Accompanying the Beethoven Violin Sonatas

This weekend, I attended a marathon performance of all of Beethoven's violin sonatas in a single concert, organized by one of my McGill colleagues as a studio project. Each of her students (plus two participants from other violin studios) paired up with a pianist to learn and polish one of Beethoven's ten magnificent violin sonatas. Along the way, a wide range of other colleagues attended studio classes to coach the students (including a modern piano professor, our historical keyboard professor, and me, as a historical violin and musicology professor), and then, this weekend, the whole gang got together to present the cycle in public, moving chronologically from Op. 12 no. 1 all the way through Op. 96. (Studio teachers, take note! This was a fabulous experience for everyone involved.)

I love the Beethoven sonatas dearly, and I know them well, having performed the cycle a few times on period instruments. But as a performer, I've always split the sonatas into three concerts, which in turn could be separated by days or even months. I had never heard the whole cycle live in a single event--and this listening experience alone was edifying and instructive. There is the sheer creative ingenuity Beethoven exhibits across the set. It feels like each work is a fresh attempt to solve the problem of how to write for these two instruments. Not once did my attention flag. I also marveled at Beethoven's creative development across the set. Unlike his piano sonatas, symphonies, and quartets, which are spaced more evenly across his career, the violin sonatas are chronologically lumpy. He composed the first nine within about five years (c.1798-1803) but waited nearly a decade before writing the final sonata, in 1812. This, too, is remarkable. I still find it hard to believe that the first sonata and the "Kreutzer" have only half a decade between them--that an artist can undergo that much growth in such a short span of time, redefining so many formal and expressive features of the genre. And of course, it was equally uplifting to see ten different students, each a true musical individual at a singular stage of development, grappling with the composer, the music, and the instrument.

Watching this inspiring performance, I found myself reflecting on what it is that makes these sonatas so difficult. Flip through the score: there's nothing in the music that "appears" at first glance to be technically impossible--certainly nothing that even begins to approach the challenges posed by, say, Paganini's Caprices, composed 1802-1817 and thus contemporary to the last five of Beethoven's violin sonatas. And yet, despite the seemingly simple notation, these pieces are incredibly hard.

Many of the challenges Beethoven sets for us violinists in these works are expressive rather than technical. If I had to identify the single most important thing for a violinist to keep in mind while playing this music, it would be this: that we are, for much of the time, accompanying the piano. The late 18th-century violin sonata was a genre in which the piano soloist would take center stage, with the violinist often playing quiet whole notes in support; and although Beethoven does expand the role of the violinist beyond mere accompaniment, very often we are there to bolster the pianist. This is even reflected in the way Beethoven and his contemporaries referred to the genre. Although today we think of these as "sonatas for violin and piano," in the late 18th century they were known as "sonatas for piano and violin."

If you're a violinist starting to dig in to these pieces, one way to begin thinking about your role is to ask your pianist play various passages without you. Sometimes, as in the opening phrases of Sonatas 1, 3, 4, and 8, you'll see that absolutely nothing is missing, that the piece is "complete" even without the violin part. Ask yourself, then: in such cases, what exactly is your job? Why did Beethoven bother writing a violin part? One answer is that the violinist's function is to provide aural "background" so that the pianist can act like a soloist. In Sonata no. 3, for instance, the piano part alone sounds like a coherent solo sonata. Add the violin playing those half notes, though, and you suddenly have an "orchestral" background from which the pianist emerges, like a concerto soloist. (In fact, once you see it this way, isn't the opening just like the beginning of the "Emperor" Concerto?) At other times, as in Sonatas 1 and 8, the unison helps the pianist sound more orchestral. And in Sonata 4, the violinist gets to manufacture the illusion of the piano's resonance, so that the pianist is free to play a clear left hand without obscuring the eighth notes with the pedal. With the violinist's help, the pianist can have it both ways, articulating the left hand while also producing a halo of sound that supports the long slur and adds warmth.

Here's how I usually describe all this: the violinist's job in 80% of this music is to make the pianist sound better. Once you take this outlook on board, so many interpretive matters clarify themselves. Vibrato, tone color, articulation, and the like are suddenly to be used in the service of blending with the piano and creating resonance that is unavailable on that instrument alone. Try, as an exercise, having your pianist play just the left hand along with the violin part, so you can coordinate these matters: you'll find, for instance, that if you really focus on supporting the piano, you'll vibrate a lot less on those long notes than you might have otherwise. One of my favorite passages for this exercise is the theme in the slow movement of the "Spring" Sonata (no. 5). Those interjected quarter-note sighs in the first iteration of the theme, and the syncopated eighth notes and gentle sixteenth-and-eighth-note rhythm when it repeats, need to be both audible and truly in the background, supporting what the soloist does without taking attention away. When the violin plays a dissonance that is absent from the piano part (the G flat in m.35, for example), it's a moment to reclaim aural focus. And even when the task isn't to play an accompaniment "with" the pianist, you can benefit from imitating the pianist's style of executing similar figures. In the slow movement of Sonata 6, don't try to sing out every sixteenth-note triplet in the arpeggiated accompaniment passage in the second half of the movement; instead, ask your pianist to play their version of that accompaniment for you, and try to imitate the lilt so easily achieved when a keyboardist plays that figuration.

Perhaps because the violinist spends so much time accompanying, I've always felt a little strange standing in front of my pianist when I play these pieces. So I generally set up the stage with the pianist in front, while I stand behind and read over their shoulder. The very nicest way to do this is to have the pianist actually facing the audience, the end of the instrument pointed directly out, with violinist standing by the pianist's left side. This is how musicians generally set up in the late 18th century, and it works beautifully in this repertoire. It makes it easier to play in the background, since the piano is, quite literally, in front--and it carries the added benefit of allowing you to actually see the pianist's left hand and adjust your playing in response. The benefits accrue everywhere, but are especially palpable when the violin and piano left hand carry joint accompaniments. Of course, being a historical performer, I'm ok doing wacky things like radically rethinking the stage setup for this music, since I'm not contending with the weight of a modern-instrument performance tradition. But as HIP practices become increasingly mainstream, even modern players might want to experiment with this setup. (And, to their great credit, many of the McGill students did this past weekend!) It really allows both players to make these pieces into the chamber masterpieces they are, rather than putting the accompanist out front while the piano soloist, in the back, does much of the work.

Another set of ideas that can help performers find their way through this music involves understanding the gestures that make up Beethoven's expressive arsenal. I hinted briefly already at the value of thinking this way, when discussing the opening "concerto" passage of Sonata 3. Once you recognize the opening four bars as sharing some elements of the "concerto" genre, your pianist might feel emboldened to play those bars out of tempo, like the quasi-cadenzas they appear to be. This idea can be generalized as follows: always ask whether the texture of a given phrase implies some performance directives. To me, the opening of Sonata 1 looks like the start of a symphony; and this means that my job as a violinist is to help the pianist sound like a full orchestra, complete with strings, winds, trumpets, and drums. This means that I'll limit the vibrato and adopt a different tone color than I would in a more melodic setting. Sonatas 2 and 6 open with what seems more a string quartet texture, with the violinist playing either second violin or second violin + viola, and this in turn carries a different set of associations for phrasing and rhythmic feel.

Nor are Beethoven's signals purely textural. Other rhetorical or expressive gestures come in the form of rhythmic patterns that suggest various dance types, which can also offer insight into tempo and phrasing. The last movement of Sonata 2 is a minuet--so, don't play it too fast, and be sure those lovely syncopations tug against the more usual downbeat-centric hierarchy. Likewise, the second movement of Sonata 8 is a minuet--in this case, don't play it too slowly! And make sure the unslurred quarter-note upbeats to the second melody are light. Other dance-like patterns found throughout these works include gigues (last movement of Sonata 1); contredanse (last movement of Sonata 3); gavotte (last movement of Sonata 8). Other rhetorical markers, meanwhile, are broader and say something about the atmosphere of a piece. Particularly well represented in this cycle are features of the "pastoral" style (drone basses, 6/8 meter, woodwind textures), which show up in Sonatas 4, 5, 8, and 10, and may suggest a less virtuosic, and more muted and intimate style, than what you often hear in modern-instrument recordings.

Of course, despite their often simple appearance on the page, these sonatas are exceptionally difficult. But I hope this brief overview of some of their expressive features helps others find a productive point of entry into Beethoven's writing for these two instruments. Although thinking of the music in such ways does not automatically disarm the technical challenges, I've found time and again that the technical difficulties become less acute with these adjustments of mindset--that accompaniment passages become a little easier to play when we stop trying to emphasize every note, and that even the flashier phrases become more approachable when we recognize them as part of an intimate dialogue with the other performer rather than as soloistic flights that demand high-octane delivery. The dance-like movements, too, become easier when we allow the gestures to have some strong notes and some weaker notes, and when we relax our sound and arms on the lighter parts of the bars. Needless to say, these are just a few of the relevant expressive issues, and there are others as well, for instance the sense of humor that imbues these sonatas, and other kinds of expressive characters. I may revisit them in a future blog--but for now, happy practicing!

Embellishing Mozart's C-major Quintet

 For many of us who play music by canonical composers like Mozart, the notated score is sacred. Our job as performers, we might think, is to realize the notation as faithfully as possible--and this means in particular that we can't just change things without Mozart's permission. But this isn't how musical scores were treated during Mozart's lifetime. It's now clear that Mozart and virtually all his contemporaries expected performers to make all kinds of changes to the music they played, especially through the insertion of elaborate cadenzas, lead-ins ("Eingänge") and embellishments.

Research into these topics has been carried out most thoroughly in studies of Mozart's keyboard music. And the practice of improvisation and embellishment in modern-day performing culture are most closely associated with keyboard players, especially Robert Levin, who has recorded highly embellished readings of Mozart's complete piano sonatas and piano concertos. (There are very few exceptions; one of them is Nils-Erik Sparf's lively and daringly unconventional recording of Mozart's violin concertos.) One reason for this keyboard-centrism is the simple, historical fact that Mozart himself identified primarily as a virtuoso pianist for much of his career, and studies of his performing practices therefore often lead back to his activities as a keyboardist. In my own recent book on Mozart, which devotes a chapter each to improvisation and embellishment, keyboard music features more centrally than string music because there's more direct evidence for Mozart's stylistic preferences, in the form of manuscript models, published variants, and pedagogical samples, in his keyboard output.

But I wonder whether there's also another, perhaps more interesting, reason that most Mozartean embellishers are keyboardists. Much of Mozart's keyboard music is written not just for a soloist playing alongside accompanying forces, but rather for an individual player, as in the piano sonatas or in so many concerto passages where the orchestra drops out and the soloist forges on alone. In such context, embellishment presents the fewest possible practical obstacles. The performer who plays entirely alone can do all sorts of things to mess with the musical text, and never needs to worry about the effect this might have on collaborators. Thus, Levin's hilarious reading of the last movement of the Sonata K.283 features madcap textural changes and transpositions, and Andreas Staier's brilliant recording of the last movement of the Sonata K.331 introduces some unexpected contrapuntal tricks during repeated passages--and these kinds of textual interventions would be impossible in the context of a work for multiple performers. For us string players, however, everything we play by Mozart is a work for multiple performers! What are we to do?

I started asking such questions in earnest last year, when I recorded Mozart's violin-viola duos (and I blogged back then about many of the performance decisions, including the embellishments and cadenzas). One of the reasons I selected those pieces as my entry-point into embellishing Mozart's string music is that the players are comparatively unconstrained. Although there are many instances of real textural complexity, there are also plenty of phrases where the violinist plays the tune and the violist accompanies. (This did not stop me from inserting a surprise viola Eingang in the first movement of the B-flat duo!) The practice of writing and performing embellishments for the duos was highly instructive--but at no point did it challenge my fundamental understanding of the topic.

This month, however, I'm performing the great String Quintet in C major, K.515, perhaps the most daring piece Mozart wrote. Part of the pleasure of doing K.515 is, of course, simply to be inside Mozart's mind at this high-point of his compositional life. A nice add-on, however, is that I get to try to embellish in a limit-case: a context where it is always stylistically appropriate but extremely difficult to pull off in a way that seems musically appropriate.

One of the hardest things about embellishing in K.515 is that counterpoint features centrally throughout the work--and this means that very few melodies can be innocently tweaked without wreaking havoc among the other players. For instance, the final theme in the first movement exposition might look like a perfect candidate for embellishment:

However, following those first four bars, the theme is immediately played in octaves between the first and second violins, and imitated contrapuntally by the first viola and cello. The first violinist can embellish mm.132-35, but short of pre-coordinating some embellishments with the other players (a no-go, since it would shatter any sense of improvisatory freedom) this would mean that the embellished theme is followed by a necessarily unembellished restatement. That's something Mozart himself rarely gives us in his composed embellishments. Embellishments are meant to ratchet up the intensity of a melody, not vanish and let the intensity wane.

Then there are passages like this:

Here, it's entirely possible to insert embellishments! First off, the violinist has four bars of sitting on a D dominant 7th chord, and can easily turn those bars into a stylistically-appropriate Eingang of some kind. I jotted this down, but the possibilities are endless:

However, problems pile up in the following phrase. Beginning in m.86, we get another melody that should be eminently embellishable: there's no immediate contrapuntal imitation, and the first violinist is just as free as any soloist, with all four other players holding long notes beneath the tune. But look closer, and once again constraints appear. The voice-leading is such that, when we move from tonic to dominant in m.87 and m.89, the first violinist still needs to hover somewhere around the fifth scale degree, as in the unembellished original. Move anywhere else and we'd hear parallel octaves, since the second violinist controls the third scale degree and the two violists control the first scale degree. What might one do? A possibility would be something like this, a chromatic wiggle that coexists with the original melody for m.86:

As far as embellishments go, I like this one--though it hardly draws attention to itself as a florid embellishment.

This previous example points to the most pervasive difficulty in embellishing Mozart's chamber music. Mozart favored an embellishment style full of chromatic sinews and twisty gestures that circle around the notes they embellish rather than connecting them in a direct scale. But introducing such winding, circuitous embellishments often brings problems of voice-leading in music so densely notated as these string quintets. This is not to say that embellishment is impossible; but the performer who wants to embellish is certainly on a leash.

In the slow movement, these effects are slightly diminished. The recurring theme calls out for embellishments, as to all repeated themes in Mozart, and here the soloistic nature of the first violin line makes intervention easier than it was in the first movement. One of the interesting questions here is how to treat the many short rests (an eighth note, a quarter note) in the first violin part--whether florid embellishments can just cross over those silences, as Mozart's own embellishments often do in his keyboard music, or whether the silences need to be observed in order to clear aural space for interjections from other players. My solution has generally been to cross over the rests; thus, this cadential figure returns twice and can be treated with various embellishments--perhaps a diatonic arpeggio on its first recurrence and a twisting, chromatic scale on its second:

Then there are passages where playful imitation occurs between the players, and embellishments in the first violin part will be a spur to creative invention for the first violist:

So far I've composed embellishments for the first violin part in the first two movements. The minuet, like the first movement, offers very few possibilities (though I'll certainly come up with some chromatic variants for the cadence gesture in m.9 (and m.23 of the Trio). But it's the last movement I'm most excited to do, where the rondo theme repeats a few times across the movement and feels very much like the soloistic rondos elsewhere in Mozart. It should offer plenty of opportunities for embellishment--and, as with the previous movements, I'm sure I'll learn a lot in the process of writing them!

In the meantime, here's a messy draft of my embellishments for the slow movement, in case others are interested in seeing them and playing them--or taking inspiration from these ideas and trying their own hands at composing different embellishments. These generally follow Mozart's melodic style as closely as possible--though I'm certain that these will change once we start rehearsing in two weeks: