Beethoven Will Save You

Lenin, Lang Lang, and Ludwig’s Appassionata

Made with DALL·E 2

In the 2006 film The Lives of Others, one scene remains etched in my memory.¹ East Berlin, 1984. A dissident playwright sits at his piano, his lover stands behind him. Both are unaware that the Stasi is recording every note and word from the attic above them. He pauses playing and reflects aloud: 

You know what Lenin said about Beethoven’s Appassionata? ‘If I keep listening to it, I won’t finish the revolution.’ 

Can anyone who has heard this music… I mean truly heard it… really be a bad person?

That Beethoven’s music arouses such emotion makes it a trope in films and protests to represent humanity in the face of despair and suppression.

Vladimir Lenin, who led the 1917 Russian Revolution and established the first communist government, would further say of Beethoven’s piece:  

It affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty.²

Lenin’s campaign would set the stage for a century of direct and proxy conflicts that continue today. But one piece of music gave him pause. Lately, I’ve been listening to it a lot.

Appassionata is the posthumous name for Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23. When he started composing it in 1804, the bloody Napoleonic Wars had begun, even arriving at his doorstep.³

Europe was shifting from the Classical Era to the emotive Romantic. The airy symphonies of Mozart and Haydn yielded to the turbulent rhapsodies of Rachmaninoff and Brahms. Fairytales were replaced with tragedies. Pride & Prejudice with Wuthering Heights. 

This was Beethoven’s aptly named Heroic Period (1802-1812), where his music took on narratives of the individual’s struggle. The Appassionata is one such monomyth, anchored in the brooding F minor chord that never lets you out of its shadow. 

I’m in awe at how Beethoven conveys the width and depth of the human spirit through a single instrument. Befitting that it’s so technically demanding.

Lang Lang, the Chinese-born wunderkind, released his rendition in a 2019 live performance. I’ve since been partial to it.⁴ Lang Lang takes fierce and fanciful liberties with his pacing and the range of an 88-key Steinway.⁵ His oft-criticized theatricality is, to me, just another man in his thirties who loves Beethoven but was given the supernatural ability to channel him. It’s a young Superman still enjoying his gift of flight.

The twenty-five-minute runtime requires some set and setting. As learned in primary school Music Appreciation, I close my eyes and indulge my imagination.

In the first movement, we’re finding our feet in a fraught world. We’re following sunlight and fleeing a storm. Our principles and prudence—from traditions we might scorn—offer a lifeline from darker instincts and a reality we’re not ready to face.

The second is a reflection. We must go inward to go forward, deciding which values to keep or cast aside. Our process will never be perfect, but the D-flat major theme assures that the Light is with and within us. And don’t forget it. Here be dragons. 

In the third and final movement, we turn and run toward the storm, because the way out is through. Through the darkness of Mordor. Through the belly of the whale. The leitmotif reassures that each trial is one we can bear. In the finale, we triumph insofar as we collapse, dutifully, having bled out, purposefully.

I see the composer, in his early thirties, coming to terms with encroaching deafness, the cruelest curse to befall a musician. Sitting alone in candlelight, he lays bare his soul on ivory and in ink. Around him, Europe’s turmoil foreshadowed that the world as he knew it was ending. And it was.

I see a man who has been tortured by love unrequited but whose voice would cry out,

I shall take fate by the throat, for I refuse to let myself be crushed by her. Oh, how beautiful it is to live—to live a thousand times!⁶

I think about how Beethoven might have felt redeemed through a musician who called him “the beating heart of the Romantic era.”⁷

I think about how Lenin might have reacted to this performance by a pianist whose parents were forbidden to perform during communist China’s paradoxically-named Cultural Revolution and moved to America so their son could reach his potential.⁸

I think about how history might have changed. And how Beethoven might still rouse us to change our own.

Have you truly heard him?

Here is Lang Lang performing the third movement in the Musikverein of Beethoven’s beloved Vienna to a captivated audience of classical connoisseurs.

Headphones on, notifications off, screen full, volume up.

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PS: I’m aware that writing about music is like dancing about architecture,⁹ and I do believe in experiencing art on its terms. But a 25-minute solo piano performance requires a patience we no longer possess and only a stuffy concert hall can enforce. If you’ve heard the Appassionata, tell me what you saw and felt.

1. Das Leben Der Anderen https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/

2. In an essay by Maxim Gorky, activist and Lenin associate https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorky-maxim/1924/01/x01.htm

3. Beethoven refused to play for Napoleon’s troops by locking himself in a castle room until the door was kicked in https://medium.com/@rgreenbergmusic/music-history-monday-appassionata-5a769ff14c66

4. Soviet-Ukrainian-Jewish pianist Emil Gilels remains my favorite

5. Beethoven played a 61-key fortepiano

6. http://www.searchengine.org.uk/dailyebook/Beethoven%20-%20a%20pictorial%20biography%20(1958).pdf

7. https://www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/in-250-words/

8. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/16/lang-lang-pianist-beethoven-sausage-lover-childhood-practice-mum-home-cooking

9. https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/dancing-about-architecture/#:~:text=It%20has%20been%20said,Laurie%20Anderson%2C%20among%20several%20others.