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Vol. IV No.7 · Week of 29 September 2000 |
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B.U. Bridge is published by the Boston University Office of University Relations.
International
Beethoven Festival-Conference
Sonatas
for violin and piano have the spotlight, for once, all to themselves
By Eric McHenry
After a year of tutoring young Ludwig van Beethoven, the Austrian composer Johann Georg Albrechtsberger infamously declared, "He has learned nothing, and will never do anything properly."
Almost as remarkable as the gloomy prediction itself is Albrechtsberger’s tacit belief in the inability of Beethoven to change. Beethoven’s career as a composer, divided by scholars into three identifiable periods, is defined by fruitful evolution. Nowhere is this more evident than in his sonatas for violin and piano, which are the subjects of BU’s International Beethoven Festival-Conference, a series of lectures and concerts held October 5 to 7 at the School for the Arts and the Tsai Performance Center.
"Beethoven wrote 10 sonatas for violin and piano," says Mark Kroll, SFA professor and chair of the department of historical performance, who is codirecting the festival-conference. "By the time he wrote his last one, he’d finished eight symphonies. So there’s a great transformation in the sonatas, both stylistic and in terms of the demands he makes on the players and the instruments. The first violin and piano sonatas are heavy virtuosic piano writing he was the young virtuoso then." In later sonatas, Kroll says, the division of labor between piano and violin was much more even.
On the other hand, a case could be made that Albrechtsberger’s assessment was partly right: much of Beethoven’s creative success stems from his refusal to do things according to the conventions of the time that is, "properly." At one point, early in his career, a progressive periodical called Allgemeine musicalische Zeitung took Beethoven to task for his "daring harmonies and venturesome rhythms" apparently these were pejoratives in 1800. A lecture by Lewis Lockwood, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University and codirector of the festival, will treat Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, Opus 24, one of the rare works in which, Lockwood will contend, Beethoven purposefully made the music accessible to audiences of the day.
"The surface appeal of the work is very great, and he knows that," says Lockwood. "Many of his earlier works, including some of his earlier sonatas, were regarded as bizarre, difficult, and hard to understand, and this is one work that I feel certain he knew would be pleasing in the most immediate way to audiences. There are ways of making that happen that belong to certain traditions of composition. And when a composer spends a lot of his time improvising for audiences, and doing it with mastery, as Beethoven did, he knows exactly what impressions he can evoke."
The festival-conference will visit Beethoven at every point in his development as a composer of sonatas for violin and piano. Those who attend all three concerts, Kroll says, will hear all 10 sonatas. Sieghard Brandenburg, director of the Beethoven-Archiv in Bonn, who edited the violin sonatas for the new standard edition of Beethoven’s work, will speak about the Violin Sonatas, Opus 12, Beethoven’s earliest attempts in the genre. Maynard Solomon, Beethoven’s foremost biographer and a member of the Juilliard School’s graduate faculty, will address the final Violin and Piano Sonata, Opus 96, composed some 20 years later.
It was the success of a similar event, held at BU in 1998 and devoted to Domenico Scarlatti, that got Kroll and Lockwood thinking about a Beethoven festival.
"We began to discuss the sort of approach we’d need," Kroll says. "Beethoven is a much larger subject than Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord works. Finally, Lewis suggested focusing exclusively on one area of the repertoire the violin and piano sonatas. And to our amazement and delight, we discovered that it had never been done before."
"This is a branch of Beethoven’s chamber music," says Lockwood, "that does not get the kind of attention that you see for symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas, and so forth. But it’s a very important branch." He calls the inclusion of both lectures and performances "very sensible. It enables the two things to shed light on each other, which is one of the great hopes and dreams of scholars, and I think, evermore in our time, of performers as well."
| Lectures
Lewis Lockwood, Harvard University Maynard Solomon, Juilliard School Sieghard Brandenburg, Beethoven-Archiv, Bonn, Germany Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas,
Op. 12: First Attempts in a Genre with Rich Traditions Rainer Cadenbach, Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany Richard Kramer, CUNY Suhnne Ahn, Peabody Conservatory William Drabkin, University of Southampton, England All lectures will be held in SFA’s Marshall Room, 885 Commonwealth Ave., and are free and open to the public.
Concerts Sonatas for Violin and Piano, Op. 12, Nos. 1, 2, 3, and Op. 24 Sonatas for Violin and Piano, Op. 30, Nos. 1, 2, and Op. 96 Lucia Lin, Roman Totenberg, Peter Zazofsky, violin Tong-il Han, Horia Mihail, Anthony di Bonaventura, piano Sonatas for Violin and Piano, Op. 23, Op. 30, No. 3, and Op. 47 All concerts will be held at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Ave.; $10 general admission, $5 students and seniors, free to the BU community. For tickets, call 617-353-8725. For more information, call 617-353-8783. |
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October 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations