Home 1. Introduction 2. Markers 3. Archive 4. Audible Markers 5. Visible Markers 6. Notational Markers 7. Conclusion
5.1. The Sonata 5.2. Examples 5.3. Learning from Embodiments
As with Ballet mécanique and 4’33”, I have a strong affinity with opus 111. I first learned it as a university student and have performed it dozens of times since: onstage, in living rooms, in practice rooms, in churches, in auditions, and in concert halls. I am intimately familiar with every note and every rest. I understand (and will try to show) how the complexities of the notes influence the performance of the silences (and vice versa).
By applying the embodied analysis techniques described above, I realize I am creating the potential for historical inaccuracies. However, this is a study of modern interpretations of a specific piece of music and what they can tell us about performed silence at the present moment in time. As within the Cage chapter, the analysis is not about what the music was, nor what it should be, but about what the music has become and can become.1
The six performers are chosen for the variety of silences they embody. The YouTube videos of their performances are all recorded in concert halls, mostly for an audience, in full concert attire, with theatrical lighting, traditional architecture, and a frontal, audience-view camera. The audience is generally not visible, and the hall is reduced to a decorative background. I have deliberately watched them all on a screen, granting them a consistent frame to facilitate comparisons.
Example 1: Sviatoslav Richter
The first performance I analyzed and re-repeated was Sviatoslav Richter’s 1975 performance in Moscow. Richter imposes silences that act as interruptive and structural elements, illustrated as precise and aggressive pauses. They are interruptive in the sense that they arrive suddenly, dramatically, and surprisingly. They are structural in that they clearly delineate the form of Beethoven’s composition. Richter’s interpretation is unsettling, with his left hand conducting and thereby creating visual markers for both the notes and the silences. After the fanfares, he rips his hands off the piano, imposing silence precisely with the score (1F and 2F), and curls his fingers up during the rests like a reverse-action boxer.
Richter is strict about following the score. Yet the exceptions are the most interesting part. After the first fanfare, he cannot withdraw his hands fast enough: in an abrupt and violent gesture, the curled fingers turn into fists in a gesture of surprise, as if he has been caught off guard by the violence of the music, or as if the keys were hot, on fire. But—and this is what makes it rich and ambiguous—he still has the pedal down at F1, just as Beethoven wrote it. This pedaling fits with Richter’s famous devotion to the text. Yet the contrast between what we see (a violent withdrawal) and what we hear (a soft diminuendo) is bizarre and not what Beethoven notated. Further contrast between what can be seen and heard is provided by his curtailing of the rests by exactly a sixteenth beat. We hear the rests loudly and clearly, but they are cut off in medias res as if he had deliberately misread the score. Is he afraid of the rests between the phrases? Why does he trim them so precisely?
Reviews of Richter’s performances on other occasions offer varied perspectives. Geffen (1975) praises Richter for his tremendous energy and drive, suggesting that his willingness to discard caution results in a brilliant and exciting rendition. Moore (2013) commends Richter for his fierce intensity and whirlwind tempo, particularly highlighting the clarity and firmness of his touch. A review from Gramophone magazine (1998) expresses disappointment, noting that the performance started uneasily with “clipped rests” and slight imperfections in sonority. These clipped rests are silences that, in my analysis, contain a “not,” a very visible withdrawal away from the piano, away from playing. This embodiment of distancing—a withdrawal from the instrument—also serves to make clear the structure of the piece.
Distler (1998), writing for Classics Today, lauds Richter’s “sizzling” approach to the opening movement in a re-release of this exact concert (Moscow, 1975), noting his tempestuous tempo and his bold engagement. Perhaps this tempestuous approach is Richter’s attempted embodiment of Beethoven.
He [Beethoven] was the lonely prince over a ghostly realm, from which came emanations evoking only a strange shudder in even the most well-disposed of his contemporaries, terrifying messages to which they could have reconciled themselves only at rare, exceptional moments. (Mann, 1947, p. 57)
Richter, whose conception of opus 111 was inseparable from Mann’s text,2 employs a rigid gestural vocabulary to embody the lonely prince in the ghostly realm, attempting to make the audience shudder with him. His tensely embodied discrepancies create a “ghostly” non-correspondence between what is visible and what is audible.
Here is what I learned from embodying Richter’s gestures:
Example 2: Maurizio Pollini
I analyzed two performances of the sonata by Maurizio Pollini, one from the mid-1990s and another from 1998. Pollini approaches the sonata with a reserved attitude and a magisterial posture—his silences, though few, are accentuated. Pollini’s interpretation appears to bypass Beethoven’s notated rests, rushing the narration of the notes forward without giving the listener time to process the accelerating fanfares, and thus challenging the notation of the rests even more so than Richter does. Pollini’s magnetic attraction to the keys muddies notational fidelity in favor of artistic expression. He is still playing the notes during the rests, and overtly so. He does not want to interrupt the notes or imply any space between them. The fanfares are thus interconnected by his (missing) silences, becoming one knotted multiple fanfare.
Pollini’s interpretation overrides Beethoven’s notation so that there are no traces of the rests except for a gasp at 2F; he pushes forward.3 Meanwhile, he keeps his foot firmly on the pedal and his hands on the keys. The lack of embodied silences does not mean that his playing is not eloquent. But it is emphatically a situation in which the playing, not the rest, is eloquent. He does not perform the silences, and he does not indicate that silence is happening. The tiny gasps (at the end of 2F in the first performance and at the end of 1F in the second example) seem annoyed and perfunctory. There are no visual markers for silence. However, the gasps could be considered audible markers of silence.
This first performance is not as rushed as the recent version, but he still curtails the 1F rest after the arpeggio from three eighths to two eighths. The pedal stays down, and his hands stay on the keys. The second fanfare brings in a little air (a manner of building tension) at 2b, and then he takes the pedal off, like a grace note of silence, at 2F just before the third fanfare begins. Gesturally, the movements seem minimized, reduced to their simplest form. His hands rise briefly from the keyboard at the end of the rest in the last sixteenth note, but only as a gesture to attack the following chords. Again, there is barely a hint of silence, a miniature accentuation. As a consequence, the music does not breathe, which creates a high degree of tension.
According to a review in Musicweb (Greenbank, 2020), Pollini “throws caution to the wind with an opening movement of tremendous energy and drive.” Each rest length is curtailed by about one-third, making for a very “restless” introduction. Pollini has created a unique situation (amongst these examples at least) in which the rests are played as sound, as notes, as a sustaining. His silences are not embodied by gesture; they are marked by sound. While the visual is important to him, the rests are not. As a performer, he has chosen for a knot so densely and thickly intertwined that silence is barely present. It is difficult to perceive his rests as silences.
In Chapter 1, I tried to refute the idea that silence is nothing. For me, silence is something. But what if Pollini has a different viewpoint? Is silence a nothing for him to avoid? This raises questions about the role of silence for classical pianists: Is it seen as expendable? Does it detract from the more appealing notes, or is it feared because it might lead to audience disengagement? This idea of avoiding silence—akin to a musical horror vacui—suggests that performers like Pollini deliberately choose to focus on the notes and to gloss over the silences. Silence could potentially represent the failures of memory loss or missed notes. But it is also possible that Pollini is avoiding the rests to increase the sense of risk and excitement.
Case Example 3: Maria João Pires
Maria João Pires’s performance is poised and contains minimal visual markers, treating silences as connective elements within a highly rigorous performance. The direct correlation between visible actions and audible sounds underscores a nuanced understanding of silence as an integral, though understated, component of musical expression. Her performance is very similar—in length and shortness of rests—to Pollini’s, yet the effect is completely different, for she summons silence where he overrides it. This is a perfect example of performed silences which are both a tectonic division (diaresis) and a synthesis.
Pires offers a direct correlation between the visible and the audible, meaning that what her body is doing is what is sounding. Her performative body suggests that form follows function. I experience none of the overloaded romanticism that I find in some of the other performances. One reviewer wrote: “The first movement lacked a certain roughness” (Sava-Segal, 2021). Indeed, it does lack roughness because she plays the text quite seriously. Her smooth fanfares are about the precise notes, not the drama, downplaying the tension between the phrases. She understates the silences between the fanfares, which are reduced (hands on keys, then pedal down) to sixteenth rests, really just gasping breaths before the next phrase, which itself arrives one sixteenth beat too soon, shortening the rest even further, much as Pollini does.
The silences in her performance have more impact than in Pollini’s, yet they are barely longer. Where Pollini rushes through both the notes and the rests, Pires keeps strict time during the notes. Hence, her arrival at each rest is more measured and clearer, even if she keeps her hands on the keys. Her use of a measured pulse in the notes informs the audience’s perception of the silences, lending them apparent clarity, although they are hardly audible as silences.
Example 4: Evgeny Kissin
Evgeny Kissin enacts wildly extravagant and aggressive markers, producing silences that are both interruptive and expressive. His performance is marked by a romantic exaggeration of gesture and pedaling, transforming rests into moments of theatrical suspense and anticipation. Kissin offers an interpretation heavy on rubato, pedal, and oversized gesture. The wildness of his gestures seems to make the silences less abstract and more narrative than those of the preceding pianists.
At the Verbier Festival (first example), Kissin places two mini rests at 1a and 1b and then holds the arpeggiated chord with the pedal through to the next note. So there is no 1F silence at all. Just after the arpeggiated fanfare, Kissin curls his arms up during 1F in an elaborate spiral as if winding up a spring. It is fascinating to watch and a little disturbing. I have named this highly distinctive gesture “the dentist,” as Kissin seems to be extracting a rather painful tooth. The sound continues during the rests due to the pedaling, but he is indicating something different than during the chords or arpeggio. Kissin implements a violent gestural storytelling of the rests, describing silence and creating embodiments which contrasts starkly with the way he plays the notes.
How many other pianists give those grand, annunciatory chords that open the two-movement piece the finely judged weight he brought to them? (von Rhein, 2013)
But other reviews are troubled by his lack of silence:
[…] the larger intellectual explorations of Beethoven’s writing eluded him […] The opening movement rushed too many fences, allowed too few moments of silence. (Kettle, 2012)
And Distler feels that the gesturing is overwrought:
Some of his expressive pointing, to be sure, comes close to loosening the music’s cumulative grip, in contrast to Pollini’s taut reserve. (Distler, 2017)
Kissin’s “expressive pointing,” his gestures of the coiled spring or the dentist about to pull, connotate a coming onslaught of notes and create suspense, though there are very few “moments of silence” indeed. Through his gestures, Kissin is speaking to us, about energy, tension, about what is to come in his version of the sonata. These silences are not audible but visible.
However, four years previously, at a concert in Armenia, his interpretation had been very different. In this earlier video, he performs the introduction with one little rest, one longer rest (if 1a is a surprise, then 2a is a question), and a pedal hold for the top of the arpeggio; it seems less stressed, with more of a driving forward motion. There are many audio markers at his performance: the hall is swirling with small sounds, such as the rustle of the audience, whispering, the ventilation system, and the creak of the stage, which themselves provide a counterpoint to the pianist’s own loud breathing. The main audible silence is his first gasp at 1a. The long rest after the arpeggio is not silent at all; it is very quick, as if he wanted to connect the two fanfares together (somewhat like Pollini).
In this recording, the audience cannot see Kissin’s wild gesturing, which offers an important test of my visual analysis, because it may challenge some of the functions of visible communication of the rests (especially when they are interpreted with temporal freedom). Yet it seems to me that I do hear his gestures, even without seeing them. The accented upbeats on the CD seem to result from a misunderstanding of the silences that precede them, suggesting that Kissin’s gestures may be hiding a lack of rigor or understanding. But perhaps the strange accentuations are not the point; it is possible that Kissin’s gestures are the point: Kissin’s performance is then far more about Kissin than about Beethoven.
For comparison, I also listened to his 2017 recording for Deutsche Grammophon: the first rest (1a) gains even more prominence, and there are unexpected accents on upbeats—as if the other silences are squeezed out. Kissin seems to be using the rests to amplify the tonality of the piece. His extremely stretched rest at 1a is an amplification of the dominant tension.
For classical conservatory students, rests are often not substance, content, or emotion. They are absence, problem, even defect—as if the composer forgot to write something there. Unlike singers, young pianists do not look forward to the rests. Kissin might also have a fear of stillness, but he expresses it very differently than Pollini. He uses excessively baroque gestures to fill every rest, indicating a possible discomfort with the absence that silence could present in a performance. But his use of descriptive gestures creates powerful markers that do instill an impression of silence in the audience. Pollini has the audience focus on the sound, not the separations, while Kissin gives the listener a narrated, embodied experience of silence.
Example 5: Katie Mahan
Katie Mahan utilizes large, swooping, balletic gestures with silences that are both separative and expressive. Her deliberate extension of rests beyond their notated length invites a reconsideration of silence as a space for interpretative freedom and personal expression.
The silences are considered but un-timed or even out of time. Her silence after the first fanfare is a full quarter note longer than notated. She is the only pianist in this study who lengthens rather than shortens this silence. She delves deeply into the silences and conducts them with slow-motion bravado.
Comparing Richter and Mahan, their different use of dynamics and timing gives another quality to the silences. So here audible markers are important in communicating eloquence. Richter follows Beethoven’s dynamics rather precisely, while Mahan gives a startling accent to the top of the arpeggio. It is jarring, attention-grabbing, and surely intended, for it launches the longest silence in this case study: at 1F, between the two fanfares, Mahan’s silence is a stunning 2.005 seconds, three times as long as Richter’s breath, and twenty times as long as Pires’s brief articulation. She imposes silence, summons it, and describes it, all at once, in a seemingly endless gesticulation.
Her silences are wild, while her notes are careful and discreet. This interpretation contrasts with Pollini’s performance, in which the notes are wild (and occasionally wrong), and the silences are discreetly omitted.
Mahan’s performance suggests a larger affordance for silences that can be extended beyond Beethoven. The rests are an occasion for her to break out of the keyboard stance and to let her arms dance. Of all the pianists here, her performances of silence most resemble the opportunities afforded by the Cagean case studies, as she is self-consciously illustrating long silences with attitudes or poses (see Chapter 4). In terms of my own imitative fidelity, I found her grander gestures difficult to copy, as she goes far beyond the Beethoven score, exploring the silences with improvisatory bodily gestures and (sometimes) bodily stillness.
The audience has extra time to appreciate the silences and the notes in between. Through the choreography of her arms, she subverts the conventional hierarchy: here, the silences are paramount, and the notes facilitate their emergence. Her gestural ballet of silence becomes a communicative channel for moments of understanding and comprehension.
Example 6: Daniil Trifonov
Daniil Trifonov’s embodiments may be contorted, actually excessively so, but his performance is of the utmost clarity and precision, respecting Beethoven’s dynamics and giving the silences a separative “not,” an expressive and structural character. His performance is distinguished by the quietness of his silences, ending sometimes with loud breaths that herald the fanfares and emphasize the musical structure while enhancing the eloquence of the silences. Rests 1a and 2a are interpreted as short breaths (contrasting with Richter’s legato version), articulated by a unique, subtle staccato release only in the left hand. Trifonov hunches completely over during these moments. Then, straightening his back during the arpeggio, he snaps his head up at the top chord, preparing the silence, as if summoning it from the depths of his soul.
It is a performance that is wonderful to listen to and difficult to watch. The pauses are apparent agony—his contorted face is theatrically Shakespearean, dramatically ugly. Particularly unique to this interpretation is his use of breathing in F1 as a marker for the descending 7th chords of the next fanfare. His sharp intake of breath (especially in the New York concert) creates an audible upbeat. But Beethoven has already written the upbeat as notes. So the breath at the end of bar 2 is an upbeat to an upbeat. This double upbeat seems unique to Trifonov and recalls the double prelude performed by Dead Territory in their cover of 4’33”: the band prepares to play the piece (in silence), then they count off a drum roll (in noise), and then they finally start the composition (in silence). This creates an ambiguous situation in which the beginning is excitingly unclear.
The two performances shown are remarkably similar in dynamics, though the Lyon version is a noticeable ten seconds faster. In Lyon, he omits the big intake of breath (the double upbeat) at 1F, transitioning more smoothly between the two fanfares. The 1F and 2F rests are both closer to the notated durations and not as drawn out as in New York. Possibly, he is responding to different acoustics and a different architecture. The Lyon concert hall is considerably drier, which probably explains the faster tempo: he does not have to wait as much for the reverberation as he does in New York.
