A Difficult Beethoven Measure
Posted: 03 Aug 2020, 22:40
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op. 31 no. 3 is an amusing piece with so many comic moments that it sounds at times like a stand-up comic delivering a series of one-liners.
One of the strangest moments occurs in the first movement. After a series of strange starts, hestitations, and other quirky events, the piece finally achieves prolonged energetic motion. Then it breaks off yet again, tries to take off, crashes, before achieving an unusually prolonged take off: The “crash” presents an almost unsurmountable technical hurdle for the player. Beethoven’s student Czerny says that this measure should stay in time. He also specifies the metronome marking for the movement at quarter note = 144, which is brisk, but within the range in which the faster sections of the piece are played today.
A 12-tuplet at quarter =144 is 12 x 144 = 1728 notes/minute or 28.8 notes/second. I googled “How fast can a pianist play?” and came up with a range of 15-19.5 per second maximum, 19.5 being a virtuoso achievement. So 28.8 notes/sec. may be impossible.
So we are left with several possibilities to perform the measure convincingly:
1. Slow down the tempo enough to play the third beat. But the momentum generated before the measure and the fact that it must lead smoothly into the following measures makes this surprisingly difficult to pull off at a slow enough tempo.
2. Convert the 32nds to 16ths and add an extra beat to the measure. This works better, but the “crash” is lost, and there is no hint of such a solution in Beethoven’s notation, such as fermatas over the left hand rests.
3. Reinterpret the notation in some other way. Maybe Beethoven was trying to notate something special that was very difficult with the tools at hand. This is the possibility that I am considering most seriously.
If the measure indeed were to stay in time, all 21 notes of the measure must be playable at 48 to the dotted half note. This amounts to 16.5 notes per second and thus, in the performable range.
The solution that I will suggest in my edition is based on the theory that Beethoven was trying to notate what today would be notated with feathered beaming: The acceleration might be approximated in standard note values as: And Beethoven’s notation might be regarded as a simplification of that to avoid the rhythmic complication.
While this would require the ability to play 21.6 notes per second for the second beat if one adhered to 144, it is manageable at tempi a little less than that, which would be acceptable for the piece as a whole or even for the one measure.
One of the strangest moments occurs in the first movement. After a series of strange starts, hestitations, and other quirky events, the piece finally achieves prolonged energetic motion. Then it breaks off yet again, tries to take off, crashes, before achieving an unusually prolonged take off: The “crash” presents an almost unsurmountable technical hurdle for the player. Beethoven’s student Czerny says that this measure should stay in time. He also specifies the metronome marking for the movement at quarter note = 144, which is brisk, but within the range in which the faster sections of the piece are played today.
A 12-tuplet at quarter =144 is 12 x 144 = 1728 notes/minute or 28.8 notes/second. I googled “How fast can a pianist play?” and came up with a range of 15-19.5 per second maximum, 19.5 being a virtuoso achievement. So 28.8 notes/sec. may be impossible.
So we are left with several possibilities to perform the measure convincingly:
1. Slow down the tempo enough to play the third beat. But the momentum generated before the measure and the fact that it must lead smoothly into the following measures makes this surprisingly difficult to pull off at a slow enough tempo.
2. Convert the 32nds to 16ths and add an extra beat to the measure. This works better, but the “crash” is lost, and there is no hint of such a solution in Beethoven’s notation, such as fermatas over the left hand rests.
3. Reinterpret the notation in some other way. Maybe Beethoven was trying to notate something special that was very difficult with the tools at hand. This is the possibility that I am considering most seriously.
If the measure indeed were to stay in time, all 21 notes of the measure must be playable at 48 to the dotted half note. This amounts to 16.5 notes per second and thus, in the performable range.
The solution that I will suggest in my edition is based on the theory that Beethoven was trying to notate what today would be notated with feathered beaming: The acceleration might be approximated in standard note values as: And Beethoven’s notation might be regarded as a simplification of that to avoid the rhythmic complication.
While this would require the ability to play 21.6 notes per second for the second beat if one adhered to 144, it is manageable at tempi a little less than that, which would be acceptable for the piece as a whole or even for the one measure.