Playing all thirty-two of Beethoven’s piano sonatas–the greatest piano works by one of the greatest composers of all time–is a heroic feat, last done locally under the UMS’s auspices by Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff. So what drove Schoenhals, who lives in Lower Burns Park, to devote five years to mastering and memorizing ten hours of virtuoso music?
“I’ve always been composer focused,” the EMU piano prof replies. “I went through a Brahms kick in college and played a lot of Mozart at one point.” And he chose the sonatas because “they’re one of the greatest bodies of literature of any art form.”
There’s also a personal reason. Schoenhals, who is married and has a five-year-old son, says he was “looking for something in my life where I could be active and involved but local so I don’t have to be schlepping on a plane, sleeping in a hotel, and be away from my family.”
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma–his mother was a piano teacher, his father a bishop in the Lutheran church–Schoenhals started piano lessons at age five, but says, “I wasn’t into it. I was into sports.” Music was more important in middle and high school but mainly “dance band and playing for musicals and in a jazz-rock band.” So when he went to Vanderbilt as a piano performance major with a religious studies minor, he discovered “I didn’t know what’s going on in the classical world. I played catchup for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and by the time I got my doctorate [from the Eastman School of Music] I was competitive.”
He admits playing all the Beethoven sonatas “is a huge stretch. It takes me months to get an hour-length recital program together–but some of these are more like eighty minutes.” Since September 2012, he’s performed twenty-seven sonatas in six concerts. He will play two more on September 18 at EMU’s Pease Auditorium (see Events) and has three yet to master.
Though it’s hard, technical work, it’s not about showing off. “One of the things that makes [the music] appealing is the gamut of expression,” Schoenhals says. “But you just can’t drop proportion and form and emote, and you can’t just be clinical about it. It’s all got to be in balance within itself.
“You have to do that in front of a bunch of people. It’s tempting to pound the hell out of it, because this is exciting stuff. But then it sounds like a mess and loses its power.”
So what does his son think of Beethoven?
Schoenhals blushes. “One day he wanted to watch a video, and I said, ‘Let’s watch some Beethoven!’ He has two words he thinks are bad–‘hate’ and ‘stupid’–and he said, ‘I hate stupid Beethoven!’
“This is from a five-year-old kid who will have heard every single sonata in the background of his life. They’re all somewhere in his consciousness. And just yesterday he was in the middle of building Legos, and he said, ‘I want you [to] teach me piano.'”
Schoenhals is scheduled to perform the final Beethoven sonatas next spring. What will he turn to when he finishes his musical marathon? “I’m starting to do a little composing, so the next concert might be of my own stuff.” He says his own compositions would fit musically “somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century–Schubert or Mendelssohn, not Beethoven. I’m a beginning composer.
“That’s the immediate next thing. After that, some people have suggested Schubert, and I’d like to get back to playing Rachmaninov. But I’ve been fantasizing about goofing off for a summer, of just drinking a cup of coffee in the morning.”
