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Richard Goode: Beethoven

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Dec 14, 2020
Category: Classical

If Beethoven’s your composer for piano, Richard Goode’s your pianist. There are others who have climbed this mountain, but of the living practitioners, Goode stands alone. He’s given the bulk of his creative life to Beethoven. And it shows.

Beethoven had an ego as big as his talent and emotions that ran hotter than a blast furnace. He had heroes; he liked the idea of heroism. And as a composer, he tended to write grand heroic music. (No one has ever admired his Ninth Symphony more than Stalin, who saw it as a great propaganda weapon.)

Beethoven began his career as a pianist, and his writing for piano is something else. The 32 piano sonatas are the darlings of music critics; they show the enormous growth of Beethoven’s composition over the course of his working life. Goode has recorded them all, and he’s absorbed them so fully that, when he plays, it almost feels as if he’s composing or improvising.

If Richard Goode’s name is not familiar, that’s almost his design. He’s a scholar of the music he loves, not a brash showman — he was 47 before he gave his first solo recital in Carnegie Hall. He plays, he teaches, he reads. And the deeper the dive, the richer the music. It seems right that he was the first American-born pianist to record all the Beethoven sonatas. [To buy the 10-disc set of CDs from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here. To buy the download of the Moonlight Sonata from Amazon for 99 cents, click here.]

The drama of Goode’s playing is that he reduces the distance between the listener and the composer. He’s not looking for fresh interpretations. He knows what’s there. I find his description of Beethoven admirable: “Beethoven’s music is immensely powerful and positive. It is completely satisfying. Beethoven’s music is like a meal made up of all the basic food groups. There is nothing left out.”

That can also be said of Richard Goode.

BONUS BOOK: Patricia Morrisroe: “The Woman in the Moonlight”

Because I wrote a novel based on a historical event, I’m inclined to notice and cheer a journalist who’s written her first novel based on a historical event. Patricia Morrisroe is a veteran of New York Magazine and a landmark biography of Robert Mapplethorpe. Now she’s written an novel about Beethoven and his student, Countess Julie Guicciardi, that’s as emotionally rich as his “Moonlight Sonata,” which he dedicated to her. (He kept a miniature portrait of her, which was found in his desk after he died.)

Beethoven wrote the sonata in 1801, the year he began giving Julie lessons. It was nameless until his death, when a writer described the first movement as a lake reposing in the faint shimmer of the moon. But it needed no name; it was an instant favorite at concerts. The back story – of the sonata and her novel — is fascinating, and Morrisroe has told it in the New York Times. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle, click here.]