Jonathan Biss on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.2

Beethoven was not a prodigy. This was as much a question of temperament as of ability. Mozart and Mendelssohn, who produced works of inexplicable sophistication as teenagers, were not blessed or cursed with Beethoven’s dogged vision. For them, publishing music that was perfectly wrought but less than fully individual or emotionally developed was fine; for Beethoven, it would have been unthinkable. Until he had honed not just his craft, but his voice, the world would not be hearing from him.

Therefore, the Piano Concerto in B flat Major, Op. 19 is not just a great work – characterful, idiomatic, spiritual – but a fascinating historical document. While obviously not one of Beethoven’s first published works, it is among the only ones whose roots predate his twentieth birthday. (By that age, Mozart had written some 250 works that ended up in his official catalogue; Mendelssohn had produced masterpieces such as the Octet and the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Beethoven completed and premiered the B flat Major Concerto in 1795, when he was twenty-four, and for the most part, it has the depth and the conviction that are among his essential qualities. Just occasionally, though, a slightly anonymous quality peeks through, evidence of the work’s early origins.

This is primarily the case in the first movement, most of all in its opening moments: a B flat major fanfare, played by the full (Mozart-sized) orchestra, then a dolce response in the strings. Neither idea is especially distinctive; both are immediately repeated, forming an eight-bar phrase that is harmonically symmetrical and rhythmically unvaried.

But while the elements themselves might be a bit all-purpose, this is still Beethoven doing the purposing and repurposing, and before long, we are fully absorbed into his world. The fanfare, rather perfunctory when it first appears, soon acquires a burbling potential energy, and then sharp elbows, giving the music specificity and inner intensity. As for the dolce response, its second appearance, mid-tutti, takes it from pleasant to wondrous: now in an otherworldly D flat Major, it is reimagined as a dialogue between the violins, each entreaty from the seconds answered by the firsts with a different sort of motivic complication. This music has both strength and vulnerability; it is pure Beethoven.

As the first movement proceeds, strength and vulnerability are not the only notable qualities: this music is also highly subtle. Each detail – the slight changes as a motive appears and then reappears, the use of harmony to alter the music’s emotional color – is sophisticated and meaningful. While the personality of this music is unmistakably Beethoven’s, the frequent, quicksilver shifts of character are reminiscent of Mozart, whose theatrical nature found magnificent expression in his piano concerti. Those works are clearly Beethoven’s model here, though he couldn’t suppress his own very different nature if he tried – which, on account of the belligerence of that nature, he never would have.

In an offhanded comment to his publisher, Beethoven dismissed this concerto (along with the one in C Major known as number 1) as “not my best.” Composers are notorious for being poor judges of their own work, but in this case, it seems probable that Beethoven didn’t even mean it – or, if he did mean it at the time, he later reconsidered it. Years after writing the concerto, he wrote a new cadenza for it, the only one to be published. That he composed a new cadenza for himself to play is not in itself meaningful; that he wrote it down and approved it for publication demonstrated that he cared enough about the concerto that he wanted to exercise some degree of control over its future performances.

This cadenza is remarkable. If snippets of the first movement offer a glimpse of Beethoven’s adolescent past, the cadenza is a window into his extraordinary future. The work’s opening fanfare is the launching pad for a series of increasingly compelling and confronting adventures. The first of these is a fugue which, thorny as it is, at least does use that motive as its subject. But as this cadenza progresses, it evolves away from the piece, acquiring a visionary quality and an air of extreme mystery, sharing little with the movement proper, save for the dotted rhythm of its opening measures. Moments before it comes to an end, the music reaches a diminished chord and simply stops, the silence asking an unanswerable question. When a series of onrushing scales brings the cadenza to a close, and the movement’s coda returns us to the world of 1795, it is jarring: the cadenza might only have been written a decade later, but it seems to exist outside the time-space continuum entirely.

Suspending time is one of Beethoven’s greatest gifts, and it again finds magnificent expression in the B flat Concerto’s middle movement. This movement gives the lie to the notion that Beethoven’s spirituality belongs specifically to his late period. Beethoven’s language evolved greatly, as that wild cadenza demonstrated, but his personality and core concerns remained remarkably consistent throughout his life. Unlike the first movement, no phrase or aspect of this music evokes Mozart. Mozart’s slow movements are operatic scenes, the Countess enumerating her regrets, Figaro and Susanna experiencing every one of love’s exhilarations and regrets. Beethoven’s slow movements are not love stories; they do not involve characters. They are conversations with the cosmos, expressions of idealism and of an unshakable belief in beauty. The opening phrase of this slow movement asks a question – not of a lost love, but of the universe. Philosophical from its first measures, as it progresses this movement grows indescribably profound. Its final pages, a gloriously unhurried colloquy between the piano and the orchestra’s strings, could make a believer of the most committed atheist.

The last movement finds Beethoven scampering back to earth. As delightfully profane as the slow movement is sacred, it has at least one eyebrow raised for all its brief duration. Beethoven’s spiritual side is balanced – and made more moving – by his earthy sense of humor, on full display here. The movement, at its core, is an essay on rhythmic displacement: the joke is that the emphases are all in the wrong places. If that seems unsophisticated, that’s because it is: the silliness is the point.  The ability of this deepest of people to delight in something so basic is critical to his music’s irresistible pull. Whatever else Beethoven is, he is utterly human.

He is also an excellent prankster. Towards the end of the piece, the finale’s joke takes a twist. Beethoven transposes the theme into a remote key, and simultaneously tweaks it rhythmically, so that the stresses are finally where they really should be, by logic. By now, though, the other version is so steeped in our ear, what ought to be right sounds peculiarly wrong. Beethoven is messing with us, and enjoying himself enormously in the process.

The B flat Major Piano Concerto has often been overlooked – by historians and by concertgoers – in favor of the grandeur and formal innovations of the works that followed it. This is understandable, and a shame: its rewards are deep and grow with each listening. In short, it is a treasure.

Timo Andres on The Blind Banister

Solo piano introduces the main theme of The Blind Banister: two descending scales, one the melody and the other (lagging behind) the accompaniment, creating little rubbing major-second suspensions against each other with every move. This “Sliding Scale” is presented over and over, forming the basis for movement of continuous variations, constantly revising themselves. Orchestral layers pile up around the scale, building dissonant towers out of those major seconds. One last, long downward scale gathers enough momentum to launch the second movement scherzo, “Ringing Weights”.

Here, the downward scale is transformed into a propulsive motor in solo strings, driving bright cascades of chromatic chords in the solo part. This movement is also made from varying modules, each increasingly elaborate—though this time, each successive module descends a step, the scale theme subverting the structure of the piece, trying to push it inexorably downwards.

The piano works hard to reverse this process in a trio section, trading a stumbling, stepwise melody with gentle orchestral echoes of the ringing chords from the scherzo. As the piano music lurches to its feet, it grows progressively more boisterous, and the steps move faster, whirling themselves into a return of the scherzo material, this time with full orchestra, the main theme in pounding timpani.

Orchestra suddenly falls away, leaving the pianist to wrestle with the two basic elements of the piece—rising and falling. Arpeggios leap up and over each other, unbound from any meter, vaulting through the harmonic atmosphere before plunging down to the lowest E. As the arpeggios begin to trace more regular patterns, the orchestra drifts back in with another long scale, descending step by step, introducing a richly harmonized Coda, really a super-compressed recapitulation of the first movement, before the piano finally rushes off into an ambiguous future.

The Blind Banister was written for and dedicated to pianist Jonathan Biss. Jonathan had asked me to compose a new concerto to be programmed alongside Beethoven’s second—a tall order. Beethoven gave this early concerto a kind of renovation in the form of a new cadenza, 20 years after writing it (around the time he was working on the Emperor concerto). It’s wonderfully jarring, in that he makes no concessions to his earlier style; for a couple of minutes, we’re plucked from a world of conventional gestures into a future-world of obsessive fugues and spiraling modulations. Like any good cadenza, it’s made from the same simple gestures which comprise the rest of the piece—an arpeggiated triad, a sequence of downward scales—but uses them as the basis for a miniature fantasia.

The Blind Banister is, in a sense, a whole piece built over this fault line in the Beethoven, trying to peer into the gap. I tried as much as possible to start with those same extremely simple elements Beethoven uses; however, my piece is not a pastiche or an exercise in palimpsest. It doesn’t quote or reference Beethoven. There are some surface similarities to his concerto (a three-movement structure, a B–flat tonal center) but these are mostly red herrings. The best way I can describe my approach to writing the piece is: I started writing my own cadenza to Beethoven’s concerto, and ended up devouring it from the inside out.

The piece was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.