The limits of omniscience

I can't remember when was the last time I heard Beethoven's Pathétique sonata.  Must have been long ago.  But of course I still love this work, even if I do so the way we love Grandpa's stories of wars fought, women loved, and men bested.  We've heard these stories often since early childhood, know them by heart, and while we continue to think of them with affection, we'd rather not hear them again any time soon.

But lets pretend I do want to hear the Pathétique again, and imagine that God - the Supreme Music Lover - decided to reward my continuing affection for this piece by offering to take me back in time and arrange for me to hear this sonata performed by one of the following pianists (all known to have performed it in public recitals or private gatherings):

Ludwig van Beethoven
Felix Mendelssohn
Franz Liszt
Clara Schumann
Hans von Bülow
Anton Rubinstein

There would be no deliberation on my part.  I would ask the Almighty to let me hear Beethoven's performance.  This much I know.  What I do not know is why I would choose a performance I have no reason to believe would be musically the most rewarding one.  For one thing, Beethoven's playing could be sloppy.  Describing his performance of the Pathétique, his friend Anton Schindler noted that it "left something to be desired as regards clean playing".  On top of that,  Beethoven's highly theatrical projection of music - banging fortes, fluctuating tempos, wild gesticulation - would likely make him sound like a musical drama queen to my ears.[1]  And if I wanted to hear a messy performance of the Pathétique by a drama queen (which I don't), I could do better by asking God to take me to an Anton Rubinstein recital.

It is tempting to think that I would choose Beethoven's performance of his own work because it would have the absolute authenticity (Werktreue) denied to all other interpreters of his music.  But that's just comforting nonsense if only because Beethoven did not always play his own music exactly as written.[2]  So, unless 'authenticity' is taken as equivalent to the vacuous 'whatever Beethoven happened to play on a given occasion', his performance of the Pathétique could be no more 'authentic' than those of other musicians.[3]

Perhaps it is not Beethoven's performance I would really be after.  Perhaps I would choose it only to observe in the flesh the man I consider to be the most fascinating personality in the history of music.  But that can't be right either.  The personality of Beethoven-the-man has been pretty well documented, and there is nothing fascinating about a swarthy, rude egomaniac whose personal hygiene was as appalling as the squalor of his living quarters.  What is fascinating, of course, is Beethoven's musical personality which comes through all those brutal dynamic contrasts, surprising modulations, unbearably tense transitions, noble hymnal themes, and other aspects of his compositional style.  And that personality can be observed without any help from God by studying scores, attending recitals, or listening to recordings.

In the end I think I would ask God for an alternative reward.  I would say to Him: Dear God, I will be amply rewarded if You just tell me why, given Your original offer, I would choose Beethoven's performance.  And the omniscient Creator would reply:

Ludwig van Wotzefok

I can't be the only music lover to have had this experience: a performance of a well-known work - say, a Beethoven symphony - sounded all wrong, and yet there is not one reason I can think of that would convincingly explain my response.  The performance did not violate the score.  It did not suffer from technical defects of execution.  It was not sabotaged by noisy audience or unexpected headache. And yet it almost made me gag...

Not that I have some rigidly fixed idea of how a score - Beethoven's or otherwise - must be translated into sound.  I have no problem with Beethoven's music clad in heavy Teutonic armor, its structure buckling under the slow-moving extra weight.  I don't mind it being pumped full of steroids to give it restless tempos, cranky dynamics, and impatient transitions.[1]  Or when, medicated with Xanax, it sleepwalks lethargically [2] through what once were audacious modulations and startling dynamic contrasts.  My skin did not crawl when I was introduced to Beethoven the Foppish Metrosexual sporting skinny jeans, pointy shoes, and tight-fitting jacket, his expensively disheveled moussed hair cascading over designer eyeglasses.[3]   And if my blood boils at the thought of Beethoven the Circus Freak grotesquely disfigured by off-pitch amateurish playing of period-instrument bands [4], at least I understand clearly why I feel this way.

No, my problem is not with the variety of ways in which a composer's musical personality can be shaped by conductors and instrumentalists.  Rather the problem is that on rare occasions I find the results inexplicably repulsive.  My most recent experience of this kind was with Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony whose concert recording of the Eroica symphony still seems to me as perverse as a Netflix remake of Dirty Harry in which the title character is a bi-curious Asian-American detective who defends undocumented Mexican migrants from vicious Federal agents and, on his days off, distributes clean needles to cute heroin addicts in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.

Of course such experiences are not the only mystery of my musical life.  Those of the opposite kind - where I am awed by performances which violate the score [5] or suffer from defects of execution [6] - are no less mysterious.  It is just that people are not eager to scrutinize positive experiences.  After all, we don't pay psychoanalysts to help us understand why we have happy marriages, fulfilling careers, and well-behaved children.  Nor do we expect the pharmaceutical industry to develop drugs for treating cheerfulness and optimism.  So I suppose I am just being human here...
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1.  Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic.
2.  Frans Bruggen and the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra.
3.  Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic.
4.  Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood.
5.  Sergei Rachmaninov's recording of Chopin's Piano Sonata in B-flat minor.
6.  As heard in recordings of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Edwin Fischer, or Alfred Cortot.

There is no such thing as female orgasm

There is no such thing as female orgasm.  I've had sex with dozens of women and it never happened.

Few people (especially women) would fail to see the joke in the above argument.  Yet the same faulty logic, which takes limited subjective experiences as completely reliable indicators of objective general facts, seems to defeat the sense of humor in many music critics faced with evaluating the merits of new music.  Consider, as representative examples, the following excerpts from three different music critics reviewing new or very recent music (italics are mine):

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.