Beethoven: Les cinq dernieres sonates pour le pianoforte.

WE ARE TOLD that Beethoven was possessed by passion and logic, by angels and demons, by tenderness and fury, by the tragic sense of life--that his last five piano sonatas, the greatest music written for that instrument, were methphysics translated into sound. Though Beethoven was a virtuoso of the piano and knew the precise function of the notes he set down on paper, we are told that passages in the sonatas are unplayable--a belief that Ferruccio Busoni dealt with half a century later in the paradox that "everything is possible on the piano, even when it is impossible to you, or really so."

Yet in contemplating those overarching works--scores that pushed the instrument to a point beyond which no other composer would go--it is wise to remember that for Beethoven form transcended unbridled inspiration. As one critic has noted, even where the poetic idea suggested a sacrifice of form, Beethoven resisted the temptation. At no time was he massaging his psyche. This is something to bear in mind when considering the performance of the last sonatas.

And it is performance that concerns us today. Had there been recording equipment in Beethoven's time, we would know exactly how he wanted these sonatas played. Karl Czerny, who studied under Beethoven and annotated the sonatas, gives us many important indications. But he argued with Beethoven, who screamed back at him, that the composerhs tempi were wrong--that the sonatas should be played more slowly--and generations of pianists were led astray. Changing musical styles also took their toll. Where Beethoven insisted on strict time, later interpreters indulged in tempo rubato. Where he demanded a "perfect" legato, we are sometimes treated to clip-clop. Yet Beethovenhs directions were as precise as he could make them. In the opening passages of Opus 111, for example, he marks his score allegro con brio ed appassionato, moves to meno allegro, then to several measures ritardando, and follows this with poi a poi sempre piu allegro. Since he had defined by metronome what each of these terms meant, there can be no mistaking his intent.

For years, Artur Schnabel was for me, and for other more knowledgeable, the interpreter of the Beethoven sonatas. He edited them, researching surviving documents, and recorded the entire cycle for HMV in Europe. Though he sometimes hit wrong notes and was seduced by Czerny, he played them with what might be called an intellectual lyricism. Walter Gieseking explored the sonorities and Edwin Fischer invoked a classical delicacy. More recently, I turned to Rudolf Serkin, whose fine musicianship brought him closer to Beethoven. And there were others who gave me new insights into the music.

Now I have come upon what is unique for the last sonatas--superb performance, interpretation, and recorded quality--in Paul Badura-Skoda's Les Cinq Dernieres Sonates pour le Piano-forte. The three-record album (AS 909, $35.94) was issued by Astree in France and is distributed in this country by Audio-Source (1185 Chess Drive, Foster City, Calif. 94404; phone; 415-574-7585). Simply as a recording of solo piano, this album is remarkable for its fidelity, as if the piano were in the room with us. It is the best I have ever heard. We owe this excellence to the recording engineers, of course, but also to the acoustics of the Baumgartner Casino in Vienna, a small hall appropriate for the instrument Badura-Skoda plays.

That instrument is a Conrad Graf 1824 Hammerflugel, almost identical to the forte-piano Graf made for Beethoven. The Graf piano has Viennese action, in which the key is directly connected to the hammer. It produces a sensitive, clear tone, softer in volume than that of the English-action pianos Beethoven and previously used--pianos that were stiffer and more powerful, and forbidding in rapid passages. Starting with Opus 101, the first of the last sonatas, Beethoven wrote for the Graf piano, which alone can meet the demands of these sonatas, and makes payable those "unplayable" passages that so concerned later interpreters.

Beethoven made it perhaps his first law of performance that music must be played as the composer intended it to be played. With this in mind, Badura-Skoda embarked on a complete and thorough study of the composer's notes, manuscripts, and commentaries--as well as what Beethoven's contemporaries had written and done. In his "interpretation," therefore, he comes as close as is humanly possible to what Beethoven set down and wanted. Never does he try to be "original" or to impose his own personality on the music. Never does he fall prey to what T. S. Eliot ironically described: the pianist transmitting "through his hair and fingertips." Of the great artistry of his renditions, the best comment is in the words of Anton Schindler, after hearing Beethoven himself play one of the sonatas: "An enormous difference! So much more comes out in the inner parts which one could not hear before and often was blurred."

"Simplicity that guide Badura-Skoda in these superlative recordings. By his playing he confounds the myth, for example, that Opu 106, the Hammerklavier sonata, was in effect the piano score for what was to be recast as a smphony. Beethoven wrote piano music, not music for the piano, and some interpreters, by leaning on the pedal and indulging in overblown sonoroties, betray his intent. There is no need to add complexities and adornments to these sonatas. "I should like to become simpler and simpler," Beethoven wrote in his notebooks, and he marked Opus 111, the last of the sonatas, "molto semplice e cantabile," as Badura-Skoda points out. The modern concert-hall piano, with its brilliance and resonance, adds "adornments" to the sonatas that the Graf piano and a great Beethoven interpreter have removed.

One of my first great musical experiences was listening to a Schnabel recording of Opus 111 in my under-graduate days. It cannot compare with my experience in playing and replaying these beautiful, insightful, to-the-heart-and-mind records that Paul Badura-Skoda has given us.