If you have occasion to attend one of these concerts live, they’re held at the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, which is upstairs at Benaroya Hall at the corner of Third Avenue and Union Street in downtown Seattle. There’s a bus and light rail station (University Street) just under the hall. The secret of the acoustics is to sit either in the very front or the very back. In the middle, the piano sounds clangy, and the balance between instruments is sometimes lost. People would see where I sat and say, “Well, if old Pubbie’s sitting there, that’s the place to be.” For that reason, veteran ticket holders now reserve their seats all the way in the back.
Now that Jimmy Ehnes is Artistic Director, we’re getting a lot of music we’ve never heard, which is a joy for me. I love the old chamber warhorses, but there are a lot of pieces that don’t get heard very often that are gems. As we approach each concert, I’ll introduce one piece per evening at the Canteen with commentary about the piece. On concert nights, I’ll introduce the musicians.
Tonight I’ll take you through the opening piece for next Saturday, the third of Beethoven’s Opus 1 trios for piano, violin and cello. Beethoven had written a lot of pieces in his teens and early Twenties that he didn’t publish. He was a good judge of quality, and he waited until he was 25 to publish his first pieces.
The older Haydn was Beethoven’s teacher, and he loved the first two trios of the set. Haydn had pretty much invented the form, and in his trios the cello tends to double the piano part. Beethoven wrote an independent cello part in the style of Mozart, which is why cellists love playing his1 trios.
But Haydn had reservations about the third trio. It was too brash, too brusque, too abrasive – too Beethovenish. It was the sound of the future, Romantic rather than Classical, and it threw quite a scare into old Papa Haydn.
It starts with a sonata movement marked allegro con brio. Mozart had used this direction only once, and Haydn only a few times. Beethoven was to use it a lot. For those of you who survived my Brahms series last year, you’ll remember sonata format as being 1-2-1-2-development-1-2-coda.
Beethoven starts out with the instruments playing in unison in C minor, his “death” key. Note that Beethoven doesn’t use the kind of long, “singing” lines that Mozart and Schubert were fond of. He prefers instead to use shorter units of melody; he thinks instrumentally, rather than vocally.
At 1:10 he slides into the second subject, which is in the relative major key, E-flat. (C minor are E-flat Major both have three flats.)
At 2:35 he repeats the exposition.
At 5:07, it’s development time! He quotes the opening fragment, but takes off into the kind of struggle that defines a Beethoven development. Keys come and go, creating a wonderful kind of instability.
But he settles into C minor again at 6:30 for his recapitulation, but only briefly enough for the cello to take up the theme in C Major, a technique beloved of Mozart. The violin moves the theme to A-flat Major. It’s clear that Beethoven is re-composing his recapitulation.
As he cadences in C minor at 7:19, you would expect the second subject in the recap to be in C Major, the corresponding major. (Corresponding minors and majors share the same letter.) But Beethoven pulls off a surprise by placing the second subject in C minor! In effect, in the recap he reverses the role of the major and minor keys.
At 8:15 he begins his coda by reworking his first subject, ending it quickly with no long held notes. Haydn was shocked at the brusqueness.
Howdy! Good to see ya! (((hugs)))
Looks like you’re gonna get to do some wallerin’ of your own when
those concerts start up! Enjoy! :)