Music in the Second Person: Listening to Opus 110

2 0 Y M U S I C I N T H E S E C O N D P E R S O N L I S T E N I N G T O O P U S 1 1 0 M A R K M A Z U L L O If truth is not in the face, then where is it? In the hands! In the hands. – Ann Michaels, Fugitive Visions How is it that the work of art, when I arrive at a new understanding of it, having chased down yet another horizon of meaning, is already there waiting for me, meaning what it has always meant, knowing what it has always known? When I first put Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A-flat Major, op. 110, into my hands, I was a young man in the process of assembling the pieces of a life, taking on weight, preparing to carry it uphill. I was newly married; we were expecting our first child and had recently moved into our first home. I was completing a doctoral dissertation and embarking upon an academic career. The sonata, with its arias and fugues (its sad songs and their well-reasoned overcoming), represented the realization of all of my potential, my struggle, my will, my control. I found the sonata heroic, for I myself was a hero. For its part, the sonata must have found me amusing, quaint in my simple-minded faith that I could one day possess it, along with everything else. But these were my years of mastery, of undisputed, emergent selfhood. I did not know at the time what I have since learned 2 1 R from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, that ‘‘the collectivity in which I say ‘you’ or ‘we’ is not a plural of the ‘I.’’’ In tackling the thorny middle section of the sonata’s second movement, where the hands cross repeatedly and the key changes on a dime, I resorted to extremes, employing the ‘‘co√ee bean trick’’ that I had once heard was Beethoven’s method of mastering a di≈cult passage. Line up ten co√ee beans to your left on the piano’s rim, move one bean over to the right each time you play the passage cleanly, but move them all back to the left if you play a single error anywhere along the way. The goal: ten perfect executions in a row. I labored feverishly, beans on the rim of my family piano, newly bequeathed to me (the emerging professional) by my parents, baby shower gifts strewn about a freshly painted living room. I was as assured of this work as of everything else that surrounded me. The movement would be mine; the sonata, secure and essential, another shelter. I took in opus 110 quickly, in one massive gulp, a passion-filled first date. Above all, I aimed to form a conception of its overall narrative arc, which recounts the paradigmatic Beethovenian story of triumph over adversity, su√ering overcome. The first notes of the opening movement, whose micro-shape (down a third, up a fourth, repeat) su√uses the entire sonata, become the subject of a fugue in the hybrid-form finale. Part reflected in whole: such is the hallmark of Beethoven’s musical worldview. But the fugue encounters trouble along the way, some sad songs are sung, the fugue gets turned upside down (inverted, in fugue terminology) and shifted to a distant, alien key. In the final pages, some of Beethoven’s most resounding, the inversion is undone, the key restored, the sad songs forgotten, the yearned-for heavens reached. The baby, when she arrived (only two short weeks after my first public performance of the sonata), was a tricky second movement herself, requiring the same extreme e√ort. The joy I experienced was immense, the love unprecedented. But I also mourned the self that was being lost. The first night home from the hospital found my exhausted wife in bed with the infant in her arms and me on the couch with the dog in mine, weepy, desperate, terrified. The existentialist in me came out. Facing this strange new figure, I...