Beethoven xviii: hearing recordings in the early fifties (1)

In the 1950s, my family played various classical recordings on the living room phonograph. One I remember was a work which influenced Beethoven in his early period: the pianist Robert Casadesus with George Szell conducting the C-minor piano concerto by Mozart, his 24^th, K. 491, composed in 1786 (just a few years before Blake wrote his early “Songs of Innocence” and then of “Experience”).
Both Mozart’s concerto and Blake’s early poems project an open display of fairly fierce emotions and are more intense than more conventional contemporaneous works. The fact that Mozart’s dramatic concerto was in C-minor was also significant for Beethoven, for the most dramatic and intense works he published early were in minor keys, and particularly C-minor: the second of the three piano trios opus 1 and the first of the three early piano sonatas in opus 10 (his first published piano sonata, opus 2, no. 1, is in the related key of F-minor).

Even at the age of ten, I loved hearing the wonderful momentum of Casadesus’ rippling scales on this recording, charging ahead, and with the main theme and its repeated final punctuating phrase all beautifully phrased. Casadesus’ “sound” – the warmth, clarity, and restraint of his tone and approach – were, I remember, admired also by my mother, who was an amateur pianist and who loved playing Chopin’s first Nocturne, Schumann’s Arabesque, and Beethoven’s opus 7 piano sonata, no. 4 in F. (She had aspired to professional competence in the mid-1920s, studying during her University of Chicago years with a pianist who had in her turn studied with Cortot.)

This Mozart C-minor concerto recording, which my father would play on our living room console, was an early vinyl LP, the 1951 collaboration between Casadesus and Szell. Both pianist and orchestra perform the main theme with extraordinary clarity and force: it is a surging melody rising up the scale by thirds from the initial C and then descending the scale to a repeated, slightly jagged, drily voiced three-note phrase as it moves down the scale to final harmonic resolution.

That repeated jagged motif – da-Da Da, with the third note rising in pitch – is heard frequently throughout the first movement as a sort of unifying element and evolving punctuation. The pianist Casadesus and Szell were both famous for their clarity and cohesiveness, and these qualities are wonderfully present in their recording of the tragic force of the main melody and the subsequent unifying repetitions.

It is just that combination of qualities – cohesively evolving repetitions and the sense of tragic drama – which Beethoven’s early minor-key works value and develop. A good illustration is provided by one of his six early-period opus 18 quartets. My father and his friends often performed these works during their quartet evenings at our house during the Fifties, and the fourth quartet in C-minor reveals and transforms the influence of Mozart’s music and particularly the great 24^th concerto.

Opus 18 no. 4 starts with a characteristic theme, a surging opening comprised again of an upward moving melody and a descent in pitch accompanied by a repeated punctuating motif (these features echo the features of Mozart’s concerto). Beethoven’s repeated “punctuation” is a frequently voiced octave leap upward, as the opening exposition of the main theme closes in through brusque chords and more of those punctuating octave leaps toward harmonic resolution.

Though this movement is more somber than Mozart’s opening C-minor concerto movement, it’s clear that many of the effects I tried to describe in the latter are the basis of further experimental development in Beethoven’s C-minor quartet movement. Of course, Beethoven adds his unique aesthetic characteristic of creating music which is continually “working out” its motifs, testing new combinations of them, and inviting the players to feel as if they were participating in his building of the musical edifice, in his constructing this creative flux in time.

In my next post, I’ll turn to a recording of Beethoven’s middle-period Violin Concerto, which the family owned and heard in the early Fifties.