Doing god's work on the piano

The tragic story of Beethoven's life helped draw pianist John O'Conor into the composer's music. It has become a life's journey, he tells Eileen Battersby

Pianist John O'Conor sits at his desk in the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he is director and professor of piano. Outside, the rain ebbs and flows. As do the faint sounds of the various music lessons in progress throughout the building.

Next Monday night, at the National Hall Concert in Dublin, he continues his performance of Beethoven's magnificent piano sonata cycle. This, the third recital in the eight-part series, which continues until May, has been sold out for weeks. O'Conor has chosen to perform the 32 sonatas in chronological order. Monday's programme opens with the Pathétique (Sonata No 8 in C minor, Op 13) and, for many listeners, it will mark arrival at familiar territory. It is with this sonata that the cycle begins to assert itself. The fourth recital in January will include standard repertoire pieces such as the Moonlight (Sonata No 14 in C sharp minor, Op 27, No 2) and the Pastoral (Sonata No 15 in D major, Op 28).

There is nothing coy about O'Conor's passion for Beethoven.

"He is god," he says. "And I see the cycle as a journey through his work and life, the early, middle and late."

The fact of the series being heavily booked means far more to O'Conor than simply tickets sold. He is a performer, but he is also a teacher and has opted to give a pre-performance lecture discussing the sonatas before each recital begins.

"It's the interest. I'm so pleased that so many people are coming along with me on this journey," he says.

O'Conor, now an internationally established Beethoven interpreter, still remembers being a 16-year-old piano student for whom Beethoven was "just another composer." Although there was an additional dimension: "Beethoven was sort of forbidden. He was difficult, a bit strange."

It was O'Conor's first major teacher, Dr J.J. O'Reilly, who set him on the road to one of the most important musical relationships of his life.

"When Dr O'Reilly had me play a movement from the first Beethoven sonata, he gave me a small book about Beethoven's life," O'Conor says. "He said the only way to understand the music was to understand the man. He was so right."

An affable, approachable character, intent on demystifying classical music, and - surprise, surprise - not fully appreciated in Ireland, O'Conor has a lively store of anecdotes.

"Well, I was a well-brought-up Dublin boy and here was this story full of hardship and trauma," he says. "Beethoven's father was an alcoholic who used to come home late at night, wake the boy and make him practice. It was terrible."

That early introduction to the composer's life inspired O'Conor to read as much as he could about him, from Alexander Thayer's Life of Beethoven to J.W.N. O'Sullivan's Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, to Anton Felix Schindler's Beethoven As I Knew Him and Wegeler and Ries's Beethoven Remembered. There are also many letters. O'Conor read much of the material in German, but admits to having read Emily Anderson's translation of the correspondence, which spans three volumes.

"I'd see each note as saying something, as telling its own story," he says. "He was a religious man, emotional, something of a poet. Very attracted to women, he often fell in love. Yet he never married, he had no children. He had all these insecurities . . . He loved nature and was very interested in and addressed it in his music. He was also very funny, hilarious. And could be outrageous. Beethoven wrote music because he had to."

Central to any understanding of Beethoven is the tragedy of his deafness; his hearing "began going about 1799, when he was 29". O'Conor refers to "the agony of it" and describes the way the composer went from hope of recovery - the doctors thought it was connected with his having dysentery - to denial, concealment, despair and finally a desperate determination to deal with it.

"By 1802 he was despairing; by 1815 he was coming to terms with it," says O'Conor. "It had ended his career as a pianist, and he was a brilliant virtuoso. He stopped all travelling. He sawed the legs off the piano in order to be able to lie on the floor and hear the vibrations."

Empathy with the man appears to have played a part in bringing O'Conor to his love of the music. The facts of Beethoven's early life, the rough young outsider from Bonn possessed of a gift but no privileges of birth - "there was no music around him, unlike, say, Mozart, who had been a child prodigy and whose father was a music teacher" - combined with the reality of his deafness, kept Beethoven on the margins. In many ways, despite the patrons he did acquire, he was to remain an outsider.

He was also a natural revolutionary with a flair for improvisation. For all the passion and emotion in the music, there is also a powerful sense of a philosophical intellect at work. This tension between heart and mind gives the music its sublime energy. Beethoven did not exist in isolation; he was alert to his society. The explosive politics of his age affected him: he thrilled to the events of the French Revolution and its aftermath, though he was sickened by Napoleon's eventual self-aggrandisement.

"Beethoven was imaginative and pretty much a thinker," says O'Conor. "He agonised enormously about themes."

There is also Beethoven's impact on the development of the piano as an instrument. He created music that was simply beyond the physical capacity of the piano of his time.

"Mozart and Haydn could be played on the harpsichord, but Beethoven needed the piano," O'Conor says. One of many ironies about Beethoven is that he did not live to see the evolution of the piano created by the demands of his music.

Discussing the private fire and pain which shaped Beethoven makes the everyday life of a modern virtuoso appear mild. But O'Conor, who has shaped generations of students and whose pupils include musicians who fly in from abroad for a lesson, admits to still feeling nervous before any performance and is well aware of the doubts that undermine any performer.

Talent is never enough. He mentions the suicide of an outstanding young Italian pianist who had impressed me greatly some years ago during the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition.

"I've gone through bad periods when I've wanted to give it up, when I just couldn't see the point of dressing up like a penguin to go on stage," O'Conor says.

On one such night, when he admits to having had to work very hard to get through a performance, a woman appeared backstage afterwards.

"I had never met her, but she went on to explain that she had been going through a terrible time and had not intended to come to the concert. But had, and was very glad," he says.

Elaborating on the pressures and doubts confronting performers, he makes it clear that mere technique is only the beginning. But, as ever with O'Conor, for all the jolly chat, his message is clear: people in general should believe in the music, not fear it. And this is particularly true of Beethoven.

His relationship with this richest, most demanding and rewarding of composers has moved through several major phases. When performing Appassionata (Sonata No 23 in F minor, Op 57) at the age of 19, "I had already played Waldstein [Sonata No 21 in C, Op 53], I felt was the first time I really connected with the music, with Beethoven". Another major step was encountering the monumental Hammerklavier (Sonata No 29, Op. 106).

At 24, O'Conor, having graduated from UCD with a music degree, was awarded an Austrian government scholarship and went to Vienna in 1971 to study under Dieter Weber. He also began to study Beethoven with Wilhelm Kempff, who was to prove a special mentor.

Within two years, O'Conor had won the Beethoven International Piano Competition. It was the beginning of his international career. In 1975 he won the Bosendorfer Competition, and has since performed around the world. This is his second time performing the Beethoven piano sonata cycle. The first occasion was 20 years ago, also in the NCH.

"It was like climbing Everest," he says. "This time I'm playing old friends."

He has also recorded the entire series for his US label, Telarc, though not chronologically, an approach he favours as it provides an insight into Beethoven's development.

How different is his playing now?

"Very different. I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago," he says. "I've changed. There's also the fact that I'm now 57, the same age Beethoven was when he died. It makes you think."

He continues to teach the annual Beethoven interpretation course begun by Kempff in 1957. The German pianist taught it each summer for 40 years until his death in 1997, when O'Conor, his protégé, took over.

"I study Beethoven, play Beethoven, teach Beethoven. I have to say yes, he is my favourite composer."

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