Goya - Beethoven: The Path to Silence

A meeting of two artists in a performance for solo piano and video.

Using video images and live piano, the performance traces parallels between the life and works of two artists, Beethoven and Goya, who never met and were probably unaware of each other’s existence. Their lives do, however, reveal a good deal in common: their being at one with the zeitgeist at the start of their careers, similarities in their social milieu, the political convictions they formed during the Napoleonic wars and, most of all, their creative response to hearing loss in the supremely personal work they produced towards the end of their lives.

There are three bridges we can cross from one to the other: The first are the works they created which had not yet departed from the rules laid down by tradition. Thus, images and video footage of Goya’s royal tapestries are followed by a live rendition of Beethoven’s Opus 33 Bagatelles. The second video provides a bridge between the work both produced with clear political underpinnings: the paintings of the Madrid uprising of March 1808 and Goya’s engravings in the Disasters of War and Duke of Wellington leading across to the Eroica, and a live performance of the piano sonata, Opus 26. The third bridge provides the most tangible point of contact between the two artists: the silence which filled their lives, the deafness that led Goya to paint his “Black Paintings”, the terrifying visions with which he filled the walls of his own home, and Beethoven to compose his final string quartets, late piano sonatas (we hear the Opus 110 sonata played live), “Ninth Symphony” and “Missa Solemnis”. Could it be that the experience of silence proved uniquely liberating for both?