Beethoven's Piano Sonatas 30, 31, and 32
I have been listening nonstop to Beethoven's Opuses 109, 110, and 111 and I am changed.
For context, I knew a handful of Beethoven pieces by ear, namely the Appassionata, Pathetique, Moonlight, and Tempest sonatas. I've known them for thirty years, since encountering Inger Sodergren's recording of them on which I imprinted as a tender high schooler. I thought them expressions of beauty. Even three weeks ago I would have said the same, that they were expressions of beauty; even now I might say the same, that they are expressions of beauty. But these three weeks have been filled with Beethoven's last three piano sonatas, Nos. 30, 31, and 32, and now I know beauty soars higher than I had eyes to see before.
I'm not a musician and I don't have a critic's vocabulary either; all I can say is that these sonatas are transcendent. They are transcendent to the pleasing prettiness of the earlier sonatas I listed, they reach toward high beauty; they are transcendent to stormy passions, they integrate passion into acceptance; they are transcendent to their instrument, they arch toward the universal; they are transcendent to life, they face death.
The second movement (of only two) of Sonata 32 has a high equanimity and poise and yet contains all the multitudes of the damned and the blessed both. You heard them, the voices of the damned and the blessed both, in the first movement. In the second they resolve, or the soul resolves them, to be complete and to be resigned, now, to face the final fact and final act: death.
The recording I'm listening to is Gerardo Teissonnière's, for Steinway & Sons. The playing is profound too, so light and bright, so vivacious yet controlled, the phrasings and dynamics impeccably interpreted and executed.
