Beethoven xv - playing Beethoven

Hypnotic is a word to use about the experience of playing Beethoven for both the performer and the listener. We’re drawn into a world which is self-contained as it works through its expressive possibilities, its rich and nuanced thinking, its emotional tensions and equanimities.

Imagine a piano in a crowded setting, like the communal room of a boarding house. Mute, unplayed, the piano has sat there for the first month of a freshman student’s first semester. (First year students at Berkeley live in a regulated setting – such was the case in 1961 and probably continues to be – in boarding houses, dorms, or Greek houses.) Finally the seventeen-year-old - bewildered and desperate for a piano to play - sits down at the piano, amid the chattering crowd, and he begins playing Beethoven. Conversations do not stop; nothing much changes, except that inside the mind of the young man, there is a nearly hypnotic zeroing-in on the sense of working out the motifs and possibilities of a beautiful structure in sound.

Some people listen to the piano being played by the very young man with bushy red-brown hair, thick horned-rim glasses, and pale green eyes. There is some pleasure in hearing the Beethoven sonata being played amid the cooking smells, the chatter and laughter. The sense of “making music” (or the player's experience of "musica practica") – of an emotional  and intellectual structure being built in ephemeral sound - has its own fascination for the player/hearer.

I remember being that young freshman, though it is hard for me to claim him as myself – he is I and yet also somehow another self. Which says something about the distance in years: I and not I. But it says something as well about music – for it draws from us a sort of double-consciousness: in the moment of living and in the moments of the music at the same time, here and there at once.

I remember also the sonata I played (there were subsequent sonatas played on that piano, once humiliation or death had not descended on the player at the first try). That first work was Beethoven’s opus 22 in B-flat, which is the same key as the great Hammerklavier sonata, composed twenty years later.

Opus 22 is not great, yet by virtue of its greater ordinariness, it offers other pleasures. First, it is a sort of pause before Beethoven’s creation of first the experimental sonatas (some offering slow variations or fantasies like the “Moonlight” in their first movements) and then the immensely powerful works for piano of 1805 – the Waldstein and the tragic Appassionata sonatas.

In contrast, this eleventh sonata looks back on the form of the previous ten and offers a summary and even a teasingly long-winded parody of their basic form: exposition of themes, development, recapitulation, and coda. Long but humorous and clever, the sonata was fine and fun to play, for it superficially did not contain the emotional and intellectual demands of the subsequent works.

Yet opus 22 does contain a sort of bounding energy (this and its length offer slight links to the later B-flat sonata): it contains the essential quality that one senses in Beethoven’s music – that working out of an inner “organic” dynamism. Whether playing or listening, there is the feeling that one is witnessing and subliminally – in the mind – participating with the working out of the structure of an entire world, with all its parts growing finally to cohere in a vision of force and order.

In my next post, I’ll try exploring a few more, related issues about experiencing Beethoven.

Beethoven's "Sound World" - i

I’d like to try to develop the idea of the “sound world” a composer creates and inhabits – and which we listeners are privileged to inhabit with him or her. In the first posts, I'll try to establish how I was initiated into the sounds of classical music and particularly Beethoven. My parents were devoted to classical music. My father played the violin, and there were frequent “quartet evenings” at our house, during which he played second violin, for the most part. Undoubtedly, I heard his quartet play some Beethoven during my childhood, though it was not until I was a teenager that I clearly recollect hearing him play some of the opus 18 quartets. My mother played the piano, and the Beethoven sonata she turned to most often was the early opus 7 (again, I clearly remember her performance only when I was a teenager).

There were several record players in the house, and undoubtedly the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and his other symphonies must have filled the house. (I certainly remember opera emanating from the Girard in my brother David’s room, starting when he was 13 and I was 8; there were choral sounds – perhaps the “Ode to Joy” movement of the Ninth, probably the recording by Toscanini, who obsessed the family – emerging from my 16-year-old brother Philip’s room at the other end of the upstairs hall.) The Melnick household was turbulent and confusing for an eight year old, and though I loved the presence of music there, it was difficult to concentrate and fully absorb it, given my spry, distracted disposition as well as my circumstances (in which adolescents and adults would act like children, even as the child was made to witness and experience adult intensities).

During the year I was 8, then (that would be 1951-2), there were piano lessons I took, which taught me not much beyond the basics. At the age of 11, lessons were resumed, and I began playing simple Haydn minuets, Clementi’s easier sonatas, etc. It was not until I was 14 that I initiated resuming lessons and began truly exploring the keyboard music of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven. By then, my brothers had moved out of the house, and things were a bit more stable; I lived with my parents in West Los Angeles, and then in 1958 we moved to the northeast corner of the San Fernando Valley, a block from the V.A. hospital where my physician father worked. During the next three years from the age of 14 to 17, when I went away to college, my love of music fully flowered.

A German-Jewish émigré drove from Brentwood in West L.A. through the Valley to our remote Sylmar home to give me weekly lessons. Mr. Schumann assigned me typical fare: Bach Inventions and then a Partita, Mozart sonatas, the Scenes of Childhood by Schumann (no relation), and of course some Beethoven sonatas – first the easy opus 49 sonatas and then opus 90, not hard but not easy. More important than his assignments and instruction (comprised of encouraging advice mostly about interpretation rather than technique), Mr. Schumann loved to play the piano for me, so during the last twenty minutes of each session, he would fill our suburban tract home with music – above all, Beethoven. He was preparing the Waldstein sonata, opus 53, to play in recital, and at the end of several lessons I heard him perform the wonderful pulse and whir of the sonata’s repetitions – its pulsing chords and whirring arpeggios and continually unfolding melodic motifs. These mini-recitals, with my sitting to one side of him and turning pages, constituted a crucial education for me.

Also, in these years, I finally had my own small portable record player. I particularly remember receiving individual records discarded by my older brother Philip, whose record collection burgeoned with new boxed sets. Among the LPs were recordings of Klemperer (the cover photo showing one half of his face bright and benign, the other shadowed and sinister) conducting the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, Szell conducting Schubert’s “Great” Symphony, Schnabel playing Schubert’s last piano sonata, and much else. I was particularly stirred by the record of Egon Petri playing Beethoven’s last three sonatas. The LP prompted me to work through those compositions time after time – I played them at a slower than indicated pace, but at whatever tempo they gave me great pleasure. Petri’s record educated me about what I would later want to call Beethoven’s organic form – his capacity to shape motifs so that they constantly grew, even as they contributed their energy to the encompassing arc of a movement’s structure. I came finally to understand the nature and power of form – whether sonata, variation, fugue, aria, or dance.

Acts of Terror and Contrition: a nuclear fable about Israel - now available.

If you have read the excerpts from Acts of Terror and Contrition and find them (or the following description of my new novel) intriguing, you may buy the book by clicking on the cover image to the side here, on the title to this post, or on the Amazon.com link at the end of this post.


Acts of Terror and Contrition is both a political novella about Israel and a literary thriller telling the unofficial story of Israeli responses to Saddam Hussein’s missile attacks during the 1990 Iraq War – and the possibility that his missiles might carry nuclear warheads “to burn Israel to the ground,” as Tarik Aziz said then. This nuclear fable presents the secret history of the Mossad Operations Chief’s covert threats to force world governments to face what is at stake should Iraq launch a nuclear attack.


Desperate and unyielding in the face of Saddam’s threat, the Chief, Arie Schneider, puts a renegade plan into place, even as he confronts the machinations of the deeply-divided Israeli government ministers as well as his staff members’ rebellion against the extremity of his plan. Shadowing all this is the presence of the first Intifada, an Arab mother, and particularly her Islamist son, who plots his own act of terror. Enmeshed in the nuclear crisis, Arie must yet face his troubled wife, their two children, and above all his father, Rami, a holocaust survivor and retired diplomat. In opposition to the dangerous extremity of Arie’s plan, the old man summonses all his wisdom and his wily, struggling will to confront his son.

Acts is a literary novella, a version of the sacrifice of Isaac, about the unrecorded acts of terror and contrition which arise in 1990 within this circle of characters as their lives move toward a powerful and compelling climax. It is simultaneously a political thriller propelling us through dangerous close-calls and suspenseful political decisions in foreign capitals. It is also a powerful alternative history presenting a secret history of Israel’s part in the Desert Storm War. Above all, the novella explores the dread and opposition human beings feel toward the danger of nuclear radiation and nuclear weapons.

Eight stories of the nineteen-eighties accompany the novella, and these works record more personal “acts of terror and contrition” during the decade of Reagan and the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories cast a stark light – both ironic and sympathetic – upon the resinous hearts of these characters feeding what flames upon the troubled nights of the eighties. Both the novella and the stories in Acts of Terror and Contrition testify to the fraying connections between the personal and political, national identity and common humanity. And just as politics and identity are entwined here, so too are the forms the stories take: political fiction meshes with a thriller; raw slices of life yield the wholeness of a family chronicle; Americans come face to face with a range of strangers and specters; headlines haunt works of literary fiction.

In the first story after the novella, the wry secular Jewish owner of a New York toy company is visited one night in 1980 (Einstein's centennial year) by the spirit of the genius, and together they mourn the part the Jewish physicist played in developing the nuclear bomb. In another story set later in the eighties, a young professor creates a haunted, incendiary poem in response to the film “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” as he faces an inner breakdown before the needs of wife, mentor, department chair, and a famed visiting Russian poet. In the third and fourth stories, two elderly characters – one an Armenian-American, the other the Greek widow of an eminent German-Jewish expatriate pianist – seek the energy and clarity to go on in the face of maddening infirmities and the incomprehension of others. In the fifth story, a former political activist takes his family on a European vacation in 1984, and on an Italian train he faces his youthful double, a fiery student anarchist. The final three stories chronicle the life of a multi-ethnic American painter born in the forties, from his traumatic childhood, through his youthful trespasses, to his difficulty in finding balance – of communicating – in marriage and beyond; the third story in the trilogy portrays a last chance he has to break the cycle of failed communication and to right himself as a father to his teen-aged son, who himself struggles to maintain his humanity in the America of 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

You may get a copy of the book from Amazon.com via the following link:




My next post will be an attempt to explore some works of certain precursors of the modern novel.

Alice, the lady in apartment 6

I must include this youtube link in the blog - Alice is a stirring and extraordinary person, enduring and always affirming. If she were not real, it would be our responsibility to imagine the possibility of her. In fact, I wish she were a part of the imagined world in my novel about pianists and composers living in Los Angeles after World War II, Hungry Generations (see September 5th blog entry for excerpt). There is more information about Alice Somer in the film's website (she was a pupil of the great pianist Arthur Schnabel; Kafka was a family friend; and then there are the events from the nineteen forties onward). Click on the flim link half way into the site: http://www.arttherapyblog.com/videos/alice-herz-sommer-dancing-under-the-gallows/.