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Rating: The Unheard
Space has a solitude
Solitude the sea
Solitude death
But these will be a company
Compared to that deepest point
Polar secrecy,
A soul before itself:
Finite infinity
(Emily Dickinson)
Being isolated from the world is a desire that perhaps has crossed everyone’s mind at least once, because sometimes it may appear as a remedy to those moments when one is caught by despair, something that life unfortunately dispenses liberally. And thus, the darkest thoughts are born, the ones that devour the heart leaving our soul in tatters and an unfillable void in the chest to which no answer can be found. However, it may also happen that once the despondency is overcome, we don't think about it anymore, or at least we pretend not to think about it, and then we don’t realize how difficult it can be to live closed within oneself, inside one's solitary universe and how this yearning for isolation can indeed transform into a prison for the soul.
Ludwig Van Beethoven unwillingly had to experience solitude when the loss of his hearing forced him into it. Too much shame for losing, he, of all people, the gift of hearing. Fleeing the world away from everyone was the solution to bear its intolerable weight. He would lay his head on the piano to feel its vibrations, and the discouragement of feeling the sound flow faintly in the distance, escaping into the air without being able to capture it, must have been tremendous. Yet, even in this desperate condition, the music kept playing within him, impetuous and powerful like an ocean in storm, disruptive like a river in flood, and at the same time capable of finding solace and peace, delineating an inherent sense of eternal conflict of the soul. It was the music that held him back from intending to end his days:
"Art, just art held me back"
And it was despair that became immense art, freeing him for eternity before all men who still today perceive in his works the sense of the unheard.
Only by knowing all this is it possible to delve deeply into Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, the last piano sonata, not just of the German composer but of the entire Classicism, which Beethoven leads to the apex to ultimately annihilate and thus open different horizons, aimed at the creation of new musical forms. A granite tombstone, the last testament of an era, written through the path of pain of a man, this is what this sonata is.
For these reasons, even for the greatest performers, it is a daunting task to play it. To convey meanings beyond the sheet music requires uncommon maturity, sensitivity, and culture; skill and talent, though necessary, are not enough. I have listened to various versions of this work from Wilhelm Kempff, Alfred Brendel, Maurizio Pollini, Ivo Pogorelich, but perhaps none like Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli has truly touched its tormented beauty. Listen to the first movement "Maestoso. Allegro con brio appassionato" and you will find yourself suddenly catapulted into an epic universe of contrasts, represented by two musical themes in continuous opposition: the first heart-wrenching, relentless, tearing, suffering; the second luminous, consolatory, idyllic. Two emotions in tension, struggling to overpower each other with difficulty, expressing the metaphor of the struggle between life and death. Nine and a half minutes lived with a sense of continuous fracture between slaps and caresses, with the soothing just showing itself to remain momentarily suspended and then hiding again. And it is only the beginning of the last journey of the sonata because the climax arrives with the following "Arietta" developed through five variations plus a final coda. And here the Beethoven that Michelangeli gifts us is one of superhuman beauty, the same found in the words of Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, which describe this indescribable passage:
"The Arietta’s theme, destined to undergo adventures and vicissitudes for which in its idyllic innocence it seems not born, announces itself immediately and is expressed in sixteen bars reducible to a motif that appears at the end of the first half, akin to a short, heartfelt appeal - just three notes: a quaver, a semiquaver, and a dotted minim that can be chanted as 'Pur-ro sky' or 'Sweet Love' or 'time was' or 'Wie-sengrund': and that’s all. The subsequent rhythmic - contrapuntal development of this sweet enunciation, this melancholically tranquil phrase, the blessings and condemnations the master imposes, the excessive obscurities and clarities, the crystalline spheres into which it plunges and to which it rises, where cold and heat, ecstasy and peace are one: all this may be termed prolix or even strange or grandiosely excessive, yet without finding its definition for, on close inspection, it is indefinable; and Kretzschmar played all those spectacular variations with feverish hands, singing loudly 'Li-lala' and shouting as he played. "
Reading these words while listening to Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s interpretation grants a feeling difficult to describe: it’s as if one is being sucked into the story. It feels as if seeing Kretzschmar presenting the theme with gentle boldness and you feel like singing to the sky that "Li-lala" almost with the desire to merge with this music to become one with it, to aspire to be even a mere part of this spirit translated into music. Until one is suddenly awakened at the end of the variations when with yet another reprise an endless series of trills appears, chaining together:
"Here... the language... is no longer... freed from rhetoric... but rhetoric... from the semblance... of its subjective dominion... finally the semblance of art... is eliminated... art always eliminates... the semblance of art. Lillala! I ask you to listen ... to how the melody... is overpowered by the weight of the chords... in the imitated passage. It becomes static... it becomes monotonous... here twice the D, three times the D in a row... the chords take care of it... lil-lala... "
Then, as it turns towards the end, the piano empties the soul of all thoughts. Those few notes fade solitary in a farewell that says "It is finished". The sonata thus has no third movement and closes with the certainty that nothing thereafter can be the same as before.
"Here the sonata ended, here it had fulfilled its mission, reached the goal beyond which it was not possible to go, here it annulled itself and took leave - that gesture of farewell of the motive re-sol sol, melodically comforted by the C sharp, was a farewell also in this sense, a farewell as grand as the entire composition, the farewell of the Sonata. "
A farewell that with the same strength would resonate forever.
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