Performing Beethoven’s musical dynamics

Mine Doğantan-Dack

doi:10.14439/mpr.11.1

Abstract

Twentieth-century musicology frequently invoked the music of Beethoven to validate its work-centred, textualist and structuralist agenda. This article re-orients Beethoven’s music towards the performance studies paradigm, which places the music making body and material contexts of performing at the centre of its disciplinary epistemology, by weaving a novel discursive context around the composer’s unusual dynamics markings. Through a historical case study of the premiere of his Op. 70 No. 2 piano trio, I explore the connections between the performance experience of Beethoven’s dynamics and some of the philosophical and cultural discourses emerging in Europe during the early nineteenth century on the body and the self, and thereby construct novel meanings for his expressive performance practice. By bringing together interdisciplinary historical scholarship, phenomenological reflection, analytical thought and practice-based enquiry, I open up a neglected area of research that lies at the intersection of the performance experience of musical dynamics, sensory history and somatic musical archeology.

Highlights

By creating opportunities for the performer to interact with her instrument in unexpected ways and through a rich variety of effort-shapes that draw attention to their making, these expressive transgressions at the same time become a means of affirming the performer’s presence and authorial voice in the emergence of musical meanings: as such, they undermine the tradition of disparaging performers during the twentieth century that Cook talks about, and resist any attempt to portray performing as a self-effacing act of mechanical realization
While early nineteenth-century music criticism was advancing an aesthetics of autonomous instrumental music,30 which was distinctly disembodied in its aspiration and sought musical essences in abstract structural relationships communicable only from one mind to another mind, or from heart to heart31 – an aesthetic perspective supported by the “propensity to ‘idealist’ structures of thought in the German-language philosophy of the period” (Grey, 2016, p. 46) – those present at the premiere of the E-flat major trio at Krugerstrasse No 1074 in Vienna in December 1808 would have observed much in Beethoven’s performance at the piano that would prompt a strongly embodied experience of the music and of the composer, more in line with the anti-dualist and materialist epistemologies emerging across Europe
I was not able to find any information about the particular piano Countess Anna Maria von Erdödy had in her Vienna house and on which Beethoven performed the premiere of the E-flat major trio in December 1808; but if we accept Czerny’s assertion that the pianos before 1810 were “still extremely weak and imperfect” and “could not endure [Beethoven’s] gigantic style of performance” (Czerny quoted in Thayer, 1921, p. 91), the instrument on that occasion would have had a lighter and shallow action, and posed less resistance to the composer’s bodily exertion compared to later metal-framed instruments

Summary

Introduction

By creating opportunities for the performer to interact with her instrument in unexpected ways and through a rich variety of effort-shapes that draw attention to their making, these expressive transgressions at the same time become a means of affirming the performer’s presence and authorial voice in the emergence of musical meanings: as such, they undermine the tradition of disparaging performers during the twentieth century that Cook talks about, and resist any attempt to portray performing as a self-effacing act of mechanical realization.

Results

Conclusion