Jonathan Biss on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4

How can one G major chord be so transporting?

It is a question without an answer – certainly not a fully satisfying answer. The way the chord is built is a contributing factor: its highest note is not the “root”, but the third, making it softer-edged, less definitive than it might be. That is something. And then there is the matter of context. This chord, played quietly by the piano alone, is how the work begins: It is the event that breaks the silence that precedes it. A classical concerto is not meant to start this way. In nearly every other example, the orchestra, not the soloist, plays first – it is the many, not the one, who set the scene. Amassed, they play all the main themes and build the concerto’s framework. The soloist’s silence creates an air of anticipation: when will this person, seated at the center of the stage at this conspicuously large instrument, finally do something? The piano’s inward-facing, unaccompanied opening statement tells the listener that Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto will be a work without precedent.

But the facts of it being voiced a certain way and formally path-breaking do not explain just how astonishingly, transformatively beautiful this chord, and the concerto that flows from it, is. It is inexplicable. Beethoven’s G Major Concerto is miraculous and full of contradiction. It is far less confrontational than Beethoven’s other works in the genre…except for its slow movement, which is pure confrontation. It is poetic in the extreme, but its poetry accumulates into something heroic. It is a visionary, spiritual work, built – especially in its first movement – from often unremarkable materials.

It is the treatment of these materials that gives the concerto its rare beauty and its power. The first movement is a grand edifice dominated by a four-note figure – more precisely, it is dominated by one note, played four times in succession. This is no great melodic motive, or even a motive at all. It is simply a rhythmic idea – one that Beethoven clearly relished, particularly in his middle period from which this concerto comes. When he uses it, he uses it obsessively – as a galvanizing force in the Fifth Symphony, and a cataclysmic one in the Appassionata Sonata. In this concerto, it has a lyrical generosity that is not to be found in those other works, but it is deployed just as single-mindedly: it is the first thing we hear after that luminous first chord and, twenty minutes later, it is the movement’s exhilarating apotheosis. In between the two, it is everywhere, underpinning the second theme in addition to dominating the first. When Beethoven begins the development with a shocking, unprepared modulation, taking the air out of the room, it is with those four notes; when, moments later, he seems to suspend time, it is again using the four notes, the last one unexpectedly dropping down a step, a seemingly slight shift which compromises the music’s very foundation.

Using a terse four note figure to create an intense, compact, dramatic scene, as in the Fifth Symphony, is already a feat; using it as the basis of a gloriously expansive canvas, as here, is a magic trick. Beethoven achieves this in part by subverting expectation at every corner, never more so than in the opening phrase. The unprecedented decision to have the soloist begin the work is somehow not the most arresting choice Beethoven makes with this phrase. Not a declarative sentence but a question posed to the orchestra, this phrase is five bars long. This is not normal. Classical phrase lengths are, overwhelmingly, multiples of four bars: four, eight, sixteen. On paper, this reads as a bloodlessly academic observation, but the irregularity of this phrase is a thing the listener feels in their bones: it is either just a little bit too long, or a fair bit too short. The fifth bar is an addendum to the question, adding uncertainty on top of uncertainty.

And yet this vulnerable-making irregularity is still not the most remarkable thing to happen in the work’s first paragraph. When the orchestra enters, it repeats the music the piano has played, but even more softly – pianissimo – and, astonishingly, in B major.

It is very difficult to convey in words how radical this B major is. It is particularly difficult in Our Year of the Lord 2025, when we have the harmonic obscurity of Richard Wagner and the atonality of Arnold Schönberg and the cacophony of modern life as parts of our overstuffed frame of reference. In a G major work from 1805, B major is not just another country: it is another solar system. In bar six of said work, it is literally breathtaking, a revelation.

A revelation that colors everything that follows it. It takes only seconds for the orchestra to find its way back to its G Major home, but the sense of dislocation we have experienced does not simply go away. It creates a persistent sense of fragility, making the movement as a whole feel far more intimate than the opening movements of Beethoven’s other concerti. Beethoven’s mastery of form is frequently and rightly noted, but the way it operates in this movement is something very special. The indelible events of the opening phrase set the movement on an unlikely but inexorable path; the final outpouring of G major is made thrilling by the harmonic peregrinations that precede it.

For all that, it might be the second movement that makes the deepest impression: long after the concerto has ended, it remains lodged in the listener’s psyche. This movement is one of music’s singular events. Nothing anticipates it; nothing can be compared to it. Whereas the opening of the concerto makes its impact through its subtlety and geniality, the first notes of the second movement have the opposite effect: they are severe and uncompromising, the full complement of strings playing in unison, with terrible unanimity. If the pianist began the concerto by posing a question to the orchestra, this is the orchestra posing a challenge: Dare you speak?

The pianist dares. There may be no other piece of music that demonstrates the power in quietness to such remarkable effect. The piano’s response is in all ways the orchestra’s opposite. It speaks softly, not loudly. The writing is chordal, and unfolds as a single, uninterrupted sentence, rather than a series of slashing unison outbursts. The mood is one of profound regret, not anger.

If this is a battle, it is won by the piano: After a series of similar exchanges, the orchestra yields, at least dynamically. It retains its rhythmic tautness and lack of harmony, but it joins the piano in volume and, more importantly, affect: a deep sadness, the menace gone. Ironically, this unleashes something in the pianist, who for the one and only time in this movement, removes the una corda pedal, and speaks with a full voice and raw distress. But this is short-lived, and the movement ends in a hush, Beethoven even instructing the orchestra to play pianississimo – very, very softly. For both orchestra and piano, it is what happens after the fight that is most devastating. When the fight has gone, the pain is magnified; it is all that is left.

This movement takes little more than five minutes to play – it is the shortest movement in any of Beethoven’s concertos, its emotional impact belying its length. And, like so many great slow movements, it creates a hell of a compositional problem: what can follow that? This is a problem that many composers have faced, but it particularly consumed Beethoven, whose approach to structure, and to the question of how to write a finale, evolved enormously over the course of his life. In his earliest works, Beethoven mostly conformed to the model set out by his great predecessors, Haydn and Mozart, not seeking to replicate the architectural grandeur of the first movements or the spiritual depth of the slow middle ones in his finales. By the end of his life, he has turned this on its head: the point of the piece is to build to its conclusion. Every idea, every structural event, every emotional peak, is part of a grand design; the last movements in the late period are usually the longest and hold the greatest intensity.

By the time Beethoven wrote the G Major Concerto, he had taken significant steps along this path; the Waldstein Sonata, the first sonata with a finale that outweighs what precedes it, was written a year or two earlier. But the concerto’s finale makes no attempt to do the same. It is fully satisfying in a different way, Beethoven eschewing grandeur and finding profundity in play.

This rondo begins in a place that is both perfectly logical and all wrong: the same note that brought the second movement to its tragic close. But we’re in a new key now, and that note, which was the most natural place for a movement in e minor to end, makes no earthly sense as a place for a movement in G major to begin. A little bit anxious, a little bit mischievous, this note is a child who got mixed up on the way home from school and ended up in the next-door neighbor’s backyard.

The yards share a fence, and the way home is simple enough – we are in a stable G major in a matter of measures – but the point has been made: Gentle humor is in this movement’s DNA. The second theme leans more towards the spiritual, the piano exploring the uppermost reaches of the instrument, undergirded by a single cello holding one of the lowest notes available to it: the effect is of looking out onto the horizon. But this theme too has a joke baked into it: The piano loops back to the same note again and again, before growing impatient and shouting it at the orchestra. This theme, and the movement as a whole, is poised between the philosophical and the quizzical, between asking questions of the universe and shrugging one’s shoulders at it. The movement – and the work – ends in triumph, but this inner contradiction never goes away. It is one final contradiction in work that is defined and made magnificent by them.

Jonathan Biss on Salvatore Sciarrino’s Il Sogno di Stradella

“Salvatore Sciarrino boasts of having been born free.” So begins the composer’s official biography. Read on, and you will learn this means that Sciarrino is largely self-taught. But the choice of words matters, just as his choice of notes matters: Sciarrino does nothing without intention, without the full participation of his head and heart. That is what it takes to create a musical language – really, a musical world – all one’s own. Few have done so; Salvatore Sciarrino, born free, has.

Asked to write a piano concerto which takes Beethoven’s example in G Major as its point of departure, Sciarrino wrote Il Sogno di Stradella (Stradella’s Dream) in which the pianist is frequently either silent, submerged under the music’s eerie surface, or testing the limits of audibility, and which has another composer’s name in its title. His notes on the piece mention Händel, Chopin, Schubert, and Satie; Beethoven’s name is nowhere to be found. This is a person who knows his mind.

And yet, the specter of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto is embedded in Il Sogno di Stradella. Sciarrino writes that the work is “a concerto not only of sounds, but also of resonances, near and distant. Physical resonances, perceptible, brought forth artificially from the piano. And above all, mental resonances, thoughts that resound within us. The soloist withdraws, denies his usual superiority, to reaffirm it on other levels. This does not seem to be a strange idea, for it touches on and speaks to the transcendent nature of language and thought. As an instrument of consciousness, art guides us, teaches us, transforms us.” There is a lot to absorb in those few sentences, but the central point, it seems to me, is that the silences – the things that go unsaid – often mean more than the notes themselves. It is in silence that those “mental resonances” – the building blocks of our inner lives – can be found. It is in Sciarrino’s silences that echoes of Beethoven’s ethereal masterwork can be perceived.

The musical language in which Il Sogno di Stradella begins and ends will be instantly familiar to anyone who knows Sciarrino’s music: he has no shortage of new ideas, but his sonic vocabulary has been in place for some fifty years now. Trying to describe this vocabulary with words is a fool’s errand. It is engrossing and strange. It has no parallel. It is in no way derivative.

Soon, though, its obscure but deep connection to the past is revealed. Several minutes into the piece – long enough for the listener to have forgotten what real life sounds like – the piano begins to play a lilting phrase that sounds like it escaped from the early 19th century, over and over again, on a loop. The strings of the orchestra envelop this phrase in sustained chords built of multiphonics – chords that come firmly out of the present day, or perhaps out of no time at all. There is no good reason that these two sounds should go together, or that any of this should follow the music that preceded it. Yet it is all peculiarly, ineffably right. Sciarrino’s conviction is its own logic. This is not pastiche: while Sciarrino’s music is bracingly original, it exists in a dialogue with several centuries of music that came before it, from Alessandro Stradella, through Beethoven and Chopin and Satie, to the music of the 1950s that inspired him and against which he rebelled deeply.

“Some artists passing through their own time leap from the ship: they go after the Sirens,” Sciarrino wrote elsewhere. But Sciarrino does not leap: his music simply transcends time and place. Its power, like that of the Beethoven G Major, is mysterious. In other words: it is art.