A Beethoven Birthday Celebration
In 2020 the world celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven! Our own special birthday celebration here at The Sembrich brought to the fore piano virtuoso Christopher Johnson performing a tailor-made virtual concert for our Sembrich audience featuring Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 31, No. 3 and the monumental “Appassionata” Op. 57. We’re also privileged to offer an insightful essay on Beethoven as a “visionary” by distinguished musicologist Christopher H. Gibbs.
But first, let’s begin our revelry with a journey to the Plaça de Sant Roc in Sabadell, Spain, north of Barcelona, for this surprising performance of “Ode to Joy” (with thanks to Sembrich member David Ebeoglu for calling this delightful link to our attention):
Christopher Johnson at The Sembrich in 2008, in rehearsal for "Chopin and the Nightingale,” a theatrical work in which he portrayed Frédéric Chopin. Click to enlarge.
I first heard Christopher Johnson perform in Moscow. Not in Russia but in Moscow, PA, at a concert series sponsored by a small community church in 2005. I was immediately impressed by Christopher’s innate musicality, his dazzling technique and his winning manner in introducing and involving the audience in the works at hand. I invited Christopher to join us on Lake George at the earliest possible opportunity and he fast became an audience favorite, his sold-out concerts standing out as highlights of our summer seasons. From the elegance of an all-Chopin program to the jazzy virtuosity of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Christopher approaches each program that he presents with integrity and enthusiasm. Christopher is always ready to take on a challenge, whether the task be mastering Samuel Barber’s massive Sonata, which he performed brilliantly during our 2010 Summer of Barber, or learning Ravel’s six movement Le tombeau de Couperin for our 2018 WWI Armistice commemoration. Christopher has done The Sembrich name proud in the years since he’s been associated with our organization---and it’s a pleasure to welcome him back for this online tribute to Beethoven on the 250th anniversary of his birth. To begin, here’s Christopher Johnson, introducing the first work on our program, Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 31, No. 3:
Now, a full performance of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 31, No. 3 with Christopher Johnson, pianist:
We continue with a virtual “intermission feature,” an essay on Beethoven by distinguished musicologist, Christopher H. Gibbs, the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College.
Christopher joined us at The Sembrich in the early 90’s, presenting a studio talk on Schubert lieder. We’re truly honored by Christopher’s virtual return visit to participate in this Beethoven birthday tribute.
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Beethoven as a Visionary
by Christopher H. Gibbs
From the Sembrich Collection. Click to enlarge
The musical world this year celebrates the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. During the last big party, for the 1970 bicentennial, Leonard Bernstein declared that “It’s almost like celebrating the birthday of music itself.” Fifty years later little has changed: Beethoven continues to define the world of classical music and to hold a unique position in its history. While Mozart may be the universal genius—a composer who excelled in nearly every genre and was a peerless performer—Beethoven most decisively shaped the musical universe that we have known for the past two centuries.
And while other composers may remain great, Beethoven somehow manages to remain contemporary as well. Not only are his compositional accomplishments essential to music history, but part of his larger importance is also that he so powerfully continues to define what an artist is and does. If one ponders the most threadbare clichés about "creative genius," one sees that most of them intimately relate to Beethoven: isolation, poverty (perceived if not actual), suffering, and eccentricity. So, too, his compositions have forcefully shaped how music is heard and by what standards pieces are judged. Many of the qualities that come to mind—"heroic," "organic," "transcendent," "expansive," "uncompromising," "expressive"—represent core Beethovenian values. Indeed, his works intimidated countless later composers as critical opinion generally held that those composers who followed his model were judged to be more successful than those who did not.
View of the city of Bonn from Kreuzberg - etching by Johann Ziegler after a watercolor by Lorenz Janscha. From the Sembrich Collection. Click to enlarge.
One of the most enduring works of music biography and criticism in English is J. W. N. Sullivan’s Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. It was published in 1927, upon the centenary of Beethoven's death, and has remained in print ever since, even though much of its biographical accuracy and imperious critical tone have long since become dated. Sullivan's central arguments—that Beethoven's music is intimately engaged with his personal experiences and that the spiritual substance of his art deepened as he aged—are among the most cogent articulations of the dominant way of looking at Beethoven's life and works.
Bust of Beethoven, Carrera marble, ca 1920. From the Sembrich Collection.
The three stages of Beethoven's career reflect three larger ages of music history during the past 250 years: the young Classicist became the fiery Romantic and ultimately a timeless legend for the Modern era. Although some commentators argue that Beethoven, the one-time student of Joseph Haydn, remained essentially a Classical composer to the very end, opinions and criticism from his own time suggest otherwise. If we focus less on some of the traditional musical and formal aspects of his compositions and look rather to those features that reflect the larger philosophical, political, and artistic currents of his time, then his middle stage emerges as more characteristically Romantic. Compositions from Beethoven’s middle years generally proved to be the most popular of all during his lifetime and they have remained so ever since. The Third, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies, the later concertos, the most famous piano sonatas, Fidelio—these works exerted the greatest influence on the rest of the century and continue most strongly to define Beethoven for the general public.
Beethoven's late works from his last decade mark a final stage that often seems distinctly Modern. The modernity of Beethoven’s last stage does not rest on purely musical elements of form, harmonic language, motivic development, and so forth, although compositional issues raised by a work like the Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue), Op. 133, do point beyond his own time. (For Igor Stravinsky, the Grosse Fuge was the "perfect" composition, "pure interval music.") While we can debate the signal characteristics of his late style, the shifts in Beethoven's aesthetic attitude can be more precisely documented.
Beethoven's walk in nature, vintage print, circa 1910, after the painting by Julius Schmid. From the Sembrich Collection. Click to enlarge.
As Beethoven’s hearing grew worse, he turned ever more inward and seems increasingly to have written his music for himself. (It may not be coincidental that this same period was marked by increasing political repression and censorship in Vienna.) As the most famous living composer, although isolated and often misunderstood, Beethoven wrote what he wanted with the knowledge that it would be published and performed. The demands of church and court that had for so long prescribed what earlier composers could and should write were replaced for Beethoven by more internal demands. His late string quartets, the lone creative products of his last years, were not written to please. This crucial component of his image as the isolated genius has had a profound impact on our understanding of the relationship between creator and audience. Much of Beethoven's music, it seems, was not composed for the masses of his own day, but rather with thoughts of posterity and immortality. Such a modern attitude about art remains in force today.
Relevant statements come from Beethoven himself. Responding to a complaint concerning the difficulty of one of his "Razumovsky" string quartets, he allegedly replied, "Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age!" Even during his earlier years Beethoven was charged, often to his annoyance, with writing for the future rather than for audiences of his own time. After the successful Fidelio revival in 1814, Beethoven placed an unusual notice—"A Word to His Admirers"—in a newspaper: "How often, in your chagrin that his depth was not sufficiently appreciated, have you said that van Beethoven composes only for posterity!" Revealing comments emerge in quite early reviews, as when one critique of the Eroica Symphony argued that Beethoven's admirers "assert that it is just this symphony which is his masterpiece, that this is the true style for high-class music, and that if it does not please now, it is because the public is not cultured enough, artistically, to grasp all these lofty beauties; after a few thousand years have passed it will not fail of its effect." This touches the core of Beethoven's critical reception during his lifetime: that his works are intensely original and that they will need time to be understood. By the end of Beethoven's life, some critics appear to have given up. One of the late quartets was deemed "incomprehensible, like Chinese."
Monumental porcelain statue of Beethoven by János Horvay (1938) manufactured at the Herend factory in Hungary.
Bronze bust of Beethoven by Pierre Fix-Masseau, produced by the Colin Foundry in France in 1902.
This issue arises throughout Beethoven's career, just as it had on occasion for Mozart, but the charge that he was detached from audiences mounted to a new pitch during his last decade, when the perceived strangeness of pieces could be attributed specifically to his eccentricities and deafness. Told that the "quartet which [violinst Ignaz] Schuppanzigh played yesterday did not please," Beethoven is said to have replied, "It will please them some day." This is one reason his music remains so contemporary: his aesthetic attitude is often not so different from our own, even after the cataclysmic shifts of Modernism. In this respect Beethoven shares more with Arnold Schoenberg a hundred years later than he does with his models Mozart and Haydn.
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Christopher H. Gibbs is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, Co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival, and Executive Editor of The Musical Quarterly. He edited The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, co-edited Franz Liszt and His World and Franz Schubert and His World, and is the author of The Life of Schubert. He is the co-author, with Richard Taruskin, of The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition. Since 2000 he has written the program notes for The Philadelphia Orchestra.
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We return now to Christopher Johnson and his introduction to the “Appassionata” Sonata, Op. 57:
To close, Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata,” with Christopher Johnson, pianist:
On behalf of The Sembrich, we express sincere thanks to Christopher Johnson and Christopher Gibbs for joining us online to illuminate the life and music of Beethoven during this, the 250th anniversary year of his birth. We also want to express our gratitude to videographer Max Shuppert for his excellent preparation and editing of Christopher Johnson’s performance videos and artist Greg Stevenson who created the Beethoven sketch that serves as the background for the composer’s signature in the videos and in the banner at the top of this article.
Until next time,
Richard Wargo
Artistic Director
Christopher Johnson at The Sembrich in 2018 performing Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin
American concert pianist Christopher Johnson has appeared extensively in recital, on radio and TV, as soloist with orchestras, and in chamber ensembles throughout the United States, Canada, Central and South America, and Europe winning extraordinarily high critical acclaim.
In New York City, Christopher Johnson made his solo recital debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall followed by eight performances with the One World Symphony performing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, and Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. He soloed with dozens of other symphony orchestras including the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestra of New Jersey, the Garden State Philharmonic, the Greater Trenton Symphony, the Westfield Symphony, and the Plainfield Symphony (with whom he has performed over 10 different piano concerti as Artist-in-Residence from 1999-2007).
Christopher Johnson has performed 23 seasons with the Bar Harbor Music Festival totaling over 100 performances through their touring program. He has additionally given dozens of performances at the Pierre Monteux School in Maine from 1999-2018, which included 7 different piano concerti with their orchestra. He has made 12 appearances at The Sembrich and performed the Horowitz/Sousa "Stars and Stripes Forever" in Washington DC (Lincoln Memorial) at the 2001 Presidential All-Star Gala for President George W. Bush. In 2008, Alfred Music Publishing internationally released his book, “Popular Performer: Broadway,” which comprises advanced piano arrangements of Broadway shows.
Born in New Jersey, Christopher Johnson received early piano instruction from Paul DiDario. He later received his BM in 1996 from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Abbey Simon and assisted David Dubal. In 2017, Christopher was acknowledged and quoted in the newly published book, “Inner Voices: Abbey Simon with Garnet Ungar.” Pursuing further studies with Byron Janis and Marc Silverman at the Manhattan School of Music, he received his MM in 1998 and his DMA in 2003. Dr. Johnson has served on the piano faculty of the United Nations International School for 3 years in New York City, and he has been teaching privately for the past 16 years hosting annual student recitals at Steinway Hall in New York City. Striving to always improve performances, Christopher continues to receive coaching from acclaimed pianist, Olegna Fuschi.