'The nearest to God we get': stars pick the Beethoven work they cherish
‘Breathtaking and indispensible’
Alan Hollinghurst, authorBeethoven is a master of compaction and urgency, and more than any other composer he writes startlingly moving fast music. The third movement of the Op 95 string quartet, “vivace ma serioso”, sums it up. I love this quartet for its intensity and compression, the absence of expected repeats which throws you into a “now or never” relationship with the material, and the gripping but mysterious drama of the whole thing. It may lack the aura of the late quartets, started 15 years later, but to me is just as breathtaking and indispensable.
‘So modern and unexpected’
Sheila Hancock, actorIn my early music-loving days, I thought Beethoven was a bit bombastic, a bit heroic, a bit, well, big. It was John [Hancock’s late husband, actor John Thaw] who first switched me on to Beethoven, and now I’ve completely changed my mind. This anniversary year, particularly, with the huge amount of his music on Radio 3, I have been staggered by its variety and its subtlety. John used to perform with the Medici Quartet on a programme in which the quartet would play Beethoven’s music and he would read from the letters. He so loved doing these – he would come back each night after a show in total ecstasy.
The piece I have to pick as my favourite is the Cavatina from the string Quartet, Op 130. It is possibly one of the greatest pieces of music ever. It is so modern and unexpected – you never know what he’s going to do next. The Medicis performed this at John’s memorial service in 2002. We had lots of funny things that day – there was an arrangement of The Sun Has Got His Hat On, which John would sing and dance to if things got edgy on set, and funny tributes – then suddenly there was this moment of utter beauty with this magical piece of music, something that was the soul of John.
Music is a great comfort to me at the moment, while in isolation. I have Radio 3 on all the time and I desperately try not to listen to the news. On the night of Brexit, while some people were celebrating and others were having wakes, I stayed in and played Beethoven, his quartets mainly, into the small hours of the morning.
I’ve been having spiritual talks recently with a fellow Quaker, trying to define what people call God. I would say that Beethoven’s late string quartets are the nearest to God that we’ll ever get. Their delicacy and intricacy and sheer beauty – can you believe this man was deaf when he wrote them?
‘A much-needed friend’
Kieran Hodgson, comedianIn the loneliest time of my life, Beethoven kept me company. A languages student, I was spending a year in Besançon, France, working and, improbably, living in a massive school known as “the factory”. Each evening, I was left to rattle around the deserted corridors like a ghost, until I discovered the cavernous sallepolyvalenteand its grand piano. At six o’clock sharp for three months I would sign out the key and spend an hour on the first movement of the Piano Sonata No 5 in C minor. Arpeggio target practice galore, a great party piece – and a much-needed friend.
‘It was love at first listen’
Laura Wade, playwrightI first came across the Violin Sonata, Op 47, the “Kreutzer”, when asked by the Australian Chamber Orchestra to write a play to be performed alongside it, taking inspiration from Tolstoy’s 1889 novella The Kreutzer Sonata. It was love at first listen. In Tolstoy’s novella, a husband suspects his wife, a talented amateur pianist, of having an affair with the violinist with whom she is playing the Kreutzer. Driven mad by the music, he murders her in a jealous rage.
The story is queasily fascinated by the power of music to arouse passion, and when listening to the piece you can sense where the husband’s suspicions come from. Just as we endlessly speculate over the chemistry between highly skilled actors playing a love scene, it’s hard not to read the dialogue between the violin and piano parts as an expression of a deeper synchronicity. We are eavesdropping on the best kind of conversation, between two people who are high on each other – riffing off each other’s ideas, each taking the other one’s phrase, turning it around and sending it back brighter each time, building and building.
It’s famously difficult to perform – I imagine it brings the players out in a sweat. The violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, to whom the sonata was dedicated, called it “outrageously unintelligible” and refused to perform it. I’m glad other musicians have been less squeamish because I would happily be transported by this piece every day.
‘Written after recovering from an intestinal disorder’
Katie Mitchell, director
Beethoven String Quartet in A minor, Op 132 – written in 1825 after he recovered from a nearly fatal intestinal disorder – is my favourite because of its strange third movement. Marked molto adagio, it is about 20 minutes long (depending on your recording) and alternates between slow funereal sections in the key of F and joyful fast movements in D marked “Neue Kraft Fuhlend”, or “feeling new strength”. It is these unexpected leaps of regrowth coming out of the slow sad sections that always fill me with possibility if I am feeling low. A study in hope.
‘Passages of aching beauty’
Timberlake Wertenbaker, playwrightIt’s very difficult to choose a favourite piece by Beethoven. One of the late quartets? The “Ghost” trio?
I have a particular fondness for the Choral Fantasy, especially the end, because it’s so wild and full of hope, and because Beethoven first played it himself and apparently improvised some of it.
In the end, my favourite Beethoven has to be Fidelio. An opera set in a prison that is about a political prisoner incarcerated for wanting to reveal corruption has a very contemporary resonance. The heroine is active, intelligent and doesn’t even have to die in the end. It has passages of aching beauty, the finale of course, and earlier on, a brief moment when the prisoners come up into the air and are able “to breathe again”. Apt words, especially these days.
‘I first heard it at an afterparty’
Ragnar Kjartansson, artistThe Seventh Symphony, the Allegretto in the second movement comes to mind immediately. It sounds like death and life and love and everything in between! I first heard it at an afterparty in Reykjavík many years ago. Among the much younger people hanging out at the bar was an old man, too. He invited everyone to his home, where he played the Allegretto on a 1960s stereo for us all. It was dramatic and powerful
and just so beautiful – I loved it immediately. The movement is a crazy memento mori, it has this curve of longing in it. I also like that you can really hear Handel’s Sarabande in it – it’s almost like a remix of it. I don’t have a favourite recording – I’m not enough of a connoisseur that I can hear nuances of interpretation. Besides, you can’t screw this piece up.
‘I am listening to an opus every day for a month’
Ali Smith, authorI spent a lot of my life believing classical music wasn’t really for me. Then about a decade ago I began listening to a piece of Beethoven every day. I’d heard pieces and been astonished; as modernist as Frank Gehry architecture, as timeless as things dug up in Greece from millennia ago, as uncompromising as history, as inventive and colourful as Picasso and Hockney. But I’d no idea where to start. So I began at Opus 1, listened to it every day for a month, then Opus 2 the next month. And so on.
It’s not a real chronology, but it gave me a way in, has introduced me to a lot of Beethoven that isn’t commonly listened to, and it’s never not been enlightening, exciting, and a fusion of pleasure and meditation – your mind opens and dimensionalises as you listen, whatever it is, it’ll be layered with an understanding of societal negotiation and of the heft, the shadow and the forward push of time.
Right now I’m on Op 117, the overture to Konig Stephan, with its formal double-take, its suggestion of time slippage. My favourites over the decade? The piano sonatas. The piano concertos. The symphonies. (I’m looking forward to a month with the Ninth.)
And The Creatures of Prometheus. Life, joy.
‘Painfully beautiful’
Es Devlin, artist and set designerMy first encounter with Beethoven was in a community centre in Hastings, sitting at the back of the second violin section in the town’s youth orchestra. My mum would drive me and my sister the 12 miles from Rye every Tuesday night. It was usually dark at 5pm and mainly raining, windscreen wipers going full pelt – and in my memory we always practised the Egmont Overture.
I was not the most virtuosic violin player, but I loved being part of a collective sound. I could never quite fathom how my scratched bowing could meld with everyone else’s contribution to become this overwhelming surroundsound that seemed to be so much greater and more magnificent than the sum of all of our wet Hastings Tuesday-night souls.
My most recent encounter with Beethoven was on another rainy night on a rooftop carpark in Peckham, the site of Hannah Barry’s Bold Tendencies art project. We had edited theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time into a 24-minute large-scale digital artwork. Part of Carlo’s text invokes the painfully beautiful lead violin part in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis Benedictus, and our composers, Polyphonia, had extracted the solo violin and reset it to accompany the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch reading Rovelli’s meditation on time. In this context, as 2,000 of us including Carlo himself stood on a south London rooftop reading his profound text on the nature of time, beneath the relentless downpour, Beethoven’s music felt almost excruciatingly moving.
‘A celebration of hope’
Tony Hall, director general BBCIn 2004 I went to South Africa to see Cape Town Opera mark 10 years of democracy with a production of Fidelio on Robben Island. I had the privilege of being guided around by former ANC prisoners before the performance and was shown the cell where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years in captivity. It’s always a tricky opera, but as night fell, against the backdrop of a spectacular sunset, the prisoners emerged singing that famous chorus on to a stage set in the real-life prison courtyard. It was unforgettably moving – a celebration of hope and liberation in the most powerful setting possible.
‘I hear their sadness more clearly now’
Michael Craig-Martin, artistI first heard Beethoven’s Late Quartets at the 92nd Street Y in New York in 1960 when I was a student. I love the clarity and intimacy of chamber music because one can “see” the music being made, and can focus on the contribution of each musician and instrument to the ensemble. The Late Quartets were found unintelligible and dismissed at the time, but proved to be prophetic about the future development of music. They are filled with emotion and the experience of a lifetime. I hear their sadness more clearly now, particularly at this time, than I did at 20.
‘A passionate attack on injustice’
Lady Brenda Hale, former president of the Supreme CourtTwo of Beethoven’s works mean something special to me. One is his Grosse Fuge: a magnificent striding fugue that I used to march round my college room in time to, learning my notes for the Cambridge Law Tripos. The other is his only opera, Fidelio.I first saw this in the
Vienna Opera House, a suitably grand setting for a great operatic experience. It is a passionate attack on injustice, autocratic and unaccountable power, and secret prisoners, conquered by the power of the love of a wonderful and courageous woman. My favourite is the vocal quartet Mir ist so wunderbar, four completely incompatible views of what is going on, intricately woven together.
‘Genius in ruins’
Edmund de Waal, artist and authorBeethoven’s Grosse Fuge in B flat major, Op 133 of 1826, was “incomprehensible, like Chinese” according to the critics of the time. It was “a confusion of Babel”. There were passages that could be understood but seemed to have no structure, no development. It was genius in ruins. It was chaotic, angry, complex. Sylvia Plath in her poem Little Fugue on her father and death writes of “The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge”, a deep and dark and forbidding barrier: “He could hear Beethoven: / Black yew, white cloud, / The horrific complications. / Finger-traps—a tumult of keys.” Lateness needs a response, an understanding of how much is left to achieve. Beethoven’s lateness is powerful because it does not seek resolution. This is why I return to it again and again.
‘Played as bombs rained down’
Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National GalleryA few weeks after the beginning of the second world war, Kenneth Clark, the director of the National Gallery, asked the pianist Myra Hess to organise some musical concerts in the empty rooms, the pictures having been removed for safekeeping. The very first concert she gave was – perhaps surprisingly for us – almost entirely Germanic music, and included one of Hess’s favourite works, Beethoven’s
“Appassionata” sonata. This is a big showy piece (the F minor key allowed Beethoven to use the entire range of the keyboard from the very bottom note); it is difficult, brooding, brilliant and passionate as its (later) title indicates. Clark said that as she played the opening bars: “It was an assurance that all our sufferings were not in vain.” The story of how these lunchtime concerts helped keep up Londoners’ spirits as the bombs rained down is enduringly inspiring.
‘Forever modern’
Leon Bosch, double bassist
The Grosse Fuge is still absolutely shocking, almost like contemporary music to anybody and it’s always going to sound modern. Every great composer since then has always remarked on that characteristic and for me it also exemplifies Beethoven the human being, that he never accepted the status quo and he always struggled. Let’s not forget that he was virtually penniless for most of his life and that he did what he believed in rather than what was expected, and for me this piece exemplifies the essence of his personality. He never loses contact with the idea that music is the expression in sound of human life, and human life can be shocking, and in this piece he shocks us, but also gives us moments of great tenderness and beauty.
• The Proms begins on 17 July on Radio 3 and on the Proms website with a Beethoven weekend including great Proms performances of his music. On 17 July, a virtual orchestra performs the world premiere of Beethoveniana by Iain Farrington. Being Beethoven is on BBC Four and iPlayer.