Beethoven's fortes

The word on the street is that Beethoven's pianos didn't last long: snapped strings, broken keys, even a cracked frame now and then...  This kind of keyboard mayhem, we are told, was unavoidable because what Beethoven meant by  fff  called for much greater volume of sound than could be extracted from those Broadwood pianos of his day.  I’m sure this much is true.  I wonder, however, if this is the whole story.  Much of what is known about the man suggests that his idea of  fff  might have included some amount of ugliness and brutality in addition to loudness.  After all, Hummel could play forte on exactly the same pianos without snapping strings or breaking keys.  And even the young Liszt – in his bombastic period – was not known for inflicting serious damage on his pianos.

Alas, Beethoven never marked his fortes brutalmente (as far as I know), so the question of how his fortes should sound on a modern metal frame concert grand intrigues me a good deal.  In Beethoven’s day, of course, one could know for sure if the forte was played the way the master wanted it: produce the right kind of damage to the piano, and you provide irrefutable evidence of your dynamical authenticity.  With a modern Steinway, however, it would take a sledgehammer to inflict Beethoven's kind of damage, which – given the cost of the instrument versus the box office for a typical piano recital – is out of the question.            
      What remains is the option of “coloring” Beethoven’s fortes with the kind of crude, metallic banging that would carry an unmistakable reference to “ugliness” and “brutality”.  And some quite famous pianists seem to have done just that in their Beethoven playing.  Richter used to come close to“losing it” in his Appassionata performances from the 1960s (although three decades later he played the same piece with stately grace and restraint).  In the 1950s Gilels nearly destroyed his piano while playing the same sonata in Prague.  (I always sort of expected to see smudges of blood from Gilels’ fingers on my Multisonic CD containing this performance.)  And it wasn’t just the Russians who were into Beethoven-with-a-Bang.  Yves Nat easily forgot about the French virtues of balance and grace when playing Beethoven: the outer movements in his live Appassionata from a 1953 Paris recital literally scream in agony; there is not one bar without ugliness and brutality.

Even if the bangers indeed represent Beethoven’s own idea of  fff (and they probably do), I never could appreciate this sort of hyper-cathartic playing of Beethoven’s music.  As far as I am concerned, whatever Beethoven might have meant by fff over and above “very loud” carries no more validity today than his ideas about personal hygiene.  To be a great Beethoven player today one need not appear before the public unshaven and disheveled, in a rumpled shirt, with dirty fingernails, and with body odor reaching beyond the fifth row.  Ditto for turning Beethoven's fortes into a piano transcription of Mossolov’s The Foundry.

Fortunately, there are plenty of world-class pianists whose Beethoven is played with exquisite restraint (without aloofness), impeccable finger work (without didacticism), and beautifully contoured (but not schmaltzy) tone across the entire dynamic range.  This kind of Beethoven playing – from the inimitable Dubravka Tomsic, the patrician Cassadesus, the melancholy Andrea Lucchesini, and the refined Clifford Curzon - may be inauthentic, but I find it more musically satisfying on repeated hearings than the outbursts from the roaring “keyboard lions”.  

      

Eugene Ormandy

I'm sure you're familiar with the widely accepted description of Eugene Ormandy as a competent yet largely uninspired kapellmeister.  Here is what I think this description actually means in relation to other conductors, past and present.  It means that Ormandy
(i)  did not have a flowing mane of blond hair, and did not date movie stars (unlike the handsome Stokowski);
(ii)  not only could read a complicated score, but could learn one in a matter of hours, and conduct the piece from memory after correcting instrumental parts for errors (unlike the "inspired" charlatan Koussevitzky, who could not conduct Le Sacre du Printemps (or learn even rudimentary English) if his life depended on it);
(iii)  was hopelessly heterosexual, which undoubtedly made his interpretations as boringly conventional as the missionary position with the lights turned off (in contrast to the music making of Mitropoulos, Bernstein, or Boulez);
(iv) was not a hip European leftist communist sympathizer (like Abbado), or a hip American leftist communist sympathizer who gave parties in honor of militant and violent terrorists (like Bernstein did).

More disadvantageous factors could be listed, but I'm sure that (i) - (iv) are already enough to convince anyone that Ormandy could not have been a great conductor, no matter how good his recorded or concert performances might have sounded.  In fact, that an average Ormandy performance radiated more orchestral color and textural richness than all the recorded performances by Abbado and M.T. Thomas combined is already proof enough that Ormandy was offering his audience little more than sonic glorification of conspicuous consumption and other excesses of unenlightened American capitalism.

Admittedly, I myself do not care for much of Ormandy's repertoire, and I never warmed up to the wide but two-dimensional and lispy stereo recordings given to him by CBS in the 1960s.  Still, I have encountered enough recorded examples of Ormandy's musicianship to develop a good deal of admiration for this conductor.  His mid-1950s recording of Mozart G-minor symphony is one of the three greatest recordings of that work that I can think of.  His stereo Bruckner 7th recorded for RCA in the early 1970s (and never issued on CD outside Japan) is another remarkable interpretation: the fastest and the most 'Schubertian' interpretation among those I've heard, with not a trace of ponderousness or elephantine profundity (which, to my ear, are nearly always fatal for Bruckner's outwardly simplistic block-by-block constructions).

Incidentally, the interpretative approach in Ormandy's 1970s Bruckner 7th was already in place as early as 1935, when he was in charge of The Minneapolis SO (now The Minnesota SO).  The 1935 Adagio is slower, but the first movement is just as fast, and the swift, Schubertian lyricism dominates this early recording as much as it does the later one.  Even more telling testimony to Ormandy's musicianship is the sound and the playing of the Minneapolis orchestra.  At the time when Toscanini was still with NYPO, and when the general standards of orchestral execution were supposedly still 'evolving' toward their post-Toscanini level of perfection, Ormandy was already obtaining superior results from a (somewhat) provincial orchestra.  And he did so in the era when accurate recordings could not be manufactured with the help of numerous tape splices.