The title of Tom Beghin's extraordinary CD, ‘Inside the Hearing Machine’, lets us know we are not in it only for the Beethoven sonatas. The cover photo shows a piano with a shiny ‘hood’ making a high arch, as though the piano were being partly swallowed by the old RCA horn. The pianist, hands on the keys, is leaning into the mouth of the ‘machine’: this is where we add the subtitle, ‘Beethoven on His Broadwood’. Only after we see machine and man do we notice the third line of the title: ‘Piano Sonatas Opus 109, 110 and 111’. Going well beyond recording Beethoven's last sonatas on a period instrument, then, Beghin here conjures the world of sound and touch experienced by the deaf composer through a technological intervention no one since the 1820s had ever thought to repeat.

In March 1820, the piano-maker Matthäus Andreas (‘André’) Stein offered to make a ‘hearing machine’ (Gehörmaschine) for Beethoven's Broadwood. The relevant passages in the Conversation Books, translated in the CD booklet and available at the website with the other essays, show that Beethoven took some convincing, especially because Stein would need the instrument for three months to make tests. In the event, the piano with the attachment was picked up in May, when Beethoven went to Mödling for the summer, and returned to him there in September 1820, just before he started work on the variation finale of op. 109.Footnote ¹ Thus, op. 110 and op. 111 were conceived with the new technology. A few years later (June 1824), Stein said to him (presumably about the same hearing machine), ‘You do hear better, when you bring your head under this machine, don't you?’

The Broadwood itself was a gift from the manufacturer in the late spring of 1818. Beethoven's (often troubled) relationship with his pianos has received scholarly attention, most recently by Tilman Skowroneck, and it has long been known that Beethoven received the Broadwood while he was composing the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata op. 106; Skowroneck recently narrowed the arrival window to early June, when three of the movements had been completed.Footnote ² Scholars have routinely dismissed the idea that the new instrument affected Beethoven's work on the sonata in any significant way. In 2014, Beghin was able to connect important compositional aspects of the first two movements to the range and action of the six-octave Viennese piano, and then prove that the sonata's fugal finale was composed on the Broadwood: no one had noticed that its range moves down a fourth from the Viennese piano's FF–f⁴ to the Broadwood's CC–c⁴. Lopsidedness becomes a musical topic, and Beethoven could now ‘hear or play the lowest C for the first time ever’.Footnote ³

One of the leading fortepianists in the world today, Beghin has been a professor at UCLA and then McGill, where he led the recording extravaganza ‘The Virtual Haydn’, recreating the acoustical environments of eighteenth-century concert rooms in which to play all of the Haydn sonatas.Footnote ⁴ He is now Research Fellow at the remarkable Orpheus Institute in Ghent, an organization that takes seriously ‘artists’ knowledge’ and the role of what it calls ‘artistic research in music: research embedded in musical practice and primarily guided by artistic objectives’. The CD, film and website under review thus take Beghin's ‘artist's knowledge’ and his performances of Beethoven's last three sonatas into the realms of acoustic technology, haptic analysis and sensory compensation, and invite us to imagine the flesh-and-blood pianist-composer seated at his instrument, experiencing touch, vibration and even perhaps the threshold of his hearing.

Three of the essays in the booklet are substantial. Robin Wallace's ‘The Deaf Composer and His Broadwood: A Working Relationship’ is related to his important new book, Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery (Chicago University Press, 2018), and offers new ways to think about Beethoven's sensorium: as his hearing worsened, he would have developed greater reliance on touch and sight. Wallace even connects compulsive sketching practices with the need for visual cues in composition. The exploration of touch at the beginning of op. 109, ‘preluding at the piano’, becomes ever more acute in the variations, written once the hearing machine was in place and the vibrations were thus more intense; variation 4, with its shift from piacevole figurations to oscillating and then poundingly insistent offbeat chords, illustrates this tactile and vibrational experience well, as Beghin and Wulfrank also stress. A machine designed to help Beethoven hear must have ‘helped him feel things more acutely as well’.

Wallace's poignant experiences with his late wife's hearing loss, recounted briefly here but extensively in the book, suggest to him that working with the hearing machine and accommodating to its feedback may even have caused a temporary improvement in Beethoven's hearing, as evidenced by the singing melody at the beginning of op. 110 and the exceptional registral span of treble and throbbing (vibrational?) chordal bass in the Arioso dolente. The astonishing tenfold ever-louder repetition of a G-major chord after the second Arioso, leading to the inverted fugue, might even show Beethoven trying to bring the sound of the piano up to the ‘threshold of audibility’; the choice of G major, with its sonority ‘purer’ than A-flat, might thus account for the return of the fugue a step below its first appearance. Ultimately the goal is to imagine Beethoven hearing and composing ‘deafly’.Footnote ⁵

Beghin's wide-ranging essay, ‘Beethoven's Broadwood, Stein's Hearing Machine, and a Trilogy of Sonatas’, discusses the ‘Pandora's box’ opened by commissioning the first-ever replica of Beethoven's Broadwood (from builder Chris Maene) and an approximation, since no model is extant, of Stein's hearing machine (from acoustician Thomas Wulfrank). He creates in effect a rhetorical confutatio to anticipate and refute the objections of sceptics, who might especially adduce Beethoven's overwhelmingly Viennese-instrument milieu. Imagining Beethoven at his Broadwood via the Hoechle wash drawing of Beethoven's study in 1827, into which the artist placed a bust of the recently deceased composer facing the window, Beghin seeks poetically to turn the composer to face his piano even as he replaces him at the stool. The first eyewitness to the hearing machine, the painter August von Klöbel, arrived when it was quite new, in late September 1820, and recounted that while Beethoven was sitting for his portrait he was able to correct his nephew's practicing with his back to the keyboard. This means the machine successfully projected sound backward, to the player, like a clavichord. The biggest issue for the ‘well-hearing’ performer using a piano fitted with the hearing machine is that gathering up the sound as directedly as Beethoven must have needed it makes the acoustical environment too harsh and booming. Beghin suggests that Karl had no choice but to play in ‘aggressive acoustical circumstances’, but perhaps his team might be able to mitigate that.

Thomas Wulfrank's essay, ‘The Acoustics of Beethoven's Hearing Machine’, discusses the evidence that the machine Stein constructed was curved, made of metal (though Beethoven seemed to prefer wood), and had to aim sound toward the pianist without necessarily being connected to an ear trumpet. (Stein seems to have considered and then discarded the latter idea.) He conducted a number of experiments on amplification and vibration and confirms that the Broadwood has twice the vibrational strength of the Viennese Graf, measured while playing the fourth variation of the finale of op. 109. (This sound test is available at the website.)

The final short essay, ‘Recording Beethoven's Broadwood: A Tonmeister's Perspective’, by recording producer Martha de Francisco, notes that most recordings are made from the perspective of an audience member in a good seat. In this recording, the goal is to record the sound from behind the pianist's head, as though receiving the sonic messages directly from the hearing machine. A recording from the performer's perspective, with ambient sound kept to a minimum, is an exciting accomplishment of ‘artistic research’.

The documentary, Inside the Hearing Machine, directed by Steven Maes, offers a well-shaped and congenial narrative with a group of appealing interlocutors (primarily Beghin, the piano builder Chris Maene, Wulfrank, Skronoweck, and de Francisco, with brief appearances by Peter Dejans (director of the Orpheus Institute,) Michael Ladenburger (director of the Museum Beethoven-Haus) and Marc Loncke (organ-builder). As we are invited into instrument-building workshops and concert environments, the film is richly illustrated with Beghin's playing and with images of documents. We learn that Maene's Broadwood replica is not based on Beethoven's instrument now in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest (donated by its later owner, Liszt) because permission was not granted to make a copy. But Broadwood made many identical instruments that year, the team reasons, so that an instrument close to Beethoven's own, in possession of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, became the exemplar.

Beghin, Wallace and Skowroneck compare aspects of musical rhetoric, tactile experience and technique made possible on the English piano (as Haydn discovered in London) that are not available on Viennese instruments. In testing Beethoven's 1823 Graf and the 1817 Broadwood, Wulfrank focused on airborne sound and vibrations, or ‘structure-borne’ sound. The Graf has greater airborne sound but the Broadwood's greater vibrational intensity (almost twice as strong as the Graf) must have been important for the last sonatas. But some of those vibrations are illusory: there are three high C#s in the finale of op. 109 that cannot be played on the Broadwood, and Beghin eloquently conjures the image of Beethoven ‘bending the instrument to his will’, with the possibility of retuning the highest C on the piano because it is used nowhere else in the sonata.Footnote ⁶ Even if it can be made to sound like a C#, however, it still feels like a C to the pianist.

The most thrilling part of the documentary is the second half, as the hearing machine takes shape. The initial goal was to come as close as possible to the one built for backwards-projecting sound by Stein. They first tried several materials and shapes based on the conversation books and on descriptions by visitors (e.g. Klöbel's ‘metal cupola’), then came up with the half-horn shape, open at the back end and made of zinc (and partly of cardboard, the material Stein started with). But with Beghin judging the resulting sound too harsh for a well-hearing pianist, the goal then shifted to make a more sonically congenial prototype using the same principles. Now they sought what de Francisco calls ‘an idealized hearing machine’. Experiments with the split piano lid are vividly rendered in the film.

But the shock is delivered very fast: the hearing machine pictured on the CD with the pianist's head ‘inside’ it is not the actual machine used in the recording called ‘Inside the Hearing Machine’. Only in the film and in a few videos on the website (including the ‘bonus’ video of op. 110 available to CD purchasers with an access code) do we see and hear Beghin playing Beethoven's music with the shiny ‘Stein-horn’. The three bonus video performances by Beghin (which in my opinion should be freely available, helping to market the CD) are: op. 109 on the Broadwood only with its normal ‘sideways-projecting lid’, putting the listener ‘next to’ the lid as an audience member; op. 110 on the Broadwood with the silver hearing machine, placing the listener with the pianist, ‘inside’; and finally op. 111 on the Broadwood with the listener ‘in front of’ two newly designed, acoustically engineered wooden panels that Beghin's team calls the ‘flexible backwards-facing lid’. It looks like the wooden lid was peeled back in two segments, each held in place at the correct angles by a wooden frame.

Beghin's hypothesis, borne out in the acoustical experiments with Thomas Wulfrank and the builder Chris Maene, was that the split lid

Thus, a double shift takes place in the research and experimentation leading up to the recording: from the creation of a machine fitting over the piano to concentrate and project sound backward for the deafly hearing pianist, to the re-engineering of a piano lid to project sound backward with both focus and treble-bass diffusion for a well-hearing pianist. What I would have wanted, ideally, was to see and hear Beghin playing each sonata in each sonic set-up, as a video companion to the CD, even if the CD chooses for us the ‘best’ sonic experience. Not only is the silver-colored horn-shaped hearing machine framing the pianist the most visually striking of the experiments, but it also seems closest to the historical artifact and to the level of sound-concentration that Beethoven needed.

The website contains two interactive features available to all. In ‘360’, one can drag and rotate the piano in each of three videos of the disarmingly wacky Bagatelle in C major op. 119, no. 7 (1820). As with the bonus videos, the choices are piano only, piano with hearing machine, and piano with backwards-facing lid. (And as stated in the film, a ‘neutral’ concert space was deemed the best background for the piano to take centre stage: the Akademiezaal in Sint-Truiden, Belgium.) But on the page titled ‘Comparing Lids and Hearing Machines’, there are six fragments (two excerpts from each sonata) recorded in five different ‘acoustical conditions’: regular lid, without lid (the most diffuse sound), with the ‘horn’ (the most concentrated sound), with a ‘box’, that is, a rectangular enclosure for the rear of the piano with the top angled upward toward the keyboard, and with the ‘backwards-projecting lid’ (the final version used in the recording). One may choose to compare by fragment or by ‘condition’; these are extremely illuminating sonic snapshots. Scores are offered from the first editions. For the fourth excerpt, which moves from the G-minor Arioso of op. 110 to the inverted fugue in G major, we are shown the first edition by Schlesinger in which the pedal marking for the repeated G chords (discussed above) is not cancelled at the beginning of the fugue, following the autograph; however, it is cancelled in the early Viennese edition by Cappi & Diabelli and accepted by later critical editions. One may judge for oneself. Initially I thought the haze obscuring the fugue subject to be rather off-putting; after listening many times I now find recordings that lift the pedal dismayingly denuded.

In his sensitive, musically acute, even visionary performances on the CD, Beghin revels in the keyboard's touch and sound. Listening to the CD while caught up in the materiality of its contexts creates a kind of multi-track response as, variously, ‘the music’, ‘the piano keys’, ‘the vibrations’, ‘the timbres’ and ‘the opus concept’ emerge and recede. The set of three sonatas reveals connections and contrasts in this recording as radiating outward from touch to sound. Now it is the repetitive pattern coming to the fore, now the sinuous counterpoint. One feels the pianist listening to each element, turning it this way and that. Resonances with and without pedal can be transformative: the two-note figures at the opening Vivace of op. 109 shimmer in a coloristic wash that gives way to a surprisingly transparent Adagio con espressione. The variety of Beghin's trills – in speed, colour, urgency or ease – is astonishing, and in these pieces trills matter a great deal. Key strikes with their appoggiaturas or afterbeat echoes seem unusually varied and insistent in the slow movement of op. 110, while key strikes for repeated notes and figurations in the final variation of op. 109 and in the transcendent variation finale of op. 111 blur yet remain paradoxically distinct. Indeed, Beghin's essay insists on the word ‘transcendence’ as the experience of the op. 111 variations: they overcome the harshness of the first movement (which he relates both to the finale of op. 106 and to the ‘dark and hollow hearing machine’), they allow him to feel Beethoven ‘becoming one with the soundscape’, and to find himself in a holistic state of ‘perfect balance between sound, touch, body and instrument’. Does the recording measure up to that vision? Perhaps the best way to answer the question is to compare the recording to the one Beghin made over 20 years ago on a restored Viennese piano (Johann Fritz, 1825) as part of a complete set of Beethoven sonatas by Malcolm Bilson and a group of his former students all on period Viennese pianos.Footnote ⁸ Beghin's op. 111 variations are lovely, with a truly ethereal pianissimo. The instrument does not intrude into one's consciousness of the music. On the Broadwood with its focused sound waves coming at us, however, the piano's materials bowl us over. Beghin's engagement with every layer of rhythm and register seems real and raw, and his performance of the variations makes this culmination of the opus concept a fitting close to a concept album.