"What is in my heart must come out and so I write it down."
—Ludwig van Beethoven
"The difference between the first movement of the Pathetique Sonata [Beethoven] and the equally great and powerful C Minor Fantasy by Mozart is the difference between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the difference between a society dominated by the idea of aristocracy and a society dominated by the concept of individuality. In Beethoven's music, the concepts put into motion by the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution are shaping the destiny of man and art. Beethoven's music has much more personal quality than Mozart's. It is more concerned with inner states of being and the desire for self-expression. Mozart holds himself in classic restraint, while Beethoven bares his soul for all to see."
—Harold C Schonberg, Lives of the Great Composers.
"We know that in the Romantic period (nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) composers and performers pushed the boundaries of every musical element, primary and secondary, achieving an unprecedented emotional expressiveness while avoiding the descent into the atonal anarchy that followed. New instruments, bigger orchestras; new forms, and the expansion of old forms; the coming of age of opera and ballet; virtuoso stars, like our modern-day 'celebs' only with talent; the cult of the conductor; more inventive melodies using bigger intervals between notes; greater dynamic range—fff (fortississimo: very, very loud) to ppp (pianississimo: very, very soft); more daring harmonies (chromatic and dissonant, without recourse to the sabotage or assassination that became de rigueur later) modulating more frequently into other keys; more rhythmic variety, including greater use of syncopation, rubato (bending of the rhythm), accelerando (speeding up) and ritardando (slowing down), changing of the time signature within movements, etc. They honored, but were not straitjacketed by, the formalism of classicism, stretching but not eschewing the rules that make music cohere. They knew with their predecessors that coherence was integral to integration, and integration to harmoniousness, and harmoniousness to beauty. They exercised freedom within the rule of law—the perfect mirror of what was going on politically.
"Thus did they bring individualism to music—they were each distinguishable from the other; each imposed his distinctive stamp upon the form without going out of it (at least not to the point of disintegration). They united the idiomatic with the idiosyncratic, reason with emotion, Apollo with Dionysus (albeit with a leaning towards the latter, via, it must be admitted, that villain Rousseau). They transformed the 'universal language' into an individual language."
—Me, Music of the Gods.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is often cited as the bridge between Classicism and Romanticism in music (though he was much more than that, of course). His five piano concerti, soon to be played/conducted by Freddy Kempf with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, illuminate the bridge, starting in the classical style of Mozart and Haydn (1 and 2) and ending unmistakably on the other side (5). Additionally, with his Third Symphony, Eroica, Beethoven gave Romanticism in music an explosive blast-off. Music's grandest era was underway. If a better future for mankind awaits, its historians will compare the music of that era with that of our own and wonder how such grandeur could succumb to such grotesquery.
To mark Phenomenal Freddy's forthcoming Ludwig-fest I am posting here the entirety of an interview I conducted with him for Capital Magazine. The interview graces the current issue of the magazine in substantially truncated form. I shall also post performances of each of the concerti, one a week in the lead-up to Freddy's first concert, in Wellington on February 28.
Beethoven wrote his Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major in 1796-97. It received its first performance in 1798 with the composer himself at the piano. It was actually Beethoven's third essay into the genre. He had written what we know as Piano Concerto No. 2 ten years earlier, but it wasn't published until 1802. (A third effort was never published.)
Here it is played/conducted by one of Freddy's heroes, the legendary Leonard Bernstein.
And here it is played by one of mine, Evgeny Kissin. Note in particular the sublime left hand in the second movement (beginning at 20' 50"), and Kissin's captivating interactions with clarinet (2nd movement) and oboe (3rd).