A Conversation with Jeremy Denk about Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4

Jeremy Denk will be the soloist in a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra in a concert on November 23rd at the Center for the Arts at George Mason University, conducted by Christopher Zimmerman. I was glad to have a conversation with this wonderful pianist, who is also a bestselling author and blogger. 

Evan Keely: Jeremy Denk! I’m delighted to have this opportunity to connect with you again. I so appreciated our dialogue two years ago when you and the Fairfax Symphony gave us a fine performance of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. 

You’ve played this Beethoven concerto many times over the years, such as with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in 2017, the London Philharmonic in 2020, last spring with the San Diego Symphony, and this past summer with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (and this list is by no means comprehensive). I want to begin our conversation by alluding to this video in which you share some really interesting musings about this piece that you know so well. 

I’m especially interested in what you have to say about this concerto’s “fascinating mixture of innocence and experience” and “the use of playfulness and seriousness together.” It’s not easy to think of a composer more skilled than Beethoven at juxtaposing levity and humor with introspection, gravity and even lamentation, all in the same piece, and still create a whole work which is not only coherent, but endlessly inviting, arresting and alluring. (The Piano Sonata No. 15 and the C# Minor String Quartet are but two examples; we could think of so many more.) The Fourth Piano Concerto does this with particular finesse, especially as we contrast the outer movements with the slow movement. It’s hard to escape the usual trite adjectives to describe the latter: “solemn,” “earnest,” “plaintive,” while not off the mark, don’t get at the many layers of what’s happening there. And I’m so beguiled by your comment that the motif at the outset of the first movement is “maybe the most loving theme he ever wrote”! It may be! As we listen to you playing it at George Mason University, what elements of your interpretation do you hope will come through? 

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Jeremy Denk: One of the most beautiful things for me about the 4th Concerto—how do I put this?—is the way it reaches back to Mozart and Haydn, not just to the style, and the elegance, but some of their values. In many mature works of Beethoven you feel an implied protagonist, triumphing against all odds, the hero, and all that kind of narrative. Often, the pianist feels like the hero trying to “overcome” the orchestra in some way. In Mozart, you don’t feel this hero-protagonist so much; as an opera composer, he developed more of a universal empathy (he knows that we’re all flawed, in some fashion or another), his music switches from one voice or style to another, from “noble” to “common,” urban to country, rich to poor, and all in between.   

This piece —maybe especially the first movement, but all of it—has that Mozartean generosity of spirit, and that sense of equal conversation between piano and orchestra; nobody’s trying to overcome anybody. It begins, famously, with this quiet, intimate, loving piano solo; and then the orchestra is written to sound even more intimate, more within, more tender.  

I do feel the opening has the quality of a dream, especially when the orchestra enters in B major, and in the course of the piece we awake from the dream often, to be cheerful, or radiant, or funny, to sing or to dance, but the music keeps passing back into the dream, from time to time. It is this quality, maybe, that sense of being at the border of this paradise, but still with one eye on the earthly, living between zones—this all sounds so ridiculous, maybe, or over the top, but I do think this is what I like to bring out!  Schubert does this same maneuver also, but his dreams seem darker, more haunted; this concerto is not haunted in the same way, even though there’s some darkness.   

EK: I’m really intrigued by this comment you made in a recent blog post of yours about a very different composer and piece, Gabriel Fauré’s Op. 15 Piano Quartet. You remarked about a particular passage in the finale of that work: “There is beauty here, but it is partial, austere, a beauty in some ways about absence, about what is implied, about waiting, about harmonies that are not fully explained.” Now, I want to draw attention to this because I think you’ve trenchantly articulated something that kind of made me yelp, “So that’s why I find this Fauré piece so appealing!” and because I think people should be reading your writing in general, but I also wonder if this kind of insight is applicable in any way to Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. The three piano concertos of Beethoven’s “middle period” (yeah, “early/middle/late Beethoven” is kind of an oversimplification and kind of very true, but that’s a whole other conversation), the Third, Fourth and Fifth, are a fascinating set of phenomena. All masterpieces, of course, but the Third and the Fifth are almost stereotypical of what we think of when we hear the name Beethoven: heroic, full of Romantic strife, and decisive — not just emotionally but structurally, thematically, harmonically. Heck, the Third Piano Concerto begins with a tonic triad spelled out; you can’t get much less harmonically ambiguous than that. The Fifth Concerto has a short slow introduction that is nothing more than the single most common chord progression in all of music (tonic, subdominant, dominant, tonic), followed by the most unambiguous Here’s the main theme, folks! imaginable. The Fourth Concerto, on the other hand, is something altogether different. No orchestral introduction at all, just a solo piano: quiet, gentle — “loving,” as you say — getting right to the main theme in the most generous way imaginable. The totally unprepared B major chord of the orchestra’s very first entrance a few bars later may not be quite the same as the “harmonies that are not fully explained” in Fauré, but in the context of 1806 (when Beethoven finished writing this concerto), there’s some ’splainin’ to do harmonically and structurally that Beethoven — rather unapologetically! — just doesn’t do. I’ll admit that I’m seeking high and low to find an excuse to bring your fascinating remarks about Fauré into the conversation, but perhaps I’m not completely off the mark to wonder if Beethoven, albeit in a very different way than Fauré, is giving us something in this Fourth Concerto that, as you say about a passage in Fauré, “resists yielding to pure emotion, rapture, or release. It tells you, not too much.” 

JD: Honestly, I’m just glad you read my piece on Fauré! He’s a very different composer from Beethoven, and I’m not sure I’d compare these two things? French music has particular aspects, implicit rules, ways of being, that somehow discipline or corral the endless ravishing chords French composers like to write. 

Here, we are in a very very very German/Austrian world—but some of the best of it, I’d say. You can always find boundaries in every music. Every musical style has a grammar, a set of unwritten or written rules, and lots of the pleasure in Beethoven is testing these boundaries, rewriting them, pushing at them to create meaning.  For me what’s amazing about the gesture of the opening, with orchestra beginning so quietly, is the way the orchestra then grows to the most incredible, radiant fortissimo G major chord—easily one of the most satisfying arrivals in all of his music. How did this glory grow from that intimacy? The lesson I draw from it is not “not too much” but more like, “look what grandeur is possible from the simplest or humblest things…” 

EK: One of the things I admire and appreciate about you is how deeply you think and write about the intersection of music and society, of culture and the arts as a vital (read: indispensably important, sometimes messy, often thrilling and liberating) component of public life. So I’m interested in what you think about this idea that has been electrifying me, stunningly spelled out in, of all things, this article by Mark Travis about architecture, which alludes to a “belief in beauty as a form of justice that promotes dignity and that should be available to everyone”. Meanwhile, here you are at this juncture in American history, coming to the metro-Washington area to play this great concerto. Perhaps you want the audience at George Mason University to come away from your performance with something beyond, “Wow, that Jeremy Denk sure plays Beethoven well”? 

JD: I don’t know if I want to complicate Beethoven 4 with politics, at this particular moment. This piece is too pure and personal and joyful for that. But of course, I want its joyous, loving message to radiate, the country dance of the last movement, the profound sorrows of the second, the playfulness and wonder of the first…all the faith in humanity that he tried to write in his music, despite his personal convictions and skepticism, his perpetual sense of how terrible humanity is/was.   

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EK: This isn’t your first encounter with the Fairfax Symphony and maestro Zimmerman. Is there anything in particular that you look forward to in this next collaboration? I hope you’ll come back, soon and often. 

JD: Making music as beautifully as possible? What can you do, but just try to play some phrases of music together that feel like we’re talking, sharing?  

Thanks so much for the questions!