Above; La Sonate à Kreutzer, René François Xavier Prinet, 1901 (cc)
With the ingenuity borne of a lockdown, the Melbourne Digital Concert Hall presented Beethoven's watershed Sonata No. 9, Op. 47, the Kreutzer Sonata (1803) and his earlier Sonata No.3 Op. 12 (1798). The concert, broadcast live from the empty Zenith Theatre in Sydney, was performed by Madeleine Easton, Bach Akademie Australia’s violin virtuoso and Clemens Leske, pianist with the Omega Ensemble.
The Kreutzer is a particularly revolutionary piece. It's a portent of the great symphonies Beethoven was yet to produce. Embracing humanity's inner passions and energies, it's a culturally significant piece, with impacts over time, and across creative endeavours in and beyond music.
Sonata in E Flat Major Op. 12 No. 3
Sonata No. 9 in A major Op. 47, The Kreutzer Sonata
Zenith Theatre, Sydney
Wednesday, August 18, 2021, 7:00 PM
presented by Melbourne Digital Concert Hall
Concert notes by Madeleine Easton
"Beethoven's ten sonatas for piano and violin represent a high watermark for the genre. Here, the composer takes the baton from Mozart and treats each instrument equally, freely apportioning the share of thematic material..."
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Zenith Theatre, Sydney
Clemens Leske (photo: Keith Saunders)
Madeleine Easton
Madeleine Easton, a seasoned Baroque specialist, has toured and worked extensively with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, one of the world’s foremost exponents of Baroque and early music. Easton’s collaborator is Clemens Leske, a pianist with the Omega Ensemble, lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium, and featured soloist with all seven Australian symphony orchestras.
The Kreutzer Sonata is a piece where two instruments —the violin and piano—take equal billing. It’s a thrilling piece with near-orchestral ambitions. Through their instruments, the players alternately duel, gambol, tease, tantalise, aggravate and embrace each other. The Kreutzer is a piece realised only with two equally accomplished principals.
The Kreutzer Sonata brings forth Beethoven’s fevered Romantic mindscape at a key staging point in his creative development. Leaving behind ordered classicism, he engages an often asymmetrical, discordant soundscape to achieve hitherto inexpressible emotions and passions. He is travelling lightyears beyond the Baroque world of Bach, and any quest for Palladian perfection predicated on divine order.
Beethoven first performed the Kreutzer Sonata in Vienna in 1803. In the wake of the French Revolution, Europe was convulsing with change. Napoleon’s armies were on the move, demolishing the old order wherever they went.
Beethoven had greatly admired Napoleon until he, like so many before him, succumbed to the seductions of power by declaring himself Emperor. But revolution was in the air; the human psyche was released. Beethoven sought to enjoin humankind to their newfound freedoms within a radically reframed universe. Ambitious? Certainly!
1803 was Beethoven’s year of affirmation and the Kreutzer Sonata proclaims his clear intent. For several years, advancing deafness had plunged him into an existential crisis. He expressed his angst in an unsent suicide note to his brothers. In it, he assigned his well-known grumpiness and misanthropic behaviours to the travails of his advancing condition. By 1803, Beethoven understood that complete deafness was to be his fate. With some acceptance, he retreated from the abyss, knowing that he had much yet to achieve. The Kreutzer Sonata was Beethoven’s riposte to the cruelties of fate. It was his opening gambit for the soon to follow Symphony No. 3, The Eroica, the first entirely Romantic symphony.
The first of the Kreutzer's three movements is its most revolutionary. The second takes a reflective step back, while the third takes a somewhat jaunty dash home. Both instruments introduce themselves with notes that barely exist. It’s quickly apparent that Classical beauty and precision is not Beethoven’s purpose; he's more concerned with expounding on profundity and depth; fragility and strength; hope and uncertainty. It's humankind expressed and free.
A non-musical ear today, can easily miss Beethoven’s revolutionary ambitions. If his trade was visual rather than aural, then the Kreutzer probably anticipates levels of abstraction seen in the art of a Kandinsky or Chagall a century later. Beethoven may even be approximating the abstract expressionists later on again.
Above: George Bridgetower by Henry Edridge, 1790 (cc)
Above: Ludwig van Beethoven by Joseph Mähler 1804/1805 (cc)
The Kreutzer Sonata has resonated down through the years, infusing various creative endeavours with a potency that remains primed. Beethoven’s collaborator for the Kreutzer was George Bridgetower, a charismatic part West Indian violin virtuoso, visiting from London. Beethoven originally dedicated the Sonata to Bridgetower, who joined him for the first performance in the Augarten, a Baroque garden in Vienna.
These were two huge personalities, well-suited for musical duelling. By all accounts, the premiere was a rousing, even boisterous affair. Beethoven had barely completed his provisional score, which left Bridgetower with little time to rehearse. He sight-read some parts he was seeing for the first time. He also had to improvise some of the phrasings. Beethoven felt that Bridgetower’s innovations were brilliant. He left his position at the piano mid-performance to warmly embrace his friend as a valued colleague.
Almost predictably, Beethoven soon withdrew his dedication, believing Bridgetower had slighted one of his female friends. Today, the times beg for Bridgetower's full restitution. He was born in Poland to a German-Polish mother. His West Indian father, a court musician, promoted himself as an African prince. Like Mozart’s father, he paraded his son as a child prodigy through the courts and salons of Europe. And a prodigy he was.
In England, young Bridgetower distanced his father, to flourish under the patronage and tutelage of the Prince Regent himself (later George IV). He learned from the best in London, earned a music degree from Cambridge, and served as principal violinist in the Prince’s orchestra.
Meanwhile, Beethoven reassigned the Sonata’s dedication to Parisian musical administrator and composer, Rudolphe Kreutzer, conferring on him undue fame. However, Kreutzer was far from grateful for the unsought honour. He didn’t like the piece and declared it to be unplayable.
Conversely, in withdrawing his original dedication, Beethoven’s seems to have consigned Bridgetower to eternity as a historical footnote. Legend has it that in 1860, Bridgetower died penniless in England. However, he appears to have left a legacy of £1000, an ample amount to survive those Dickensian times.
Any restoration of Bridgetower’s reputation and his extraordinary tale is purpose-ready for today's audiences. Perhaps he could be revived via a Netflix series. Having performed in Regency London and Bath, maybe Bridgetower could be a follow-up to Bridgerton! After all, his is a true story—which surely trumps fiction.
Below: Tolstoy by Ilya Repin, 1891 (cc)
Below: Poster for Die Kreutzersonate, 1922 German silent film (cc)
Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, saw Beethoven’s expressions of passionate energies, in terms of dangerous and unbridled sexual fervour. In Tolstoy's irregular spiritual belief system, all sex was craven and debauched, even in marriage. The passions implicit in the Kreutzer entirely overcame the abstinent aesthete. To Tolstoy’s aging ears, Beethoven’s music manifested sexual congress itself.
In 1889, Tolstoy published his own Kreutzer Sonata as a novella. In it, he tells of a husband who returns home late, finding his wife together with a handsome virtuoso, playing Beethoven's Sonata. To Tolstoy's character, playing the potent piece alone with another man was proof enough of adultery. Having caught the couple in flagrante, the husband turns on his wife, murdering her in a fit of jealous rage. He then claims he couldn’t be bothered chasing the violinist.
Through his novella, Tolstoy professes to support the advancement of women, yet his writings display deep misogyny. He believed that women were the natural possessors of deep sexual desires that seek to destroy men; desires men must extinguish.
In the 1920s, Czech composer, Leos Janacek, composed his own Kreutzer Sonata as a quartet. Creatively, Janacek sought inspiration from the Slavic east, rather than the nearby Germanic world. He picked up on Tolstoy’s expressions of heightened emotion and dramatic urgency. But his Kreutzer incorporates a radically more positive and sensitive response to feminine sensuality. His piece engages with feminine sexuality, alternating from vulnerable to expressive, to contemplative to withdrawn. References to Beethoven's second movement conveys the certainty of consummation.
Selling luxe
For the 1901 Paris Salon, artist-academician René François Xavier Prinet entered his melodramatic rendition of Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata. In another change of fortune associated with the Kreutzer legacy, perfume house Dana, conferred mass-marketing immortality on Prinet’s overripe image. In 1941, their New York marketeers selected the image to promote Dana’s scent, Tabu—the hidden fragrance. Originating ten years earlier in Barcelona, Dana retained the Spanish spelling of taboo as it dodged wars, moving first to Paris and then onto New York. The retained spelling is the same Captain Cook gave the original Tongan word when he introduced it to English in 1771. The reproducibility and reach of Dana's marketing activities over the following decades ensured ubiquity and fame for a somewhat dated image.
Magazine ads for Tabu perfume from the 40s and 50s, incorporating Prinet's, The Kreutzer Sonata, 1901 (HP Prints)
The Kreutzer Sonata is a Russian doll fashioned from human passions and energies. Left to roll down the corridors of time, it points first to Beethoven's future creative developments. Over time, it has shed its aspects across different countries and cultures. It has infused various creative modes and lent itself for a range of purposes. Today, it remains potently poised to imbue many of humankind's ever-shifting self-reflections on meaning and purpose.
The Mount Olympus for all who perform it...—Midori
Link to ABC Classic; Beethoven 250