Opus 109 (Beethoven | Bach | Schubert)

In the summer of 1819, Beethoven left the library of the Archduke Rudolph of Austria clutching a stack of works by Johann Sebastian Bach. His visit matched a pattern of lifelong learning which began with childhood studies of Bach’s preludes and fugues, and included forensic dissections of the composer’s complex counterpoint. Víkingur Ólafsson’s latest recording explores the many strands of influence that connect Bach to Beethoven’s Op. 109, the first of his last three piano sonatas. The Icelandic pianist’s programme also draws parallels between two exquisite works in the key of E minor: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 90, completed when the composer was in his forties, and the teenaged Schubert’s Sixth Piano Sonata. The idea for the album emerged from Ólafsson’s deep immersion in Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which he toured and recorded over the course of a year. Performing this towering monument of western classical music prompted him to contemplate how the infinitely subtle process of variation in music mirrors that of variation in life and nature. During the search for his next recording project, he sensed the presence of the Goldbergs in Beethoven’s late piano sonatas. He chose, however, not to record all three at once but rather to place Op. 109 within the context of music by Bach and Schubert. “Spending a year with Bach has re-calibrated how I think about music,” Víkingur Ólafsson tells Apple Music Classical. “I hear everything differently now, I hear everything more polyphonically. I have many more new ideas than I used to, and experience the texture of music in a completely different way. Music to me is now almost like a puppet theatre, where all the voices are so alive. That’s what Bach does to you. The texture for me becomes much more biodynamic, much more organic, like a living mechanism. I felt like that when I was playing the pieces on this album.” Ólafsson’s characterisation of Bach’s contrapuntal lines gives an independent spirit to each. Above all, there’s a vitality to his interpretation of the Partita No. 6 that transcends debates about historical performance practices. “The ‘Corrente’ is so jazzy,” he says. “How modern is that? And despite the Romantic revolution in Beethoven’s music, I still think Bach is the most modern composer on this album. He wins the day in terms of modernity. He does outrageous things here. Listen to the ‘Gigue’. I mean, what on earth is going on? A gigue in four-time with that kind of dissonance. Whoa! That’s incredible.” He notes how his perspective on Beethoven’s Op. 109 altered while he was working on Bach’s Partita. The Sonata, composed in 1820, ends with an exquisite theme and set of six variations in which Bach-like counterpoint takes a prominent part. “It’s very interesting to play Op. 109 after the Bach.” The Sonata’s second movement, adds Ólafsson, feels like a Baroque tarantella. “He writes this very intense three- and four-part Baroque texture here. Sure, he’s pushing some of his expression into the Romantic piano. But the feel is of Bach and Baroque strictness. And that third movement theme is one of the most beautiful things Beethoven ever wrote, possibly the most beautiful thing. It recalls the Goldberg Variations in the way the theme returns at the very end. It’s the only time in Beethoven’s life where he does this.” Ólafsson learned invaluable lessons before recording his album while playing on a Broadwood piano belonging to Peterhouse College in Cambridge. The recently restored instrument, made in 1816, is near-identical to the one delivered to Beethoven in Vienna two years before he wrote his Op. 109. “It changed the way I think about the music, especially about the way Beethoven notated his late sonatas, which are rather extreme in dynamic markings, in articulation, in everything. While I prefer the modern piano, there’s so much beauty in this instrument. I loved it! But you have to play it with an added degree of clarity. So maybe what seem like extreme markings in the score come from this. It’s OK, and perhaps essential to translate some of that into the reality of the modern piano.” Bach and Beethoven, notes Ólafsson, were rooted in music’s formal conventions. Yet they were not constrained by them. “What makes Beethoven Beethoven is that he always questioned every single element in every piece he wrote, or at least in 95 per cent of his works,” he says. “He takes nothing for granted. And I would say Bach does the same in his Partita. But Beethoven is the first composer who always pushes against the framework and asks, ‘Who are you, Mr Frame, to imprison me?’” Mould-breaking tendencies also surface in Schubert’s 1817 Piano Sonata No. 6, composed just three years after Beethoven’s Op. 90 Sonata. Víkingur Ólafsson rejects the suggestion that Schubert’s two-movement work is incomplete, and dismisses attempts by later editors to enlarge the work with other pieces by the composer. “I would take this to court,” he asserts. “I believe it is complete in two movements. This sonata, which Schubert wrote so soon after Beethoven published his Op. 90, is obviously a nod to the great master. I’m convinced about that. I mean, why can’t we have a sonata in two movements? Especially since this one is so obviously speaking to the two movements of Beethoven’s Op. 90. I’m waiting for people to tell me that I’m wrong about this, but no one has. So let’s see.”