Beethoven’s Farewell to the Piano

I remember the first time I learned Beethoven’s Farewell to the Piano, a simple, two-part, four-page piece in the first volume of a piano series called The International Library of Music.  I could not yet handle the four-flat key signature in the second part of the piece, so I settled on learning the first part, reading and playing out the notes in the treble clef with my right hand and then the notes in the bass clef with my left. 

I made personalized adjustments: the bass clef called for my left hand to play the notes F, C, and A in a single chord – at the same time – but they were too far apart for me to reach, and the sound they made as I blipped over them in the space of one beat detracted from the unity of sound.  It also caused some discomfort as my hand stretched, and there tended to be a pause as I tried to do it.  Instead, I penciled in that I would play a chord consisting of the notes C, F, and A in that order.  They took up only the span of six notes that way, instead of ten, and the coordination helped me to keep the focus on the melody of the right hand.

The notes under control, I then focused on dynamics, which is musician-speak for volume and expression.  In a music score, dynamics can be signaled in two basic ways: first, with letters:

a lowercase p, which means, piano, the Italian word for soft

pp, which means, pianissimo, very soft

f, which means, forte, loud

ff, which means, fortissimo, very loud

The second basic way is with signs that look like open-ended triangles. 

<, which means, crescendo

>, which means, decrescendo

The ones that open towards the left show that you should be playing gradually louder, and the ones that open towards the right show that you should be playing gradually softer.

Occasionally, these two basic ways of indicating volume are accompanied by another Italian phrase or word, such as

dolce, which means, gentle, or sweet

I tend to think of this as a bird singing a lullaby to its babies, or a serenader singing with a guitar.

Beethoven’s Farewell to the Piano is marked all over with dolce’s.  There are nothing but dolce’s throughout the first section, so I hit the notes with tenderness.  After all, this was a Farewell to the Piano.  Imagine how it would feel never to see a piano again, let alone hear it or play it.  Imagine, I thought, being a concert pianist, or a composer, who had intimately memorized the notes into his fingers and posture, who had poured emotion in and out, day after day, his whole life, and to have to say farewell!  The piano likely was being taken from him, so he was playing slowly to remember each moment, but with the passion of the present.  Hitting each note with that love, I imagined, would wrench him, so it would wrench me.

With all the gentle dolce’s commandeering my choice of expression, and the little open-ended triangles letting me linger on hard forte’s for only a second, the outlet for the passion of the piece seemed too brief.  Forget the second half of the piece, which seemed reasonably subdued based on my cursory sounding out of it – this first half needed a high point of thoughtful angst. 

I thought that I found it in the third to last measure, out of eight measures.  In it, there is a repetition of the main sentiment, but with a variation that emphasizes the base notes.  In popular music, a heavy base that includes only the stem notes of the chords, with minimal harmony, sounds imposing and impetuous.  It’s the reason why many people start bopping their heads and stamping their feet, including but not limited to rock music.  (My educated guess is that Handel is the most bopped-to composer, the rock star of Covent Garden.)

I concluded that I should play those bass notes hard, especially the last two, where the stem-note-chords dip down into territory before unexplored. This, I thought, was the high point of the piece, the place where the music lets all the emotions out and the pianist can just pound the piano without thinking.  Having played it that way a couple of times, I was congratulating myself on having deciphered and executed the dynamics according to the written directions when I noticed one small detail over which I had skimmed.

The dynamics there did not go:

< >, which would indicate that in the big space between the ends of the triangles, one gets to play loudly

Instead, the dynamics said:

< p <

That meant, that in the space between, I had to get soft.  It was a sudden softness, because the end of that first triangle

[here] <

was soft, and the end of the second triangle

[here] <

also was soft.

In between there, as the volume increased, all of a sudden, was this p, which is rather unusual, especially for a relative beginner, as I was at the time.  Usually, as in the rest of the Farewell to the Piano, part one, the dynamics made a nice little enclosed space that meant simply, start soft, get loud, get soft again. 

Here, though, was some nuance.

I craned my back towards the piano, hands on the page, a pencil there, wondering whether I should mark it up the way I marked up the F-C-A from earlier.  Clearly, I thought, the composer was wrong.  Loudness was passion, and I needed a place to put the agony of farewell.

I played through the piece in order to understand the whole effect, and confirmation bias led me to keep my generalized opinion for a couple more times.  See? I thought to myself.  It sounds better, feels better, loud.

Reluctant to dismiss the directions so abruptly, I tried it soft again. Then, I tried it loud.  Again, I tried it soft.

It was only one moment in time, one place on a sheet of music, but it meant so much to the piece, and I could play it six, seven, ten, twelve times, to experiment with what was best, what it meant – what it meant to Beethoven, what it meant to me, what it meant to every and any pianist or piano-listener or piano-student or piano-amateur who ever would say farewell to a piano, whether it was only for a short time or for everlasting.  (I was inclined to think that Beethoven meant for time everlasting.  It fit in with his romantic temperament and with the Romantic era of classical music that he was ushering in with impassioned pieces such as his third symphony, Eroica, or his moody piano sonatas, such as the Moonlight.)

After many tries, the experimentation gave me a eureka realization: the moment was actually more emotional with that brief softness. When those bass notes dipped down where none had gone before – when that right hand’s melody left its usual territory to join it – the softness emphasized it, smoothed the places before and after it together, gave authority to the power of the loudness before and after it.  That sudden withholding of volume – that was the deepest, almost unutterable feeling possible.

It was the power of Beethoven.  He didn’t need flashy trills or catchy melodies to make a statement, although he frequently did.  He didn’t need fortissimo power moves that overwhelmed the piano.  He just needed the grace of quiet. It is Beethoven’s greatest underestimated power, in my opinion.

We are used to hearing the opening major thirds of his Fifth Symphony’s opening movement along with the pronunciation of his name.  We are used to thinking of the theme of the last movements of the Ninth Symphony – known as the Ode to Joy – as the culmination of his work.  His Emperor Piano Concerto, his bounding Seventh Symphony, his sudden jokes on classical form in his Eighth, the fireworks of his Fifth Symphony’s last movement – these are all quick booms of statement.  Even his most famous piano sonatas and other piano pieces tend to be the energetic ones.  The Appassionata, the Waldstein, the Pathétique, and even most of the Moonlight – all of these tend towards charisma that bursts through the pages and captures the attention.  Do we forget to listen to the Beethoven of the profoundly calm? 

There must be hundreds of examples. Beethoven second movements from symphonies, or the adagio movements, tend to emphasize this; also, the second movements or slow movements from his piano sonatas. I had heard the slower movements, appreciated them by ear, but learning one through my body was an entirely different experience, one that led me to experiment and listen in order to understand the question, “What is Beethoven doing?” Here, through thoughtful practice of a small piano piece, I could learn experientially the underrated quality of his work. 

My time alone with the piano continues to be a dialogue with the form of a piece: I learn the notes and then try to float on them so that I can move with the ebbs and flows of dynamics.  They are different each time that I play, the way that one can experience basically the same event – a child’s enjoyment of a game, the elegance of Gothic architecture, a sequence of ballet steps – but do it differently each time, feel it differently each time.  That is why it is so important to know the placement and timing of the notes before solidifying the dynamics and expression.  Ideally, after adequate practice, the notes will flow past and all I have to concentrate on is the details of expression, rather than the mechanics. 

Beethoven’s corpus is a revelation that I retrace, and I learn small things that can initiate significant changes in perspective, such as how a quiet moment is a place to listen.  In return, it can let me try to say, without words, all that I can imagine.

Print