You may like a comment made on the radio almost half a century ago by Edward Sackville-West. He described the end of Opus 111 as “depositing us gently on the edge of eternity.”

Best wishes,

Bernard Jacobson

PS Forgive me if all this is in a very unbloglike format – first time I’ve ever participated in communications of this kind.

At some risk of reading too much biography into the music, I sometimes feel Beethoven draws attention beyond (or within) the audible to something else. This really struck me for the first time while I was in an orchestra performing the violin concerto. Being rather underutilized during the slow movement, my mind wandered–but attentively. I had degenerated into listening, so much so I was concentrating on the faint patter of rain somewhere overhead, on the roof of Sanders Theater. Like the birds in the slow movement of the 6th Symphony–which still annoy me as too literal to be musical–the rain wasn’t supposed to be heard as a thing itself but as an indicator of how much else had been screened out. Or so I would like to imagine Beethoven’s intentions.
The connection to Op. 111 Arietta is that I consider it an example of how the audible eventually borders on silence, where elaboraton becomes almost indistinguishable from attenuation. The resimplification at the end of the movement, with its subtle inflection, doesn’t feel like an obligatory return. It’s more like the sound left behind after the music has moved on, somehwere out of earshot.

The Op. 111 is a piece that I avoid out of reverence, maybe afraid it could be trivialized by overexposure, or my lack of attentiveness. But one time I did put on a recording (by Alfred Brendel) was 30 years ago, after I had come home from watching a Red Sox game one night at Fenway Park. No sooner did Brendel get to the end of the second movement than the lights went out–all over the neighborhood. The outage lasted little more than 10 minutes. The next I had almost forgotten about it when I was riding home on a bus. Then I overheard a passenger from my neighborhood haranguing the bus driver. She had missed a bus earlier that day even though she was on time. She was convinced the bus had come too soon. Since her house and her clocks must have been affected by the outage, I thought for a moment could explain to her what happened after the Red Sox game and Op. 111.

More seriously, as a listener and but not as a performer, this piece has been troublesome for me.

On the one hand, classical music fans are culturally acclimated to bend on one knee at the merest mention of Opus One-Eleven. Yet I recall driving home one evening a year or so ago, and hearing “a long piano piece” on the FM radio. Not being a pianist, I did not have the slightest clue of what it was. I simply knew that I wished to Heaven that it would end soon, it seemed to drag on and on and never get into a true “fireworks finale” mode. In due course, the announcer came on and said “that was Daniel Barenboim, performing the Op. 111 of Beethoven.” [segue to commercial].

That incident troubled me, and still does. If I’d known the identity of the piece in advance, I suspect I would have been prejudiced in its favor. But as a complete blind test, I was thoroughly underwhelmed.

Some have suggested that it was Barenboim, and not Beethoven, against whom I was reacting. Maybe. But still an interesting case-study of sorts.

BTW, I’ve listened to classical music for many years, mainly chamber music and string music. So it isn’t like I am a novice to the genre. But I am a very far cry from a scholar-specialist in keyboard literature!