Why you've never really heard the "Moonlight" Sonata.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

This SLATE piece is a particulary effective use of the internet. You're reading about how one instrument sounds like this and another sounds like that and there it is to listen to as you read.

The topic is that pianos were a little different in the 1800s with lighter action and more variation in different registers than today's Steinways, and that music from that era comes off a little different when played on older instruments.

The article is two pages, by the way. (Easy to miss the second one)

A fun paragraph:

...But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn't just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can't even be played as written on modern pianos. One example is the double-octave glissando in the last movement of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata. With the light action and shallow key dip of a period Viennese piano you can plant your thumb and little finger on the octave and slide to the left, and there it is. Given the much heavier action and deeper key dip of a modern piano, if you tried that today you'd dislocate something. Every pianist has a dodge for that passage. It's said that before the glissando Rudolf Serkin would discreetly spit on his fingers...

http://www.slate.com/id/2245891

[sakabatou]

1. Interesting

I wonder if I could get my hands on "true" Moonlight via mp3.

[DCKit]

4. Series. I'd love to listen to it the way it was meant to be heard.

On edit, I'm downloading from the link page with Download Helper in Firefox. Much noise in the auditorium, unfortunately.

[sakabatou]

10. Damn

[flor-de-jasmim]

2. BEAUTIFUL - thanks for posting.

[KansDem]

3. Good read

Listening to works on period instruments can be exciting. Whether it's Handel's "Water Music" with natural horns or Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" using real ophicleides, it never fails to both amuse and enlighten. :D

[Blue Owl]

6. Norrington's Symphonie Fantastique

Nothing deals it out quite like the ever-flatulent ophecleide!

I love period recordings -- however I still tend to prefer the sound of a modern piano to a fortepiano for most keyboard literature.

These Moonlight Sonata recordings were a great comparison!

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

12. I agree. I prefer the cleaner modern sound.

I also prefer the paintings in the Sistine Chapel lit by electric light.

But I do try to remain cognizant that those paintings were done to be seen differently. When they were cleaned some people had fits because they are very loud and colorful. But since they were painted to be seen in dim light of course they were loud. Had to be. But now we can see them super-loud, cleaned and electrically lit for photography... an effect nobody anticipated but that happens to be my favorite version of them because I live in a world where color and bright light are commonplace and my aesthetic is different.

And also, those old pianos were probably a lot brighter in sound when first built two hundred years ago.

So in that sense we will never know for sure how these works sounded when first performed.

[graywarrior]

5. That makes me cry

I'm doing an essay on Beethoven so this is especially interesting.

[frazzled]

7. We've been to the Frederick Collection in Ashburnum ...

About 6 or 7 years ago we read about it in the New York Times, and since we were living in Boston at the time, we decided to make a day trip there (beautiful drive through northern MA). My son was especially keen, since he was a serious piano student. Ultimately, they let him play the 1871 Streicher, which was the piano Brahms had in his studio for the last 25 years of his life. (He happened to be working on a Brahms piece at the time, and he was totally thrilled to hear it on the type of piano Brahms actually composed it on!)

Everybody who is interested in music -- you don't have to be a specialist -- should go to visit this out-of-the-way museum if possible. But plan to be corralled for 2-3 hours! You can't walk around by yourself. The proprietor (his wife was out) led us around (it's cold in there, to keep the pianos at the proper temperature) for several hours, explaining the technical, acoustic, and aesthetic differences of each piano, along with its history -- and played examples of the music of the period/composer on each one. It began with a comparison of a Debussy piece played on a modern Steinway and then on the piano Debussy composed it on: it was amazing to hear the difference!

I think I learned more in this tour about tonal quality and composition than I ever thought I would have understood.

Four big stars from this happy customer!!

Here's an illustrated list of their pianos, with information:

http://www.frederickcollection.org/collection.html

PS: Call ahead to make an appointment if you want to visit.

[gmoney]

8. Reminds me of the "Minute Waltz" hoax from a few years back

http://www.usc.edu/dept/polish_music/news/apr02.html#chopin

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

15. Thanks for the link -- that's cool (and funny)

[Orrex]

9. This post gives me a hankering for a bit of the old ultra-violence

[unblock]

11. another difference was the longer sustains in today's pianos

which makes getting the proper feel out of that piece devilishly difficult.

on some pianos, proper technique is to use both the soft and sustain pedals; on others you need to cycle the sustain pedal with each triplet; on still others you can hold the sustain pedal halfway down.


my personal favorite is to just skip along to the 3rd movement, which is FAR more entertaining and interesting than the seriously overrated first movement (sorry, first movement fans).

[Hell Hath No Fury]

13. That was incredibly cool!

The low and high notes really jumped out on the older piano -- in a really good way.

[JerseygirlCT]

14. Wow - thanks...

it does take some getting used to, though, doesn't it?

Sounds a bit like the old piano in my house - a little clunky. I really need to start playing again...

[stopbush]

16. Oh, please. This kind of opinionated crap lost steam in the classical music world

a few years ago.

The whole HIP movement in classical music - that's "Historically Informed Performance" if you're being kind, "Having Intonation Problems" if you're being honest - was 60% scholarship and 40% marketing. The scholarship part served as an effective corrective to some performing styles. Most modern performers now take into account articulations, tempi and other aspects of past performance practices, but the notion that Beethoven can't be expressed or played properly on a modern Steinway is just so much horseshit.

Beethoven only wished he had a piano like a modern Steinway. Beethoven wrote music the way he wanted to write it. Any technical difficulties it presented to a performer were the performer's challenges to overcome.

The author goes on about a single glissando as if that were the sum total of the piece. What he fails to mentions is that overall, the Waldstein Sonata gains tremendously when played on a modern piano because the broader tone and wider color palette of the modern piano allows the modern performer much more in the way of expression than did the pianos of Beethoven's time. The "dodge" around technical challenges the author mentions happens all the time in classical music. Acting like an old piano solves it all is BS.

Besides, great performers can be great on any instrument they touch. Who would you rather hear play? Jascha Heifetz playing a student violin or a student violinist playing Heifetz's Strad?

BTW - I'm not impressed with Gayle Martin Henry as a pianist. Maybe it's the crappy recorded sound, but where, may I ask, are the clearly audible arpeggios? They're pretty much buried in the texture.

Final thought: unless one reads the paragraph that follows the musical excerpts, one would never know that, "The sound is startlingly different from a modern piano and takes a while to get used to. These instruments were mostly played in small to medium-size rooms. The sound is intimate; you hear wood and felt and leather. The voicing is varied through the registers rather than the homogenous sound of modern pianos. On the Katholnig, the effect of holding the pedal down in the "Moonlight" has a ghostly effect, most obvious in the longer-sustaining bass notes that can sound like a distant gong. All these elements of the pianos Beethoven knew shaped the music in the first place, including the way he picked out high and low notes around the murmuring figure in the middle of the keyboard."

Emperor's new clothes to me. Telling the uninitiated what marvelous differences they're going to hear in the early instrument version of the Moonlight first movement while conveniently not posting the full modern version for comparison.

Snake oil.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

18. It's not an offensive article

All popular articles seek a hook of over-statement but this piece is not really very contentious and does not say that we should junk our Steinways. It also doesn't say that vinyl sounds better than digital or that women shouldn't be allowed to appear in Shakespeare plays.

Or that the Sistine Chapel ceiling shouldn't have been cleaned because it was designed to get covered with candle grime(!)

Of course there are over-board views (don't get me started on loony-pure standards in painting restoration) but this is a pretty harmless piece on a topic that is, in my view, mostly of historical rather than aesthetic interest. (One would have to be deafer than Beethoven to miss that the best modern instruments sound better than ancient ones.)

But of interest nonetheless, particularly for folks who have never given the first thought to the fact that musical instruments evolve it's an interesting and not particularly radical introduction.

[Ratty]

17. Ha! I know that glissando.

Always made my thumb cuticle bleed. I finally said to hell with it and started using both hands, leaving out some of the left hand part. Even when you hear a master do it, it sounds off. This is great to know why. I know of course how the differences in piano technology affect the ways we hear a piece. Beethoven's meaty chords in the base are distinctive and very Beethoveny today, but really they aren't what you would call pianistic. They sound completely different on weaker pianos. But I'd never thought to look at technique this way. This is a fascinating article. Thanks for posting it.