Last week we posted our 101st “Friday Performance Pick.” Hank writes the bulk of these and spends a goodly amount of time seeking engaging performances to illustrate each entry.
We often hear just how much people look forward to receiving these posts every week, using them both for their individual musical pleasure and as resources for teaching. We’re so glad that kind of reception has developed and rejoice in the technology that allows it to happen.
But, really, 101 of them? How did that happen?
The number 101 triggers two things in my mind. First, the fact that things sometime begin small and amplify far beyond expectations. When we started posting “Friday Performance Picks,” we were trying out an idea. In fact, truth be told, that’s how I felt when we published our signature course, Discovering Music: “Let’s create a music/arts/history course and see what happens!” Well, what happened is our present “Professor Carol” endeavor, which opened up an entirely new focus in our lives.
But isn’t that the natural way things do develop? You scatter some seeds and end up with a luscious border of day lilies. You buy some mason jars and, next thing you know, you are canning your family’s vegetables and teaching others to do so. You take a weekend class on basics of drawing and find yourself embracing Renaissance art as your life’s new passion.
So here’s to the 101 Performance Picks! They covering nearly every type of music. If you’re ever trapped on a desert island (with a way to click on them), you’ll get quite a tour through about 800 years of music.
Photo: Yair-haklai (CC BY-SA 3.0)
But, as I said, the number 101 brought two things to my mind. The second is a specific Beethoven piano sonata, published in 1817 as Opus 101. An opus number is a publication number (think of it as a kind of musical volume number), so this sonata appeared as Beethoven’s 101st published work.
Sometimes an opus contains multiple pieces such as the six string quartets published as Opus 18. But Opus 101 is a single work—a quirky, enigmatic sonata written at age 46 when Beethoven was focused on composing a series of abstract, somewhat disorienting pieces. The titles sounded conventional (piano sonatas, string quartets, the 9th Symphony), but their forms and inner construction pushed the listener into uncharted territories. Most were not well received.
I learned Opus 101 as part of my recital work while earning a performance masters degree back in the mid 1970s. I didn’t particularly want to play it. My heart and soul were flung into Russian and Soviet repertoire. I chafed at every hour I had to veer away from practicing works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, or Rachmaninov. A late Beethoven sonata? Please, let someone else do it!
But my teacher pushed the issue. She didn’t have to “push” too hard. She simply opened Volume II of the Beethoven Sonatas to the first movement of Opus 101 and said, “Here, I want you to learn this.”
I was baffled. It opens with a short, lyrical movement that sounds as if the unsettled melody ran in from back stage, slightly out of breath. Just about the time it establishes its tone, the next movement comes roaring in—a gleeful, jaunty march. After that, another brief movement, enigmatic and painfully slow. And then, suddenly, after a transition full of trills, the listener is dropped into a powerful, quintessential Beethoven conclusion, where structure is clear, ideas are sophisticated, and passages brilliantly virtuosic.
Beethoven’s audiences were perplexed by his late works like Opus 101. It took another decade for me to step back in wonder at Opus 101. Finally I could see what its pages contained. I could start to imagine what it meant for this odd, distressed man to intellectualize classical form and move beyond the accepted rules of composition, replacing them with a freedom hitherto unknown.
So bravo to you Hank, for giving us 101 “Friday Performance Picks.” And thank you, Ludwig van Beethoven, for sloughing through a difficult life and leaving behind arguably the most astonishing music legacies ever created, up to and beyond your masterful Opus 101.
