often sung in the dulcet tones of a boy soprano.
It’s also the one that the famous Groton School of Groton, Massachusetts, holds or used to hold, which we once foolishly attended with newborn Suzanne. She didn’t cry … much. But I spent most of the service worrying that she would, especially during the agonizingly long minutes when the solemn procession blocked our exit.
The Festival of Lessons and Carols last night was a different matter. It was beautiful and earnest, not a flame in the darkness but a well-lit performance featuring the choir and its new director, an organist extraordinaire. The reading and songs weren’t the exact ones I was expecting but they checked all the boxes.
Afterward we went up and talked with the director, congratulated him on the success of the event and asked some questions about the organ. Turns out, it’s a hybrid instrument, part digital, part real pipes. I had no idea such a combination exists and am doubly amazed now at the sound that comes out of it.
To hear “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” on that instrument is to hear the carol in all its ancient and aching wonderment. A suiting accompaniment to the words of Isaiah: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”
Remove the apostrophe and it would also be true. I often put Brahms first; he’s one of my favorite composers. When I heard about the program of last night’s concert I knew I’d want to be there.
In the program notes, I learned that Brahms began writing his first symphony when he was in 20s, but it was 20 years before he completed the work. One problem, apparently, was Beethoven, the long shadow he cast over the 19th-century symphonic repertoire.
In fact, the pulsing timpani that opens the first movement is sometimes thought to be an homage to Beethoven. But Brahms finds his footing. The sonorous chorales, the plucky pizzicatos, the French horn melody in the final movement: all of these shout “Brahms.”
I’ve been listening to this symphony for decades, mostly recorded versions, a few live ones. I even played the last movement — in youth orchestra, when I was last chair string bass. So believe me when I say I’ve never heard it as the National Symphony Orchestra, Gianandrea Noseda conducting, played it last night. The pace, the musicality, the finale that made the made my skin prickle. I felt like I was inside the music. And when the final notes sounded, the hall erupted, as it should have. It was Brahms first, after all.
When I began walking this morning, pink clouds were piling up on the horizon. The day was just getting to know itself. I needed a quiet tune, so I chose Dan Fogelberg’s “To the Morning.”
There’s a line in the song I’ve always liked: “There’s really no way to say no to the morning.” It’s an obvious statement but one I need to hear sometimes.
To listen to it as I walked this Monday morning was to hear how beautifully reality can be crafted. Yes, there’s no way to say no. But there are so many ways to say yes.
Music matters. I believe this always, but especially when choosing the soundtrack for a walk. Today’s choice was Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
I started with Number Two, remembering the story my long-ago piano teacher told me about the physical rigors of playing the trumpet solos of that piece. Her husband played the trumpet, she said, and the second Brandenburg was so difficult, even when played on the smaller piccolo trumpet, that one could pop a blood vessel with the effort.
Apparently, she did not make this up. A quick bit of research today tells me that the second Bach Brandenburg Concerto is “a trumpet player’s Everest.”
For a walker, though, it’s an energetic beauty of a piece. It revs one up and keeps one going. And this morning, it kept me bouncing along.
(One of my favorite music-themed photos, shot May 2010 in Vienna’s Musikverein.)
I had just walked into the house when I heard a familiar piece on the radio. It harkened back, far back, into memory. It was a Brahms Rhapsody, a piece I never learned completely but mastered the first few pages well enough to play — effusively but ineptly — long ago.
I’m in a funny place with what I still think of as my new piano. I love playing, but I don’t like practicing anymore than I did in fifth grade.
What’s an adult musician to do? Playing a la fakando — the faux musical term my stand partner Greg and I penciled in above impossible runs when I played string bass in high school — is hard to pull off on a solo instrument.
When I heard the Brahms, though, I remembered. It’s the music itself that makes me practice. Give me a piece I’m itching to master and I’ll put in some time. So I’m rekindling the rhapsody.
