Pedalling the Moonlight Sonata

Some years ago there appeared on my television screen a former centerfold model in an interview for an entertainment "news" segment. To demonstrate to the audience that she wasn't just another overstuffed bodice, I recall, she carefully lowered her intensely trained bottom onto a piano bench and proceeded to finger out the first few notes of a familiar piece, Beethoven's Opus 27 no. 2 in C-sharp minor, popularly known as the "Moonlight" Sonata.

This was particularly painful for me to witness because the Adagio of Opus 27 no. 2 happens to be one of the few works I can play on the piano, an instrument at which I am otherwise inept.

The segment convinced me of three things: one, anyone can play the Moonlight Sonata; two, few can play it well; and three, never to play it before an audience unless you're one of the few mentioned in number two (unless of course you're merely trying to demonstrate number one, and even then...)

The reason it's so difficult to play well, or expressively, is precisely because it's so easy to play technically, if one can allow such a distinction. In other words, the simpler the piece, the more latitude there will be in interpretation and feeling. In the case of the Moonlight Sonata this latitude in interpretation is most evident in the greatly various tempos and rhythms with which performers have chosen to play the work, from the glacially slow to the rather quick and bouncy.

The entire piece could be said to be nothing but feel and atmosphere, with no hummable melody, the right hand occupied almost entirely with its arpeggiated triplets, played now with a pulsating rhythm that lends the piece a forward momentum, now more evenly and repetitively, without apparent progress.

Yet another pressing difficulty in interpretation is its pedal work. The issue arises again in a review of a new biography of Beethoven by Edmond Morris in today's NY Times Book Review. According to Morris:

Beethoven directed that the first movement of his "Moonlight" Sonata should be played with "both pedals of the piano . . . held down nonstop." That isn't true. In fact, Morris goes on to quote the Italian phrase with which Beethoven inscribed his instructions for the pedals (Italian having been, back then, the lingua franca of European music), and, quite plainly, it mentions only one of the pedals, and even then is ambiguous about how often that pedal should be used.

What the reviewer fails to mention, however, is that the construction of pianos changed radically during Beethoven's lifetime and that modern instruments have a longer sustain time which makes the continuous application of the damper (or 'sustain') pedal not only unnecessary but undesirable. In the case of the Moonlight Sonata, however, the decay rate of unpedalled notes stands further retardation; otherwise one risks losing the sympathetic vibrations and ensuing harmonic play that occur with undampered strings.

One modern solution to this problem is the technique of "half-pedalling", whereby the pedal is only partially depressed. But on many pianos, such as the Steinway baby grand I used to dishonour with my playing, the pedal action is shallow enough to discourage such an apparently simple pedœuvre.

Further complicating the picture is the added direction by Beethoven that the whole piece be played "as delicately as possible," indeed pianissimo. How one is to achieve that on a modern piano with the dampers continuously disengaged is far from evident. Hence the experiment with double-pedalling, which produces a somewhat mysterious sound, both hushed and resonant.

It is a lot simpler at any rate for the hopeless amateur to keep both pedals pressed the entire time than to have to mind one's feet as well as one's fingers. I suspect the centerfold pianist felt the same, but then again, few in the audience would have been watching her feet. Or her fingers for that matter.