The New Yorker Radio Hour - Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax on Beethoven’s Politics of the Cello

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax have both been playing Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major for over forty years. But it took a global pandemic for the two of them to fully understand it. “This is such open, hopeful music,” Ax said. But when Beethoven dedicated the original piece to a friend, he signed the manuscript, “amid tears and sorrow.” Beethoven, Ma and Ax reflected, finished the sonata during a tumultuous period in which Napoleon was at war with Austria and the composer was losing his hearing. “I thought this was a good piece for this moment,” Ma told The New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross. “Because people are suffering, and we do think that music can give comfort.” The musicians spoke to Ross and performed from an empty concert hall as part of the New Yorker Festival.    The segment originally aired November 13, 2020. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Of all the many reasons to be happy about the decline in COVID cases here in the U.S., one is definitely the chance to hear great musicians playing live. There's nothing like it. But for a long time, that was denied to us. Back in the fall, two of the very best musicians sat together on a stage to play some of Beethoven's sonatas. They were there all alone.

the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the pianist Emmanuel Axe. This was for the New Yorker Festival, a virtual festival by necessity, and it happened to be shortly before the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. We'll hear an excerpt from their amazing performance, and then they'll talk with New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, who was listening from home. Here's Emmanuel Axe on piano and Yo-Yo Ma on cello. So, Alex, what did you think? I'm not here wearing my critic hat. Do you still like the piece? More than ever.

Thank you so much. That was magnificent to hear, and it's just splendid to see both of you from a distance. Our first question was actually, when did you first play a Beethoven cello sonata together, and what is it like now to find your way to a new reading of the piece having played together so often. I'd like to start, and then I'd like Mani to continue,

because I've known Mani, we've known each other for over 43 years. Yeah. And we probably played this very early on in our... And so we've been playing this piece for over 40 years. Over 40 years. A couple months ago, Mani said, Yo-Yo, did you know that there's this dedication that I never knew about.

This piece, one of the things that completely astounded me was that this is such positive, beautiful, open, hopeful music. And his patron, the one he dedicated the piece to, Beethoven sent him the copy, you know, of the manuscript, with an inscription that said, amid tears and sorrow. So we were sort of asking ourselves, what gives. And we look up the date

when he wrote this, which was in 1809. 1808, 1809, just the years when he was writing this. We realize that that's the year that Napoleon invaded Austria Vagram right outside of Vienna.

So imagine you're living in this city and this foreign power comes in and takes over your town. And And just realizing the parallel, here's Beethoven, who has endured so many tough moments in his life. Right. At just that moment, also the personal side, he's a musician, he's losing his hearing. And between that, what's going on around him in the city, what's going on in the country,

there's this music which is hopeful, beautiful, generous, noble, all of those things. And I thought this is a good piece for this moment, because, you know, people are suffering, and we do think that music can give comfort. Yeah, it has that quality of serenity and contentment and joyfulness, but it's not an oblivious kind of joy. No. It's sort of, you can see.

Quite right. In the middle, there's a very, a very tearful spot, but it's just one place. I mean, that's terribly, terribly poignant, terribly sad. But again, it's just one episode in this general feeling of hope, at least, at least to me. I mean, these are all personal reactions for us, of course. Let's get into some of the nuts and bolts of certain gestures that are just so innately Beethoven that are present in this piece and elsewhere in the Chavez Sonatas. And one thing you mentioned we were talking before is just this very basic musical gesture, which is sort of the most basic there is. One-five-one, we call it a tonic dominant, the home key, and then the...

As Yo-Yo said, tension. arrival, you know? Right. And he makes it incredibly plain, almost monomaniacal, since we start in this key, and then he stops what's going to happen next. When are we going to get back home? And he does this five or six times in the movement. And there are so many examples through Beethoven of this sort of thing.

Give some examples. The Walschtine piano sonata. What's he going to do next? Fifth Symphony. Same idea. What I love to see the movement. How does he end the movement? What you mean?

The fifth symphony? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he just in the, he finally decides he's going to let you have it with both barrels. So you know, you know, you've ended on the right note. What I particularly love in this sonata is that we finally, the last time we do this, we get. Now finally, he's going to say, okay, let the cello get. But then the piano says, are you sure?

Yes, I'm sure. So I'm so very sure. Yeah, we get it, we get it, we get it. What Manny's describing is, you know, know, it's technique. Beethoven uses a certain technique to get to a certain point. We recognize that technique. So by really owning that technique, that gives us the freedom to be able to express and say,

we actually know the guy. And I think I grew up, I don't know how you grew up, but I certainly grew up. But I think Manny also, you know, we say, okay, Albert Einstein, he's a genius. there's no way we can approach whatever he does. Beethoven, he's so, you know, certain people seem unapproachable. But with Beethoven, I think the more you know, you feel that with actually quite a number of composers, the idea that what used to be not ours becomes ours.

And it's our music. But it's also the opposite of familiarity breeds contempt. Right. It's familiarity. Charity breeds more and more amazement. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Let's step back and talk about the cello sonatas,

and what sort of drove Beethoven to take up this form? And he really was inventing a form to some extent. I mean, there weren't examples of these sort of statements in this form with the cello and the piano evenly balanced. And so what do both of you notice about, how Beethoven is going about bringing all of his firepower to a form that had much less about track record than violin sonata, piano sonat, and so on. Well, in this age of inequality and inequity, I think Beethoven felt that during his time also.

The cello was a poor, poor relative to the violin and the piano. And so I think he took pity on the cello and decided that he wanted to spotlight the cello. So the fourth sonata also. And then the piano responds. And the triple concerto, which is very much close to the... Cello always gets the tune first. It's got to be intentional after a certain amount of time. I think there's a nobility to the cello sound

that he somehow intuited and loved. And you get that in these pieces well. well. And he was very concerned. We know in the A major sonata, we're lucky enough to actually have an autograph, a working autograph, where he made changes. And he spent a lot of time not thinking about what the tunes were going to be, but who was going to play them? So he would very often say the piano would do this. No, I'm going to have the cello do this. And this constant readjustment, and most of it, in order to highlight the cello more. You know, he wrote 10 violin sonatas.

He wrote 32 piano sonatas, but he wrote five piano cellatas. And I think each one is kind of a different invention. And in each case, it's to describe an even more effervescent universe as he got to later and later stages. The middle one is the one where societal stresses got him to, to say, no, I'm going to actually do something unbelievably beautiful and comforting. There was so much change that happened during his lifetime. There's so much change that's happening right now. And how do we actually hold on to certain values?

And Beethoven certainly was maniacal about holding on to the values he believed in, in spite of change. And that's something that we think about. also. Right. Yeah. This issue of how Beethoven responded to the turmoil of his time mirrors what we are all living through now. And I'm wondering, as you've been playing in recent weeks and months, often in quite unusual circumstances, and I know you've been doing these pandemic outdoor distanced events riding around on a sort of custom-built yo-yo and man-y truck to different places. First of all, what does the music sort of mean to you under those circumstances

and has it changed how you have played it in any kind of palpable way? I would love to think that what I'm doing with music is helping people in some way. It would certainly help me to play music and to listen to me. music. I hope that's true for, if not everybody, for some people. Well, I'd like to say that, you know, one of the things that we were asking ourselves is, well, what is our purpose? Right. And it's obvious that our purpose is not to say we only exist in the four walls of concert halls. That music obviously exists in people's minds. It exists at funerals. It exists at bar mitzvahs, at weddings, at

rites of passage, as teenagers. You know, it's like music is something that keeps us going and gives, not only gives us comfort, but actually puts us in very specific states of mind, as we were kind of showing a little bit with little bits and pieces of Beethoven. And also, music, it's always individual. The aesthetic experience starts at the personal individual level. So you don't have to play for a thousand people. You can play for one person in a hospital room.

And in that sense, we find our purpose by knowing how and when we can help. What we did in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is that Manny had this wonderful friend who's been moving pianos for 30 years, Stefan. He said, use my flatbed. And Blue Q in Pittsburgh, this arts company said, We'll build you a stage set, you know, and they came in and four hours, they built this kind of... And the Yamaha dealer said, sure, we'll give you a little clavanova to put on this thing. And the BSO gave us the stairs. So this was a stone soup moment where we just all put in something.

And the city of Pittsfield said, you know, come, go to the UPS workers there. You can go to this elementary school. You could go to this. You know what we discovered also, there's a lot of wonderful people in the world who are doing fabulous things. So for us, it was an amazing thing. And this also just strengthens like sort of our belief that our circumstances may change, our lives may change. But there's something in music that remains constant and it offers something. We should always respond to need.

this was one of the pieces we played for essential workers on the truck and pop-ups and we thought that this is again part of that same idea of in the midst of great discomfort you can find certain types of comfort in music manual acts on piano and yo-yo ma on the cello they played Beethoven's cello sonata number three in a major and they spoke with Alex Ross music critic for The New Yorker.

Alex's most recent book is called Wagnerism. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Hope you enjoy the show. And I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed

by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Rianan and Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle Bacon, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfei Chen, and Emily Mann. And we had additional help from Harrison Keith Lyne.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.