March 6, 2003
Playing for the cycle: Sheppard takes on Beethoven’s sonatas
Craig Sheppard has performed more than half of Beethoven’s sonatas over the years. Some of them he’s performed dozens of times. And he’s taught all of them. But embarking on a project to play all 32 sonatas has given him a new perspective on the composer.
“It’s a real privilege to play these works,” says Sheppard, associate professor of piano, who will perform the second of seven concerts of Beethoven’s sonatas at 7:30 p.m. March 17 at Meany Theater. “There’s such great variety in his music.”
Sheppard is playing the works chronologically, after trying hard to come up with another arrangement. But no matter what he tried, the most interesting programs were the ones that played the works from the oldest to the most recent.
“Beethoven’s life represents the quintessential journey from obscurity to greatness,” he says. “It’s very important to be able to retrace step by step this transformative process.”
The March concert is the second in the series. Another will follow in May, and the series will resume in the fall. In the first concert, Sheppard played pieces from Beethoven’s early career, “when he was trying to make his mark.” The pieces are long, about 27 minutes each; Sheppard describes them as “meaty.”
But the next pieces are shorter, more economical, yet equally powerful. “Beethoven was an extraordinary music architect,” he says. “He would take four or five notes and mold them into a musical skyscraper. In Opus 10 number 3, for example, he takes four notes and creates three lighthearted movements — the first, third and fourth. But the second movement has an overwhelming emotion of tragedy, almost doom. There is a balance yet also an unpredictability in this music. I hadn’t performed Opus 10 number 3 before and now I realize that, to me, this is the greatest and most profound slow movement that he produced until much, much later, with Opus 106.”
For Sheppard, playing the piano is about communicating these emotions to the audience. “It’s one thing to practice alone and feel these emotions deeply. But when you’re on stage, you have to inspire the audience to reach those emotional heights,” he says. “I recall a performance of Arthur Rubinstein in Italy in 1971. I remember talking to the people who were sitting near me. He touched all of us directly, as if he was playing for each one of us individually. That’s the ideal for which I strive.”
While the Beethoven sonatas are regarded as part of the holy canon of classical music, this does not mean that for Sheppard the written score is immutable. “Half of the original signed sonatas are missing, so we’re left with first editions,” he says. “But when Beethoven saw these first editions come off the press, he commented that he wished he had seen the proofs before they were printed, so he could have changed some things. For me, when I look at the score, it jumps off the page: I can tell what I think I want from it immediately, what I want to re-create from this imprecise art of writing notes on a page.”
While in London from 1973 to 1993, Sheppard played the cycle of Bach’s Klavierübung. Earlier, he played the complete solo work of Brahms.
“It’s a privilege to see a composer’s overall body of work,” he says. “I’ve gained profound respect and have grown in my understanding of what these composers achieved over a lifetime. And it’s helped me set a course for what I need to do.”
Sheppard is sure that his work on the sonatas will improve his teaching. “Part of teaching is in the skill of showing a student how it’s done — not so the student will imitate, but so the student can be inspired. As my playing of these sonatas has become more fluid and as I gain understanding, it’s easier to do that.”
Playing in concert every two months is demanding. It requires that Sheppard squeeze the most out of the two or three hours of practice a day that he can sandwich around teaching and other responsibilities.
“My students have been great,” he says. “They know I’m under pressure, so they’ve become more efficient in their lessons. I find teaching very challenging and fulfilling. It’s a great responsibility to be able to influence the growth and development of 15 young people at any given moment.”
