More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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2 March
Announcing Beethoven's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3, they almost invariably tell you this story about the premiere:
A pupil of his was asked to turn the pages, but was aghast that there was almost nothing written on them.
Are we ever told who the pupil is? I don't recall it, if so. So from whose account, save the pupil's, would we know that this happened (or is there a claim that Beethoven confirmed the story)? Could the audience itself possibly have known, by looking at the manuscript paper?
More importantly, how does it help us to approach the work and listening to the solo part to know that, if the story is to be believed, Beethoven had allegedly gone before an audience to play it without having written it out? Even if he had, aren't all of Concertos Nos 3 to 5, at least, in the established repertoire?
So does this account, if it tells us anything, inform us more about our own prejudices and pre-suppositions than about whether Beethoven was so behind with things that he had failed to get something down on time? After all, improvised cadenzas were the stuff of Haydn's day, and of Mozart's, and we love that story of how the latter supposedly wrote a trio whilst playing skittles:
How rare - or common - would it have been for Mozart to play a solo part that he had not committed to paper? Can we even have that notion in our mind when this story about Beethoven is trotted before us once more? It almost compels us to feel that he - in the slang idiom - was 'chancing it', was 'winging it', when maybe he was doing nothing of the sort that was unusual.
You could very well look at the prompt cards that experienced and very professional after-dinner speakers use, and maybe the key-words would say nothing to you, but wouldn't you judge the quality of the preparation evidenced in the speech by hearing it, not by looking at cards that are not meant to mean anything except to the person holding them?
So - and I truly think so - this account of the premiere of that concerto just needs dumping. Unless we know how the performance was received by that contemporary audience - and whether its members detected shortcomings that could be laid at the door of poor groundwork - so what, frankly? And, in any case we value Beethoven for the works that he left us, not for his vices or virtues as a soloist whose efforts, in that domain, we will never hear...
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