Music that Changed Me
Pianist Jonathan Biss
Jonathan Biss is an international piano soloist, author and co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, US. His life and career are inextricably linked with the music of Beethoven, whose complete piano sonatas he has recorded over the past nine years. He is performing them all throughout the 2019-20 season as part of the 250th-anniversary celebrations.
Music was always around me. My parents – the violist and violinist Paul Biss and the violinist Miriam Fried – practised at home, so there was music coming from both ends of the house. But the first complete pieces I recall hearing were the MOZART and Brahms clarinet quintets which they performed in concert when I was five. The Mozart made a huge impact on me – I remember the second theme of the first movement and where I was sitting in the hall with way more precision than I remember anything else from that time in my life. I was six when I started playing the piano and I was probably no more than 11 when I began playing chamber music at home with my parents. My mother and I have been playing recitals together since I was in my early twenties.
As a young pianist I loved Schumann and Chopin but BEETHOVEN came into my life very early. I was so obsessed by a recording of the Appassionata Sonata by Rudolph Serkin that I wore out the cassette tape. I was desperate to play it myself but it was beyond me; I was not that kind of prodigious kid. The first Beethoven sonata I did play was Op. 26, when I was about ten. I can honestly say that there wasn’t a single point between then and now that I wasn’t working on Beethoven. He was literally a constant presence in my life. Why? Because the force of personality is so enormous, the need to be listened to is so huge with Beethoven. Then there’s his spirituality – he is addressing the biggest question of his place in the universe and he does so with such profundity that to listen is to his music is to be in contact with something much bigger than we are.
My relationship with Beethoven is immersive but not exclusive! There has to be some SCHUMANN on my list and I’ve chosen his Davidsbündlertänze. I loved many of Schumann’s big piano cycles as a teenager because he expressed to me, and still does, something of what it means to be alone. We all have this experience of loneliness but Schumann was somehow able to put it in sound: his music speaks to a part of me that would go silent otherwise.
Pianist Mitsuko Uchida has been an extremely inspiring person in my life because of her commitment to both making and exploring music. Her desire to know and understand better the pieces that she loves has become a model for me. I think of a performance she gave recently of the Schubert E flat major trio, which seems to suit her personality. I have known this trio forever, but I haven’t played it. It looms so large, it is so grand in one way yet so inward in another that it has drawn me and intimidated me in equal measure.
Last summer at the Marlboro Music Festival Mitsuko and I performed SCHUBERT’S Divertissement à la hongroise. There are three huge volumes of his fourhand music, and normally when pianists get together they’ll play the big ones like the Fantasy in F minor. You see a piece like the Divertissement, you assume it’s fluffy and you just skip it, but this has a depth of feeling that is impossible to describe.
I do listen to non-classical music for pleasure, but I think classical music can also be incredibly fun and funny – it’s an undervalued and, in fact, essential aspect of the art form. Composers such as Haydn, Mendelssohn and Dvorák are undervalued masters; their ability to make us laugh and bring us joy is treasurable.
If I had to choose a second piece of BEETHOVEN in his 250th-anniversary year, it would be the Cavatina from the Op. 130 String Quartet. It’s hard to boil Beethoven down to an essence, but in the Cavatina he’s expressing something so personal and so intimate and so difficult, but in the loftiest possible way. He apparently couldn’t listen to it without being moved to tears – and I can’t either.