Glenn Gould - The Tempest

1967年、グレングールドは" Music For a Sunday Afternoon"という番組で、ベートヴェンのピアノソナタ「テンペスト」の解説と演奏を行いました。なんという奇跡！彼は既に語るピアニストだったなんて。そうそう、スヌーピーのシュローダはいつもベートヴェンを弾いていましたね。私は彼から多くのベートヴェンの作品を他のアニメソングと同じように覚えました。それは後の人生において、どんなに深く広い思いを与えてくれたことでしょう。そして。今改めて、この現代に聞き直しても、なんて瑞々しい、晴れやかな演奏だこと。まさに時代を超え、時空を超え、私たちにこんなにも切なく純粋な気持ちを訴えかけてくる、彼の演奏に酔いしれましょう。 In 1967, Glenn Gould gave a commentary and performance of Beethoven's piano sonata "The Tempest" on the "Music For a Sunday Afternoon" program. What a miracle! I can't believe he was already a talking pianist like a YouTuber a long time ago. Yes, in Snoopy, Schroeder always played piano, Beethoven. I learned many Beethoven pieces from him, like other cartoon songs. What deep and broad thoughts it gave me later in life. Now, listening to it again in this day and age, what a fresh and radiant performance it is. Let's be intoxicated by his performance, which transcends time, and space, and feel pure and beautiful feelings.

Glenn Gould - Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor op. 31/2 "The Tempest"

1)

Glenn Gould performs Beethoven's "Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor op 31/2 - The Tempest" in the classical music television series "Music For a Sunday Afternoon," originally broadcast on March 19, 1967. Remember to subscribe to stay updated with all new releases on the channel.

2)

I've been told I can have four minutes to say something original about Beethoven.

And the pity is I don't believe that many original Beethoven thoughts are lying around today hundred and forty years after his death.

3)

I think that even my favorite cartoon character, the long-haired little kid who plays Beethoven on a miniature piano in the comic strip Peanuts, is shorter.

I think he's called and would have trouble finding one in three minutes 45 seconds.

4)

Every once in a while, I come across an article that says something to the effect of why Beethoven what's so special about him why is he so central to our experience of music.

Many composers have commented themselves on just that question.

5)

John Cage, the American avant-garde composer the man who wrote works with titles such as music for 12 radios or 4 minutes 20 seconds which is a title denoting that the piece occupies four minutes and 20 seconds the complete silence was quoted in the New Yorker magazine a few months back is saying.

6)

If I'm right, Beethoven has got to be wrong.

And he bets on that one Igor Stravinsky, the composer who once said that the two most overrated musicians who ever lived were Beethoven and Wagner, has lately decided that Beethoven's Corsa Fuga and one of his very last works, is, after all, quite a good piece and that for Stravinsky is remarkably benevolent for a mark.

7)

I suspect that so many people tend to evaluate Beethoven as the composer central to our Western musical experience in a purely arithmetical sense and within the somewhat limited historical knowledge that is usually involved.

8)

He is the hundred and forty years that have passed since his death, almost precisely bisecting the three centuries of music that occupy most musicians and audiences in the concert hall today.

It's not a broad music experience, but that's another question altogether.

9)

Beethoven's career is not only dead center in the chronology of these last three centuries of instrument-based music but in addition to that, he embodies, for some people anyway, a transition and the musical manner in composing attitude, so to speak, between what I usually referred to as the classical and the romantic styles.

10)

But it's not entirely true of Beethoven that his early work is exclusively occupied with some severe architectural discipline called the classical style, and his later work is entirely involved with that fantastical quasi improvisatory psychologically ambivalent manner called the romantic style.

It's because there are altogether too many exceptions and contradictions to make any comfortable rule of thumb like that apply.

An excellent example of such a contradiction is the chronology of the two-piano works in this program.

11)

The Tempest Sonata, so-called with its turbulence, wild chromaticism, peculiar hesitancies, and vague half-focused, rest of the teams have a sort of inkblot test related to the rest of the movement they relate if you want them to.

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And on the other hand, the variations, the thirty-two variations in c-minor, employ the oldest and strictest and most predictable kind of variation principle.

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The ground is based on the guide of repeating a series of effortless harmonies indefinitely and compiling elaborate and constantly changing themes attic ideas above them in the upper voices.

And this is a principle by which composers had been writing variations for several hundred years before Beethoven wrote his set.

14)

But the curious thing about these two works, the variations the Sonata has taken side-by-side, is that the Sonata, which in every respect seems to be the voice of a much more contemporary Beethoven, was written first.

15)

So the exciting thing about Beethoven is that these two qualities, these two opposing attitudes tend always to coexist.

And I think if you put it in human terms rather than purely musical ones, it suggests that Beethoven is a kind of living metaphor for the creative condition in part.

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He's the man who respects the past, honors the traditions to which art develops, and while never other than intense and constantly gesticulating with those rather violent gestures which are so cute early his own.

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This side of his character leads him to smooth off the edges of his structure, sometimes to be watchful and even painstaking on occasion about the grammar of his musical syntax.

18)

And then there's this other side.

The fantastical romantic side of Beethoven, which draws from him those unapologetically wrongheaded gestures, was proud nose-thumbing anti-grammatical moments that, in the context of tradition against the smooth and polished edges of classical architecture, make him unique among composers for the sheer devil-may-care less of his manner.

19)

But in the end, this sort of amalgam exists for every artist.

So, every creative person has an inventor at odds with a museum curator.

And most of the surprising things that happen in music result from some short gain by one at the expense of the other.

*amalgam = a combination of parts that create a complete whole:

20)

But the thing about Beethoven is that in his case, the struggle between the inventor and the curator isn't tucked away out of sight like the proverbial skeleton in the family closet.

21)

It is the very surface of the music, and Beethoven lets us see it happening as though he had no skeleton to hide.

I don't know how original that is, but I gave four minutes.

I'll bet it's what Schroder would have said.

Glenn Gould - Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor op. 31/2 "The Tempest"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPDBcdDGrnE