Beethoven's Pedal Markings: Why Do We Ignore Them?
Modern pianists are told to ignore Beethoven's pedal markings, so why did he write them? Let's look at the question using a piano from Beethoven's era.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Hello from Vienna. I'm Daniel Adam Maltz.
Today, we are talking about the pedal markings in Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata.
By modern standards, the pedal markings that Beethoven writes in the opening bars of the third movement are very confusing. He asks you to lift the dampers for extended periods of time and even asks you pedal through dissonances.
I think most students are told some variant of the same thing when approaching Beethoven's pedal markings, and that is that he was writing for a different type of piano, therefore we should ignore them. And that's true. If you try to play the third movement of the Waldstein Sonata exactly as Beethoven directs with the pedal markings on a modern piano, the result would be a blurred jumble.
However, today we're sitting in front of a piano of Beethoven's era, and I'd like to show you what's missing when one plays on a modern piano.
First, you have to consider that everything in this instrument is much more lightweight and the tone is not quite as booming as today's modern pianos.
Also, it features a quick tone decay. As soon as I play a note, it starts to decay. On modern pianos, the sound swells and grows a little bit before it starts to decay.
We also have to take into consideration how the pedals were treated in the 18th and early 19th centuries. They were viewed as special effects for specific musical gestures, not a tool to facilitate legato playing as it tends to be used today — something that's used the whole time one plays.
So, when Beethoven writes these pedal markings in the third movement of the Waldstein Sonata, he's going for a specific musical effect in which the sound blurs together. And due to the lightweight nature and quick tone decay of this instrument, it works quite nicely.