Emotional depth

Piano Concerto No. 5 "Emperor"; Piano Sonata No. 23 "Appassionata"; Wiener Philharmoniker; Sir Simon Rattle, conducting; Alfred Brendel, piano

While hanging out with a fellow graduate piano student during my CCM days, I audibly cast out the fleeting thought that I would like to work on the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-Flat Major by Johannes Brahms. My friend offered to me what his piano teacher had said about this majestic work: “If you are under twenty-five years of age when you take on the great B-Flat concerto by Brahms, you should learn it as best as you can – then put it away for ten to fifteen years. No pianist under the age of thirty has gathered enough of the riches of life to understand, much less plumb the depths of, the emotion, fervency, sentience of feeling and zest for all things savory and piquant that Mr. Brahms requires to adequately carry out this masterwork.” Okay. Well, maybe tomorrow then. I’ll just make sure I live a little bit of life this evening and let it drip it on my fingers in the morning.

Despite the sarcasm, though, even at the tender age of twenty-three, I knew that my friend’s piano teacher spouted truth. It sits in the same chair as that old “Life begins at forty” adage. One can’t credibly extol what one hasn’t seen. If you want to sing about love, then you have to have fallen in love; otherwise you’re just an unmarried marriage counselor.

Subsequently, I have “saved” the exploration of some compositions by some composers for later in life. Gustav Mahler, for instance, composed not so much on a higher emotional plane than other composers but more in a variant musical language that I have yet to completely understand. It’s complex and sophisticated … and complicated. I can hear that Mr. Mahler’s beautiful Ninth Symphony is emotionally charged, but I haven’t figured out what he’s saying. Hopefully, age will bring this wisdom.

I have also "saved for later" much of the work of Ludwig van Beethoven. Mr. Beethoven was the original “tortured soul”. In addition to romantic entanglements and his lack of success in acquiring a wife, he had health issues, he had money problems, he had dysfunctional family matters … and always, always, always, the need to obsess, tirelessly, endlessly,over passages of music, large and small, until they said exactly what he wanted them to say.

There’s a reason that musicologists proclaim Mr. Beethoven to be the harbinger of the Romantic Period in music. Composers like Mozart and Haydn, who wrote during that time leading up to the fruition of Mr. Beethoven’s compositional talent, injected more and more expression into their music. Beethoven had nowhere else to go but full, frontal, emotional assault on his listeners; with this one handicap. While the voices of Heaven flowed from the pens of Herr Mozart and Herr Haydn like oil from a ruptured well, Beethoven created, then smashed, then resurrected, then hacked, then attached, then sanded, then welded, then spliced, then gathered, hewed, mended, lopped, fastened, chopped, patched, slashed, fused, severed, stitched, lacerated, renovated, carved – and, finally, polished, buffed and shined what he knew to be absolutely, unreservedly, categorically, unequivocally and thoroughly – right. To change one note would have made it wrong.

A man or woman who chooses to take on the emotional battering of the hard-earned musical genius of heavy-weight champion Ludwig van Beethoven is serious, indeed. Pianist Paul Dietrich, played by Richard Dreyfuss in the 1980 movie “The Competition”, has reached his thirties and stands at the edge of a cliff. The cut-off age for virtually all piano competitions is thirty-five. He has come to the last one; the final door. He can do no other than to come to the table armed to the teeth with a technical and emotional mastery and understanding of Ludwig van Beethoven’s grand and stately Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major – the “Emperor” concerto. So committed is he to his task, that he declines a job offer from a friend as a music teacher, saying, “If you need to have something to fall back on, well, then, that is exactly what you do – fall back.”

If you haven’t won the accolades of competition judges by the time you reach Mr. Dietrich’s age, should you continue in the music profession as a performer? Be careful with your response, reader. You’re standing perilously close to my cliff.

Credits: To Lee Remick, who, as Gretta Vandemann, tells Paul Dietrich, “It costs extra to carve ‘schmuck’ on a tombstone, but you would be worth the expense.” Ha!