Music, Sense and Nonsense

Alfred Brendel

5 ideas

1. Beethoven's Diabelli Variations as comic parody

   The publisher Anton Diabelli asked many Viennese composers to each write one variation on his banal waltz. Beethoven instead wrote 33, treating the tune as material to mock, distort and transcend; Variation 22, for instance, quotes Leporello's grumbling 'Notte e giorno faticar' from Mozart's Don Giovanni. Brendel reads the cycle as one of music's great humorous works, showing that trivial source material can drive a masterpiece when the composer comments on it rather than decorating it.

2. Classical music need not be solemn

   Brendel argues that performers and listeners who treat all serious music with reverent gravity miss its comedy: the wit, surprise, incongruity and deliberate absurdity composers like Haydn and Beethoven wrote into it. Because humor in instrumental music works through broken expectations of form, a performer who smooths out those breaks in the name of dignity destroys the joke.

3. Textual fidelity requires reading beyond notation

   The score is the performer's binding authority, but notation is an incomplete code for what the composer imagined. Faithfulness therefore means reconstructing the intention behind the marks, including character, proportion and sound, rather than executing symbols literally or overriding them with personal whim. The performer acts as a trustee of the work: bound to it, yet obliged to make interpretive decisions it cannot make for itself.

4. Hearing the piano as imagined orchestra

   The piano is a percussive machine whose tones decay as soon as they are struck, so a pianist who accepts its literal sound plays mechanically. Brendel asks the player to imagine voices, strings, winds and orchestral textures and to shape touch, balance and pedaling so the listener hears singing lines and colors the instrument cannot physically produce. The instrument becomes a means of suggestion rather than an end.

5. Schubert and Liszt judged by wrong standards

   Schubert's piano sonatas were long undervalued because they were measured against Beethoven's goal-driven architecture, when their power lies in expansive, wandering, lyrical time and sudden abysses. Liszt was dismissed because showy virtuosi presented him as mere display, obscuring his visionary late works and structural seriousness. In both cases a performer can rescue the music by playing it on its own terms rather than through an inherited template.

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