(318): The Garden of the Endless Clavier: Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata №8, Op. 13 in C minor, 1st movement
The catharsis of human joining with the instrument in perfect flow — a post for alto’s Tuesday Quotable theme “the music that moves us.”
I haven’t played piano in many years, partially because I haven’t had access to one in forever. But when I had one in my house, way back in the 1980s, I would retreat to it to immerse myself in a purely solitary musical experience. At the time, I had a small repertoire of pieces that I would play to provide a sort of meditative experience. They would empty my mind of the slings and arrows of the day and fill me with the joy of making music.
Foremost among them was Beethoven’s Sonata no. 8, Op. 13 in C minor (the Pathetique), particularly the 1st movement, although I enjoyed playing all three movements. I had memorized the first movement, so I found myself falling into the piano as if I were melded with it, a feeling I remember with fondness and not a little longing.
I can only describe it as a perfect joining of keyboard, fingers, mind and body. It was beyond the experience I could possibly have by simply listening to a recording of the music. I was the music. Of course, I was far from a virtuoso; but I was proficient enough that the music and the process of making it transported me to a realm beyond mere enjoyment.
I miss having a piano in the house. The closest thing I have to one is in my husband’s storage/office. It is an upright antique organ (broken, like so much of the stuff he buys at yard sales). It is almost impossible to access currently. Sometimes I wish he would bring it in to the main house so I could play it, but we’re so stuffed in here already, I don’t even think I’ll go there. (Maybe we could exchange one of the Victrolas in the living room? Yes, we have two in there. One works barely, and the other works a little better than barely). But I digress.
There is a very different feeling, one I remember when I hear this particular piece of Beethoven’s, of oneness with the instrument, a feeling of floating separate from the world, almost as if the world did not exist. It took all my concentration and expertise at the time, and I doubt I could even make a go of it today. The last time I played it in full was probably the 1990s.
This particular piece of music was my younger self’s moving meditation, long before I shifted to the full-body combat meditation of martial arts. It embodied an era, a stratum of my consciousness. Any time I hear it, I can feel the doorknob turning on a particular room in my memory palace, the one marked “hopes and dreams,” a time when I entertained thoughts of becoming a musician. I think of lost opportunities, many times I fell short, but also I think of those wondrous solitary sound-filled moments with the piano, sometimes locked in at midnight in a college practice room, back when I couldn’t sleep and dared to wander the long-ago campus at small hours.
As this is a Tuesday quotable, and the Pathetique sonata has no words, I’ll close with a quote from the composer himself:
“To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.” — Ludwig van Beethoven
