A critic writes: Mr. X has not been faithful to the score of Beethoven’s Opus Y. A critic writes: What Beethoven put down on paper is beyond the capacity of the human hand to transmit through the keyboard. He presumes that the pianist has deviated from the score because he cannot conquer it. But this is usually nonsense, for pianists today have developed technique to the point where they can waltz through the most outrageous passages. A case in point is Van Cliburn who makes the Romantics and the moderns seem facile, but goes nowhere with earlier music.
The liberties taken with Beethoven are imposed by the mind, not the fingers. To play him meaningfully, one must be possessed—as he was possessed—by passion and logic, by angels and devils, by tenderness and joy and the tragic sense of life. For the Beethoven piano sonatas, particularly the last three, are more than music. They are metaphysics translated into sound—and the cascading demisemiquavers, the page-long trills, the tortured fugues, and the Gott-betrunkener adagios and cantabiles speak differently to each interpreter. Composer and pianist must fuse into one being before they meet in the confessional of the sonatas.
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