BEATRICE RANA ON…

TWO LEGENDARY SONATAS

My new recording pairs two very intense works, the Beethoven ‘Hammerklavier’ and Chopin ‘Funeral March’, respectively in B flat major and B flat minor. I was inspired to put together the two B flat pieces that were revolutionary for the form of the piano sonata.

These two composers were fighting the same kind of solitude, but in extremely different ways. Beethoven was completely deaf by the time he wrote the ‘Hammerklavier’ and he was escaping his reality through the exploration of this structure. It’s amazing to see what he created in terms of its architecture.

Chopin, when he wrote the B flat minor ‘Funeral March’ Sonata, was in Majorca and going through hard times, ill with tuberculosis, feverish and driven by hallucinations during the night. When playing, he was completely obsessed by the idea of death. This work I think is revolutionary, first of all because of ideas like the fourth movement [a unique creation, it is a hushed perpetuum mobile with the hands playing in unison throughout]. I still wonder nowadays how it is possible to think of a piece like the fourth movement.

While Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ can sometimes be really difficult for listeners, Chopin is the opposite: he speaks to everyone at every level. The emotional impact of this sonata is absolutely huge and what is extraordinary is that in the central section of the Funeral March itself, he speaks with enormous power from a place of detachment, where he seems to rise beyond the purely human. Beethoven, with his feeling of solitude, goes inside himself and discovers the ‘Ubermensch’. Chopin goes exactly in the opposite direction: he elevates himself not to a human condition, but higher than it, and this is quite extraordinary to experience on stage.

One composer is obsessed by death and you understand this sense of terror up until the final note. And the other one is fighting against death with an astonishing hymn to life.