One With Everything
BEGINNER’S EAR | 5.31.21
Two hours into my drive to Boston last week I found myself craving a symphony. I’d already gone through a blues rock playlist built around Amethyst Kiah, and had spent a whole hour listening to an anthropologist’s take on the history of work on The Next Big Idea.
I had knocked back a shot of Poetry Unbound, devoted to a poem by Hand Abdurraqib about – very meta – four teenage boys squeezed into the backseat of a car who are struck dumb when a song comes on the radio that they fear will cause Jeff’s mom, who is driving, to have a mental breakdown, because the day Jeff’s dad had walked out on her he’d left the needle down on a Journey record. The song is “Don’t Stop Believing,” and somewhere around the return of the piano riff after the guitar solo it actually leads to a breakthrough, causing the narrator to say: “so maybe this is why grandma said a piano can coax even the most vicious of ghosts out of a body.”
I still had a lot of road ahead of me and I wanted a soundtrack for it that had story and place and development – in other words, a symphony. I thought Mahler would do the trick, but when I started to stream his Sixth I realized my speakers weren’t up to the task. The fortissimo bursts sounded tinny and cheap, and the extreme dynamic contrasts had me constantly fiddling with the volume.
Mindful of Hanif’s grandmother, I switched tack. For the rest of the drive, I listened to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 transcribed for solo piano by Liszt. Piano music always works in a car. (As a friend observed, it’s not just my speakers; the particular frequency of tire noise tends to eclipse many other sound colors.)
The piano “reduction” became a rediscovery – especially so since I heard it in motion.
With the variety of tone colors gone, what pops out in these Liszt transcriptions is the trajectory of the piece. Giving all the notes to a single instrument creates a heightened sense of continuity: in the orchestral version you hear voices pipe up and fall silent. Listen live in concert and you can actually see trumpeters sitting idly, or a timpanist counting off bars of rest.
But in these versions (I listened to a recording by Cyprien Katsaris) it’s a single pianist who seems to grow eight hands in order to render the latticed complexity of conversing voices and the quicksilver transformation of musical motifs. The current runs on uninterrupted. Playing these symphonies on the piano requires dexterity, but also strategic planning, because the buildup of volume and texture is so drawn out. Max out too soon and there’s nowhere to go when Beethoven pulls out his first triple-forte.
While I admired the skill of Katsaris, my mind kept turning to Liszt. Transcribing all nine Beethoven symphonies for piano was evidently a labor of love and devotion to a composer he revered. But there’s also a good deal of ego at play.
After all, the pianist-transcriber gets to play God in the way he moves ALL the chess pieces. Or maybe this is like one of those high-concept productions of Goethe’s “Faust,” in which a single actor takes on every role so that all characters — from the hero to the devil to the love interest’s mother — appear like fragments of a single mind.
But what goes for Liszt also goes for the listener. When a symphony becomes a solo, with all its parts telescoped into a single voice, the listener gets to identify with the totality of the piece. As Beethoven’s orchestral cosmos is unified in a virtuosic piano score, we too, in listening, get to be one with everything.
Corinna
LISTEN
Spotify has the complete Beethoven symphonies transcribed by Liszt and played by Cyprien Katsaris here; I particularly like numbers 6 and 7.
Hear Padraig O Tuama read and discuss Hanif Abdurraqib here on Poetry Unbound.
STAY TUNED
Watch this space for news on ticket sales for the next series of live outdoor Beginner’s Ear sessions at Caramoor. On three Sunday mornings in August and September these will bring meditation and live music to the center’s beautiful gardens – butterflies included in the price of admission.
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Image: Holden Baxter on Unsplash