ARS LONGA: BEAT-HOVEN Meets Jazz —

The magic word is improvisation.

Following the example of Ludwig van Beethoven — on the 250th anniversary of his birth.

Ta-ta-ta-taaaa...

It may be the most titanic motif [1] in music history, even though the opening gesture — a triplet-like figure and a longer note shaped around E-flat and G — looks almost unassuming on paper.

Yet Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, often called the Schicksalssinfonie — the “Fate Symphony” — has become a myth, a sonic phenomenon that has entered humanity’s common musical memory.

Popular imagination still tends to assume that Beethoven began his career primarily as a composer.

But to be precise, Ludwig became famous first as a pianist with an extraordinary reputation for improvisation.

His contemporaries praised above all the force of his spontaneous pianistic imagination.

The legendary composer grew out of the same young musician who, at seven years old, gave his first piano concert in 1778.

When Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1792, he was invited as a pianist — and was at times deliberately prevented from relying on familiar repertoire — so that he could demonstrate his virtuosity in improvisation.

His biographical sources show that by the age of thirteen improvisation had already become one of his passions, not only at the piano but also on the violin.

The pianist Abbé Josef Jelinek [2], well known at the time, reportedly said after a pianistic contest with Beethoven:

“I keep thinking about yesterday. Satan lives in that young man. I have never heard anyone play like that. He fantasized on the theme I gave him so astonishingly that I have never even heard Mozart improvise in such a way.”

Carl Czerny [3] likewise recalls that Beethoven’s improvisations caused an extraordinary stir in the first years after his arrival in Vienna.

There is little doubt that he was a master of a calibre his contemporaries were not accustomed to encountering.

His pianistic language testifies to a desire to break supposedly impossible limits, searching among the keys for precisely the tones the piece needed — as love searches for what the soul needs.

Free interpretive imagination was itself a work in progress: a personal artistic demand to move beyond even Ludwig himself.

Yet, like every mature specialist, Beethoven built his own discipline — a Beethovenian framework in which freedom and interpretive accuracy held one another in balance.

His sketchbooks show this clearly.

He wrote down ideas about the emotional weight of a moment and about ways in which pianistic effect could be intensified through spontaneous fantasy.

One note comes close to the essence:

“You can only fantasize if you do not pay attention to what you are playing; therefore the best thing would be, so to speak, to fantasize openly — let yourself go, play whatever comes into your mind.” [4]

Even if this sounds like an ideal that cannot always be followed literally, the note remains useful to every jazz musician today.

To play correctly and improvise boldly, Beethoven — also a meticulous musical thinker — did not surrender the credo of imagination to spontaneous inspiration alone.

He built architectural steps and key structures, without which one cannot climb or descend.

As in love:

“Ewig dein, ewig mein, ewig uns.” [5]

Forever yours, forever mine, forever us.

Everything else is completed along the way.

On page three of the sketches for the song Sehnsucht [6], Beethoven also outlines how improvisation might be carried out.

He notes that the song can eventually move into fugue and conclude pianissimo, and that in this way a fantasy may first be designed and then realized in performance.

In other words, what his contemporaries experienced in public as spontaneous improvisation did not float down from the Holy Spirit without preparation.

It rested on notated structures and thematic scaffolding.

On that armature Beethoven added decorations, fermatas, variations, chordal emphasis, rhythmic phrasing and sound declamation — invented or reshaped quasi on the spot.

The more I see how precise Beethoven was in his techniques of fantasy, the more I return to one simple guiding idea:

It is reassuring to know that the white lines and traffic lights are there, but in the end you decide where to place your foot.

Perhaps while scribbling his ideas about spontaneous pianistic fantasy into sketchbooks, Ludwig never imagined that one day they would become public.

But beyond every musicological analysis, improvisation and imagination in music concern something broader.

This is the point at which we enter the theory of the Zeitgeist: the spirit of the time blows where it will and acts as it wishes.

To locate oneself musically within that spirit requires knowledge, but also an artistic sense of belonging.

The Zeitgeist is only a temporary promise; it resists being turned into a single long-term strategy.

Still, the echo and spirit of Beethoven’s old sketches and improvisational concepts can be heard, in my view, in the language of jazz pianists such as Bill Evans and Michel Petrucciani.

Their improvisational approach often rests on a similar “law”:

metre and melody prepare mind and spirit to open.

Much depends on free interpretation.

As they improvise, developing counterpoint through layered melodic lines, the left hand simultaneously handles vertical harmonic structures in block chords [7].

Petrucciani frequently improvises more through melodic lines than through the harmonic grid.

In his composition 13th, for example, thirteen bars are constructed around the twelve tones of the chromatic scale.

Similar principles appear in the compositions and improvisational structures of Bill Evans, as in T.T.T. — Twelve Tone Tune — or his treatment of the Spartacus Love Theme [8].

It is precisely Evans’s small melodic cells that unfold into his remarkable improvisational forms [9].

The continuity and spontaneous exploration of his playing draw us inward — somewhat as Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies do — while the pianist chooses notes in real time, whether to communicate or to arrive at silence itself.

This is the formula:

unity within diversity through improvisation.

Beethoven, I imagine, might have said exactly that had he heard these artists.

A related impulse can be heard in the improvisational philosophy of Miles Davis and John Coltrane on the horizon of modal jazz.

In Blue in Green [10], the triad of Evans, Davis and Coltrane creates a subtle, almost transcendent sound-world through their solos.

The piece is built from ten bars plus a four-bar introduction.

Its almost introverted lyrical melodic line draws the listener into shadowed territories that the soul nevertheless longs to enter.

The skeleton of the piece is circular: a circle in which everything returns.

Yet the solo playing remains restless and provocative because the musicians improvise with open accents.

At times the listener has the impression that the melodic theme is constantly changing while the rhythmic pulse remains stable.

That is why I tend to say that the Blue in Green heard on Kind of Blue is indeed extraordinarily varied within its metric design, while Bill Evans’s Blue in Green (Take 2) [11], according to my personal taste, lets the modal element breathe with particular class and elegance, touching Mixolydian, Dorian and Lydian colours.

I catch myself smiling at the fact that this time Beethoven has become the impulse that makes me observe how creators breathe through one another across time and space.

There has never been, and still is not, a musical era without improvisation and famous ex tempore performers.

They appear in every period.

But I believe the Beethovenian Zeitgeist should be considered one of the great historical practices of pianistic improvisation for keyboard instruments.

The importance of improvisation in Beethoven’s work as pianist and composer is comprehensive and, fortunately, unusually well documented.

We have now entered the year of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary.

To make the genius pianist-composer a kind of patron saint of today’s improvisers, I have little doubt that Ludwig would look entirely at home on such a throne.

Perhaps he would issue one of his revolutionary statements — as Fan S. Noli presents him in Beethoven and the French Revolution.

Beethoven wrote to the poet Kuffner:

“Words are bound in chains, but fortunately sounds are still free.” [12]

He used sound to strengthen poetic text.

People valued, and continue to value, his masterful and dramatic combination of poetry and music [13].

Spontaneous interpretation and creation can be a powerful impulse today for crossing static and formulaic boundaries — boundaries that exist not only on the map of musical styles but also across the boundary between mind and soul.

I hope the contributions made during the Beethoven anniversary year will broaden our cultural lens and make visible the importance of the improvisational spirit across different fields of art.

Eda Zari Düsseldorf, 8 January 2020

© Eda Zari 2020. All rights reserved. Published in Peizazhe të Fjalës, 9 January 2020.

Notes

[1] Riff / motif.

[2] Josef Jelinek, Czech composer and pianist, 1758–1825, a contemporary of Mozart.

[3] Carl Czerny, student of Beethoven and later teacher of Franz Liszt. Source: Czerny memoirs / Beethoven-Haus Bonn archive.

[4] Beethoven-Haus Bonn archive.

[5] From the Letter to the Immortal Beloved, third part, written by Beethoven on 7 July 1812 in Teplitz: “Forever yours, forever mine, forever us.”

[6] Sehnsucht — longing, yearning — WoO 134, Werk ohne Opus. The song sketches are preserved in the Beethoven-Haus Bonn archive.

[7] Block chords: chordal note clusters or vertically notated voices, comparable to chord symbols in the Jazz Real Book placed beneath a melody, for example C – Am – Dm – G7.

[8] Bill Evans, The Solo Sessions, Vol. 1.

[9] Spartacus Love Theme — reference around 2:11 in the cited recording.

[10] Blue in Green is commonly associated with Bill Evans and Miles Davis. Beyond the long-standing authorship debate, I want to stress Evans’s important role in opening Miles Davis toward modal jazz.

[11] This version appears on Bill Evans Trio — Portrait in Jazz. I recommend the LP.

[12] Romain Rolland, Beethoven, p. 49; cited by Fan S. Noli in Eroica — Das heftige Leben des Ludwig van Beethoven, p. 63. German-to-Albanian translation by Eda Zari.

[13] From Fan S. Noli, Eroica — Das heftige Leben des Ludwig van Beethoven, p. 63. German-to-Albanian translation by Eda Zari.