Piano Men: Billy Joel on Beethoven

Luis Dias

Like many of you, I grew up listening to American singer-songwriter, composer and pianist Billy Joel. The hits that come to mind are ‘Uptown Girl’, ‘The Longest Time’, ‘An Innocent Man’, ‘Piano Man’, ‘She’s Always a Woman.’ A little later, in the early 1990s, his ‘We didn’t Start the Fire’ became an unofficial anthem of sorts during the Goa Medical College resident doctors’ strike.

But I only learned of Joel’s admiration of Beethoven very recently and quite unexpectedly, during a commercial break in the interval between Acts of an opera live stream.

I’ve written before about the Metropolitan Opera live streams. But there are many other opera houses worldwide doing this too, so one is really quite spoilt for choice. There’s the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, and the Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper, WSO).

This year should have been a major tourist attraction draw for Vienna, as it is Beethoven’s 250th anniversary year, and the city where he lived most of his life had pulled out all the stops to celebrate this momentous milestone. I had made plans to visit Vienna sometime about now and had made bookings for concerts, operas and the ballet. I had been planning for it a year in advance. It would only be my second visit to this European music capital, after almost a quarter-century. I had an itinerary chalked out, to visit all the Beethoven (and other composers from Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms to Johann Strauss) ‘pilgrimage’ destinations, museums and galleries. And then of course the pandemic struck. Needless to say, all the events have been cancelled. I was fortunate to get full refunds on bookings. But one can imagine how the classical music profession, and tourism in general, must have taken a colossal hit, from which many gloomily say it will take an extremely long time to recover, if ever.

The Vienna tourist board’s website, musik2020.wien.info has a listing of all planned Beethoven 2020 events, not just concerts, but tours, walks, etc. All that has presumably been shelved until further notice. The website also prominently features an ‘All Ears on Beethoven’ video series in which a host of musicians talk about what Vienna means to them, why it is so important in music history and today, and their own connection with ‘birthday boy’ Beethoven. These videos would randomly be inserted into the intermission breaks of WSO opera screenings.

The list includes predictable names like violinists Joshua Bell and Julian Rachlin; pianist, Yuja Wang; operatic tenor, Juan Diego Florez and film composer, Hans Zimmer. I didn’t expect to find Billy Joel in that number, so that came as a refreshingly pleasant surprise.

In the short six-and-a-half minute black-and-white video, a baseball-capped, goatee-bearded Joel tells us he heard Beethoven’s music virtually all his life, as his father was a pianist and his mother would play his music on the family record-player. It underscores the importance of introducing children to music as early and as much as possible, a point I keep making to students and parents. This is not in the hope of churning out another classical musician, and Joel’s career path is a good example of this, but it inculcates not just a love of music, but also gives one a good grounding and a discerning ear. One meets too many young people who are exceptionally musically inclined and adept, but don’t seem to think a better knowledge of classical music, and a lot more time spent listening to it, is vital to their art. One could argue that Joel would not be the musician he is today had it not been for his immersion in music, from birth, and perhaps even in the womb, as his parents loved music so passionately. They even met at a concert, a Gilbert and Sullivan performance.

Joel rates Beethoven as “the greatest composer that ever lived,” and explains why he thinks so. While “Mozart is almost God-like”, because “his music is so perfect,” with Beethoven, Joel hears “the stops and starts, the fits and struggles,” against a backdrop of inexorably advancing deafness. The struggles are what make Beethoven “more human” to Joel, “because it’s not easy to write that stuff”. Confessing that he struggles as a composer too, Joel says wryly: “My favourite part of writing is when I have written.”

Joel then talks about one of his songs, ‘This Night’ (from his album ‘An Innocent Man’), in which he ‘borrows’ from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 8 in C minor, Op 13. I hadn’t heard this song before, so I gave it a listen. And sure enough, the chorus, “This night is mine, It’s only you and I; Tomorrow is a long time away, This night can last forever” is set to the dreamy, somewhat wistful main theme of the middle movement (Adagio cantabile) of the sonata.

In the video, Joel plays the melody on the piano, exclaiming at the end: “That’s a song right there, even without singers or lyrics!” This is unsurprising, as it is clear from the ‘cantabile’ (in the singing style) in the movement’s title that Beethoven wanted it to have this
sing-able quality.

Joel even graciously credited “L v Beethoven” on the album sleeve as ‘co-writer’. “I couldn’t pay him because he wasn’t around”, he jokes in the video.

He then talks about Beethoven Sixth (‘Pastoral’) symphony in F major, opus 68 (1808), calling it “happy Beethoven” music. Again, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Joel wonders whether Beethoven “must have been shacked up with someone he really liked, for a while” when he wrote this symphony. But in actual fact, although Beethoven’s ‘middle years’ (1800-1808) were among his most prolific and path-breaking in terms of emotionally complexity and scale, he was writing in the face of the sober knowledge that his growing deafness was incurable, unstoppable; and these years were also among the most unhappy in his private life due to his tendency to fall in love with women who were “out of his reach” due to their social station (relative to his) and/or their
marital status.

The rest of Joel’s video focuses on Vienna, the city where Joel discovered a half-brother (who incidentally is also a musician; a classical pianist, and conductor) and was reunited with his father. To him, it is the “city of Beethoven, where he lived and composed in so many places”. “So many places” is right; Beethoven moved house some 70-80 times in his Vienna years, from 1792 until his death in 1827. To say he was a fussy, difficult tenant, with a succession of exasperated landlords and landladies would be an understatement.

The love of classical music informed Billy Joel’s release of his 2001 album ‘Fantasies and Delusions’, a collection of piano pieces composed by him, just solo piano, no vocal line, and well worth a listen for its sincerity and lack of pretension (or delusion, despite the title). This is no “crossover” music, no pop melodies “prettified” or “dressed up” in classical clothing. One hears the influence of certainly Bach and Chopin, perhaps Schumann, and the title of the first track (‘Villa d’Este’) suggests a bow to Liszt as well. The whole album is a tribute from one Piano Man to all the Great Ones
before him.