From the time of his arrival in Habsburg Vienna in November 1792, age twenty-one, to his death in 1827, Beethoven was regarded as one of the greatest pianists of his time. His brilliance as a composer was manifest, but his rise to prominence during his lifetime was amplified at every step by his remarkable pianistic talents. He lived in an age when the pianoforte was becoming the essential instrument for domestic music- making in bourgeois society, and piano recitals were just beginning.
Early piano performances
The instrument itself, in the hands of piano makers, was evolving in range, sonority, and timbre. Accordingly, Beethoven’s keyboard writing shows a vast range of subtleties in every dimension, fired by the creative imagination that is evident all the way from his early works to the transcendental last sonatas, the Diabelli Variations, and the late Bagatelles.
The piano was not only Beethoven’s primary vehicle for performance, composition and improvisation; it was something like an immediate extension of his body and mind. Contemporary listeners could hear him play his latest sonata or variations or hear him as a collaborative pianist in his keyboard chamber music. In his early years in Vienna they could witness him in pianistic duels with renowned contemporary virtuosi, such as Konrad Wölffl or Daniel Steibelt, both of whom he dispatched with ease and disdain. And in his orchestral concerts Beethoven was always both composer and performer, playing one of his concertos and improvising with legendary brilliance, until his increasing deafness made such performances impossible.
Contacting piano makers
His letters show his continuing contacts with piano makers, first those in Vienna, then as far away as England.
In 1796 he writes to Johann Andreas Streicher about one of his pianos to say that “it is far too good for me…because it robs me of the freedom to produce my own tone…” but in another letter he praises Streicher as being “one of the few who realize and perceive that, provided one can feel the music, one can also make the pianoforte sing…”.
As his deafness progressed he became ever more sensitive to the tonal qualities of his pianos, and in 1803 Sebastian Erard gave him an instrument with four pedals: a lute-stop, a sustaining pedal, a sourdine, and una corda. As Derek Melville pointed out in a fine article on the subject, at the end of the slow movement of the Fourth Piano Concerto Beethoven specifies the pedal markings: he first writes,“tre corde,” then “due, poi una corda” [“two strings, then una corda”] as the final cadenza trails off into pianissimo.[1]
Later, in 1817, Thomas Broadwood of London, visited Beethoven in Vienna and offered to make a six-octave grand piano for him. Expecting its arrival, Beethoven wrote to Broadwood, saying “I shall look upon it as an altar on which I shall place the most beautiful offerings of my spirit to the divine Apollo.” Although his deafness in the later years diminished to some extent his ability to hear his own playing, Beethoven kept the Broadwood until his death, and it was a mark of his esteem for Ignaz Moscheles that he lent him the instrument for concerts in Vienna in 1823. Later it became the property of Franz Liszt, and eventually passed to the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest.
Playing through the deafness
In a recent study of Beethoven’s deafness, Robin Wallace reviewed the subject of Beethoven’s pianos and offered new insights. Discussing such legends as one in which Beethoven is said to have placed a rod between his teeth and touched it to his piano, Wallace sums up the situation with the remark that “Beethoven’s physical interaction with the piano and the tactile experiences it had to offer are an important part of the story of his deafness”.[2] Among other things, he cites the fact that in his last years Beethoven had some kind of resonator that was attached to the soundboard of his piano, which enabled him to hear the piano sound much better than without it.
Another recent study comes from Tilman Skowroneck, who shows that Beethoven “experimented with each new instrument to find out what it could and couldn’t do. What mattered…was not the sound in the abstract but whether he could control the sound to his satisfaction”.[3]
Sketching not writing
That Beethoven composed mainly at the piano, keeping his sketchbooks nearby to write down his ideas as he discovered them, is well attested. In 1823 he wrote to his pupil and patron, the Archduke Rudolph, himself an excellent pianist, to suggest that he should follow this plan: “when sitting at the pianoforte you should jot down your ideas in the form of sketches…for this purpose you should have a small table beside the pianoforte”.[4]
Even in his later years his ability to improvise at the keyboard remained an essential feature of his musical life.
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Citations
[1] Derek Melville, “Beethoven’s Pianos,” in The Beethoven Reader, ed. by Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 41-67, including photographs of Beethoven’s pianos and of the action of his Broadwood.
[2] Robin Wallace, Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 115.
[3] Wallace, 118. See also Tilman Skowroneck, “Keyboard Instruments of the Young Beethoven,” in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 141-92.
[4] Emily Anderson, ed. The Letters of Beethoven, No. 1204, of July 1, 1823 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).