Wigmore Hall
Beethoven:
Thirty-Three
Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli,
op.120
Rzewski:
The
People United will never be Defeated!
Igor Levit (piano)
Following Igor Levit’s Goldberg Variations two nights previously,
we now relaxed with a little light music. A programme of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations – how often would
that appear in the first half of a concert? – and Frederic Rzewski’s The People United will never be Defeated!
(not, as I misnamed it in the former review, in a bizarre, unconscious Anglicisation,
‘The People United shall not be Defeated’!) evidently, quite rightly, thrilled pianist
and audience alike, eliciting a rare Wigmore Hall standing ovation.
First, then, Beethoven’s thirty-three
variations on what he may or may not have called a Schusterfleck (‘cobbler’s patch’), the latter theme taken faster
than I can recall, yet fleet rather than harried. The first six variations had
a sense of an exposition, only to have their parameters transformed,
transfigured, blown to smithereens. Smiling yet serious – echoes, I thought of
the G major Sonata, op.14 no.2 – the first variation proved beautifully
variegated, though never arch. Who could not have smiled at the lovely,
throwaway final phrase? Almost pointillistic Mendelssohn in the second was
followed by a third variation as seductive as anything in Liszt, its whispered,
Schumannesque confidences serving only to remind one that there is little, save
in Chopin, that nineteenth-century Romantic piano music does not owe to
Beethoven. By the time we reached the fourth variation, Beethoven’s
transformative method was clear – and, just as much to the point, felt: not
just between variations but within them. The Lisztian sense of two hands
becoming one was duly apparent in the fifth variation, the sixth showing
harmonic proliferation – variation form notwithstanding – well under way.
And so, the stage had been set
for what we might think of – and surely experienced as – gigantic development
and finale (i.e. development upon development). Beethoven and the idea of
Beethoven so condition how we understand German and much other music thereafter
– perhaps not Ravel, who spoke of ‘le grand sourd’ – that the very idea of
musical development is well-nigh impossible to dissociate from his music. (And
why should anyone try?) At any rate, I heard the remainder less as individual
variations – and I suspect that was at least in part owed to the performance.
All tendencies – modernist, Romantic, Classical, even Bachian – came more into
their own, whilst at the same time combining to make the sense of a whole still
stronger. Dialectics. Major and minor, oscillation between which Charles Rosen
famously discussed as a hallmark of the Classical style, and other dialectical
poles truly became the stuff of musical argument. Pauses, syncopations, a
simple V-I progression all told: again in themselves and as part of something
much greater. Can music go beyond the late Beethoven sonatas? If so – and many
would say it does in the late quartets – it did here, just as the Ninth
Symphony, in a rare meaningful performance, will beyond its eight predecessors.
Indeed, I drew thematic and harmonic connections with the rest of Beethoven’s
œuvre, with musical history more broadly; not for nothing did another great culmination,
the Missa solemnis, come to mind. The
array of contrapuntal procedures heard here, however, was far more
developmental; this is not the alienated masterpiece Adorno discerned in
Beethoven’s Mass. It is still a set of variations, after all. I am not sure,
though, that I have ever heard this work sound so productively difficult and engaging.
A bold, confident statement
announced Rzewski’s panoramic set of variations, immediately varied. Grand
Romanticism, Webern-like pointillism, so much was more or less immediately
thrown into the mix, direct and elusive. Here the opposites were more obvious,
perhaps, but Rzewski’s – and Levit’s – aims here were different: the desire to
give voice recalled to me, perhaps eccentrically, Henze’s song-cycle, Voices. Levit stretched the keyboard, it
seemed, to many of its limits, to bring to life a very different world from
Beethoven’s, one in which one might see and hear events in Chile on the
television, one in which solidarity and class consciousness were both more
advanced and more under siege, as well as entirely different in nature. The
musical questions were different too – or were they? That there were no easy
answers was not the least hallmark of this performance, as well as reflection
upon it. Transcendental virtuosity was required – and received. Monumentalism
too: perhaps in the opposite direction from Beethoven, Rzewski self-consciously
returning at times to hyper-Romanticism. Equally present, however, was
poignancy, never more so than in those whistled memories, never quite the same.
There could be no passive listening here, any more than political quietism. Is
the work ‘too much’? Perhaps, but some might say the same of Beethoven. And
what does that really mean? Nothing, probably. Through the piano and through Levit, it seemed, both
composers spoke; so too did humanity.