Ludwig van Beethoven
The Late Piano Sonatas

I often read on the internet, among blogs and music sites, discussions or very passionate statements filled with the conviction of the "true" music listener or the more or less experienced musician, discussions that often deal with the complexity and quality of one type of music compared to another; and, those like me who are accustomed to such "headache-inducing" wastes of time notice the constant presence of some indestructible families, a sort of intellectual or pseudo-intellectual aristocracy of caste most of the time unfortunately. For example: the hendrixians, or those who have the music of those years as their only god, the pinkfloydians, those who only believe in the religion of jazz and so on: nothing new so far, right?

I'm talking about those who must at all costs argue that music ended after the death of their favorite artist, and everyone should just go home. Of course, this applies also to classical music purists.

A question from a Repubblica journalist to Uto Ughi, violinist of exalted fame: "but don't you like anything from the so-called light music, today's or yesterday's music, but in any case distant from classical music (at least in terms of expression I would add), I don't know, De Andrè for example?" Answer: "Yes, De Andrè, beautiful lyrics, but it's nothing [glosses over]." From an interview with Maurizio Pollini, a pianist of stratospheric fame: "but don't you like jazz?" Answer: "No, I don't listen to it, but I don't like it" (sic).

Now. The immense anger I feel and have felt every time I come across things like this is truly capable of shaking me to the core. At least as much as reading here and there that "whatever a rock musician did, Debussy or Liszt had already done it two hundred years earlier" (unfortunately I read and hear such things very often, and not only in closed environments like conservatories). I feel this anger because I think it's stupid and useless to start ranking and competing over who did what first; we are talking about things that give us chills and keep us awake at night due to their beauty and where they take us, who cares about the rest, right? Enough with this competition over who is cooler, right?

That being said, and loving all and embracing the entire "modern" musical world metaphorically from Robert Plant and company to Stockhausen, from the Talking Heads to whoever the hell you like, Franco Spaturnio or Ciccio Bastardo, there's something strong to say about these last "sonatas." And that is, one cannot avoid considering the complexity of a work, the fact that listening to this music and stopping to listen, maybe lying on the floor, with headphones, heavy pianos weighing tons fly, fly very lightly, propelled by the immense force needed to continue producing this music, the strength of the performer who must literally reshape Michelangelo's stone of these scores that were not understood at the time and still prove to be too beyond even today in some solutions.

The structures of these staffs chase and build huge Cities atop other Cities, and all of Bach's tradition seems to genetically mutate towards something stronger, beyond man, and you physically perceive it on all the basses. They seem like pieces for four hands, but they are not. The proto-jazz fresco of opus 111 and the sonic storms of 109 cause a sort of anachronistic upheaval that makes us unable to understand what we are listening to anymore. Is it romantic music? No, detractors will say with prejudice? Is it the usual intellectual plin plin? No, here it's an anthropomorphic God playing with his hammers on a piano the size of a mountain. He plays about his condition, he plays about everything he thinks, about a sublime that plunges him into that mountain with a roar. You will never finish listening to it, and you realize it's something that just hearing it, and especially, clearly, playing it, can lead you to physical consumption because it's too much. Dramatically you realize that you have never heard and will never hear anything else this complex.

It reminded me of an aspect of a book not as well-known as it should be unfortunately: "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem, to whom the so-called "Sci-Fi" children owe everything. Limitless towers folding their structure upon themselves, whose meaning was obscure to those who saw them, a fractal geography, worlds within worlds on the entire three-dimensional surface, because, that's exactly how this music is. On paper, if you look closely, it's in three, four dimensions, plus time.

Here LvB went beyond, and then he died. Here and in the "Hammerklavier," in the "Grand Fugue," all works that marked a transition towards new forms, towards new freedoms, going beyond even himself and his previous musical production. Towards "new dissonances" up to, indeed, the quartet op.133 which is practically without a defined key. I choose Pollini because perhaps he is the best, despite everything, at combining philology and expressiveness, total presence of the composer and space for the performer's sensitivity; something that approaches perfection.

And now, I must say something stupid too. I love many different things. But when you listen to the "Beethoven thing" you realize that certain depths can only be reached with a diamond diving suit, mountain, and hammer. There's just no contest. Apart from Miles and the jazz season.

"We listen to music with our muscles" [F. Nietzsche]