Pianist of Laughter

Did Beethoven ever write bad music? Alfred Brendel, the 20th-century piano virtuoso, assures us that he did.

Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel died at the age of 94. This is a photo of his last performance in Vienna in December 2008 - Photo: AFP

He is said to be the first pianist to record Beethoven's complete solo piano works. But he himself says he is not.

He did not record them all. He omitted some pieces which he thought could have been done by his contemporaries or students practicing composition without Beethoven.

Digging up the humor

There are probably not many people who dare to "criticize" Beethoven. But there are certainly even fewer who dare to interpret Beethoven's works in his later years as "a collection of humorous aspects of music".

Brendel might remind us of a musical Milan Kundera, for like Kundera, he devotes a scholarly and intellectual attention to laughter, to nonsense, to triviality.

In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera argues that the emergence of the first novelists is linked to the invention of humor.

Brendel is no exception, he always finds hidden humor in seemingly serious pieces of music in the most serious field, classical music.

He saw in Haydn "the master of daring and surprise." He saw in Beethoven frivolity and mischief.

With Für Elise, for example, Beethoven's lyrical, passionate, yet somewhat "dramatic" bagatelle appears playful and witty under Brendel's fingers.

But the music of Mozart, whom we often consider the most frivolous and cheerful, Brendel says is not humorous at all.

In a lecture on the unseriousness of classical music, Brendel quotes a maxim from Pliny the Younger: "I laugh, I joke, I play, I am a man." It seems to imply that if you laugh, you will joke, you will play (the piano), and you will become a man.

Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 32 - Alfred Brendel

The most refreshing laughter

Brendel did not play music until his last breath. Before he turned 80, he said goodbye to music. When he said goodbye to music, he said that concerts were becoming too much for him, but "I still laugh - not as much as before, but enough to survive".

In his house hung a painting of a pianist laughing hysterically, surrounded by an attentive and tense audience. We think of entering a theater as entering a cathedral, we bring all our solemnity to respectfully bow our heads to the music as if bowing to a god, and the artist is a prophet preaching to us on behalf of the god.

But who knows? Who knows, maybe the artist, like Brendel, is actually secretly joking, secretly laughing with the music, and it's just us who think everything in the theater is serious.

Alfred Brendel has just passed away at the age of 94. Besides being a pianist, Alfred Brendel was also a great essayist on art, a poet with his own mark.

In a poem about the afterlife, Brendel imagines that people can redeem themselves after death: "Beethoven, for example,/ could be redeemed on the other side/ as a baker/ who throws dough into the oven with a rage that has become familiar."

He humorously compared the master's sonatas to pretzels, and his Bagatelles to poppy seed buns.

And what about Brendel? Now that he's gone, how will he "redeem" his life? We don't know, but whatever he becomes other than a pianist, he'll probably do it with a good laugh.

"It seems to me that there is little point in rescuing from oblivion works which are completely devoid of Beethoven's genius and originality," Alfred Brendel wrote in a lengthy essay on his interpretation of the German composer.

HIEN TRANG

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/nghe-si-duong-cam-cua-tieng-cuoi-20250622093751193.htm