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[estimated read time: 10-15 min, ~2000 words]
Introduction
The album of Beethoven and Rachmaninoff piano sonatas is an early work. Just out of conservatoire, I found myself at the threshold of my endeavours as an independent musician. Creating a studio recording proved to be an exciting opportunity that could define values and perspectives that would guide me for years to come. I had just relocated from Baltimore to the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, joining a vibrant interdisciplinary community. Music could not exist in my mind without a dialogue with other disciplines, and these surroundings further evolved this principle. Steeped in the writings of Derrida and Kierkegaard, I felt drawn to echo their ideas in my approach to interpreting music, prioritising the human capacity for doubt, vulnerability, and fragile, uncalculable possibilities, all while distancing myself from passive, inherited formulas. Nothing felt more human than diving into Derrida's paradox of forgiveness alongside Kierkegaard's concepts of faith and the absurd—not as doctrines, but as open philosophical questions in relation to music. Thus, through this lens, the album of Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and forgiveness began to take shape.
Only now do I fully appreciate the difficulty of those texts, especially amid the continued criticism directed at Derrida’s legacy in recent years. Looking back, I am haunted by his final interview—where he remarks with irony on how many good readers are truly left, and calls for a renewal of responsibility to resist doxa and the general discourse. Back then, his writings fueled a desire to evade the cliché, to join whatever battles remained against philistinism, to achieve a kind of seriousness. There was undoubtedly a significant degree of naïveté in my early approach. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, I was simply exploring forgiveness as an internal dynamic within art. By chance, it also became a sort of lived reality. As I prepared for the recording, I remember spending most days at the piano looking out on one of the most fascinating corners of the Marais, observing life through the medieval street of Geoffroy-l’Asnier. Music seemed superfluous here. This hidden corner was already occupied by the carefree sounds of children’s laughter from a school across the street, and, simultaneously, by the monumental weight and silence of the Mémorial de la Shoah. It was a place both wonderful and strange – the reconciliation of the irreconcilable, just a few steps away.
The Space Between
The question of forgiveness is undoubtedly born in ethics. On the surface, it appears as a question of morality that mitigates the space between Good and Evil. However, this point of departure is deceptive. Derrida illustrates the impossibility of forgiveness through the concept of the gift. The root of the French word for forgiveness, pardonner, is don (gift). If we consider the nature of an absolute, pure gift, outside of calculation, we see that the object that is given, the very act of giving, cannot return to the giver. A gift in this scenario may seem no more than a coincidence, but such is the paradox – it has to be completely removed from an economy. “On what condition does goodness exist beyond calculation? On the condition that goodness forget itself, that the movement is a movement of the gift that renounces itself…”
It was this liminal space that I imagined in the opening gesture of Beethoven’s 17th sonata. It is a moment of impossibility and illusion, before the launch of a restless counter-motif. This sonata is his only sonata in D minor. It is at once three sonatas (each movement a sonata-allegro) and none at all, suspended in time, without beginning nor end – three interrelated, parallel universes evolving simultaneously. The unique form is governed by unpredictable tempi, obscure themes, and a distinct recitative akin to theatre. One could argue that the musical themes at stake here do not reach any definitive resolution, in either the first or the final movement. Only the second movement offers a brief, dream-like repose. Instead of resolution, the sonata leaves us with an enduring tension—a musical counterpart to the frozen tableau that László Krasznahorkai described in his Nobel lecture, contemplating the unbridgeable distance between chasing forces:
"...in my eyes those ten metres are eternal and unconquerable, because my own attention only senses that the Good will never catch flailing Evil, because between Good and Evil there is no hope, none whatsoever."
Beethoven’s D minor sonata operates within this mystery. The opening Largo arpeggio and the surging Allegro exist in permanent friction—a musical pursuit across an eternal ten metres where neither theme can fully absorb, resolve, or defeat the other.
Zero Form and the Acoustic Image
Rachmaninoff would often choose Beethoven’s D minor sonata for his solo performances. This was in the decades following his departure into exile in 1917, and this decisive year for Rachmaninoff could well be the equivalent of 1802 for Beethoven – the time of both the Heiligenstadt Testament and the D minor sonata. If Beethoven was caught on the break of health, Rachmaninoff was caught on the break of centuries, during a chaotic rise of forces in Europe. Emerging from a kind of eastern renaissance, he moved to the West, only to endure endless shifts in musical vogues. Beethoven and Rachmaninoff, unfortunately, are not often linked. Besides Rachmaninoff’s personal affinity for programming Beethoven, reconciling their music for this program meant seeing these two figures not as opposite poles of the classical repertoire but as shared wanderers facing rupture, confronted with their own singular Event.
Rachmaninoff’s second sonata exists on both sides of 1917, first conceived in 1913 and subsequently revised in 1931, placed between two of Rachmaninoff’s personally beloved opuses – the symphonic poem The Bells, Op. 35, and the All-Night Vigil, Op. 37. Like Beethoven’s D minor sonata, it is also a work that may be interpreted without a pause between movements. The second movement is seamlessly enveloped by two seven-measure phrases on either side, shifting down by a whole step in the process. What is remarkable about Rachmaninoff’s Op. 36 is that it clearly points beyond any sort of literal romanticism. Long lines and melodies become less frequent and more obscure, submerged in far-reaching gestures of sound. The loose, episodic sonata-allegro formations of the outer movements do not emulate a musical architecture in the classical sense, but are instead grounded in the individual properties of distinct harmonies.
A visual counterpart to this paradigm shift is captured in Kazimir Malevich’s futurist painting Black Square, which debuted in 1913—the exact year Rachmaninoff composed the original version of the second sonata. Just as Malevich’s canvas established a "zero form" that liberates the distinct energies and properties of color from narrative representation, Rachmaninoff approached a similar threshold in sound. Rather than abandoning tonality for total atonality, he expanded tonal relationships to a point where traditional functional syntax surrendered to concentrated harmonic resonance. In doing so, Rachmaninoff evolved the sonata form away from narrative and toward an exploration of a new, pure acoustic image.
One step beyond the Universal
The singular, personal Event of Beethoven and Rachmaninoff—and the mystery within their music that finds even greater presence in their later works—underlines the enduring artistic problem of the universal, and thus, also of the nuanced relationship of forgiveness toward aesthetics. It is worth remembering that the pillars of classicism were not formulated by German or Viennese musicians, but rather by writers and poets of 17th-century France: Molière, Racine, and Corneille. Their preference for nature and reason over individual expression, the fast, light, and “tight-knit” declaration of ideas, and most importantly, the choice of the heroic character over anything particular, singular, vulgar, negative, or weak, laid the foundation for normative aesthetics in works of art. Art could not be subjective; the objective was the good, noble, and heroic. The “tragic hero”—to borrow a term from Kierkegaard—must sacrifice all personal interest for the sake of public duty. The best of a kind had to be done in the best possible way to achieve status in the universal. However, in this instance, both composers are well outside the inherited boundaries of "the universal."
Kierkegaard’s clear distinction between what he called the “tragic hero” and “knight of faith” points to the fundamental mysterium tremendum. Both Kierkegaard and Derrida frame this problem by returning to Abraham’s impossible decision to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. Abraham’s inexplicable story is central to humanity, the starting point of all Abrahamic religions, of Western civilization. Nevertheless, he exists outside the universal, outside of human reach. If Abraham were to be in the universal, he would be no more than a murderer. Abraham’s story is permeated by the impossibility of forgiveness. His life struggle is a paradox, a question of the absurd, grasped only through faith. As an individual, he exists outside the universal. If forgiveness is possible, it is as a symbol, without any explicit religious sense, given to us not to understand but to feel, to renew faith in spite of everything. Derrida reminds us in The Gift of Death that genuine responsibility cannot be reduced to a formula. It operates sans se donner à voir—without giving itself to be seen. To be truly responsible, an action must remain an un-thematized secret. It is held together by the promise of a passion to be discovered:
"Such is the secret truth of faith as absolute responsibility and as absolute passion, the 'highest passion' as Kierkegaard will say; it is a passion that, sworn to secrecy, cannot be transmitted from generation to generation. In this sense it has no history. This un-transmissibility of the highest passion, the normal condition of a faith which is thus bound to secrecy, nevertheless dictates to us the following: we must always start over."
This paradox finds its ultimate aesthetic parallel in Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice. When Alexander vows to burn his home to avert apocalyptic catastrophe, his sacrifice appears as sheer madness. It cannot be justified; it must remain a solitary secret between himself and the absolute. Tarkovsky further encircles this paradox around Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished panel The Adoration of the Magi, returning to the concept of the gift, and complements it with J.S. Bach’s aria Erbarme dich, mein Gott, in B minor, from the St. Matthew Passion—Peter’s weeping plea for mercy. Bach’s siciliana reaches upward in infinite longing, providing the acoustic voice for Alexander’s secret vow, just as Alexander Siloti’s transcription of Bach’s Prelude in B minor on this program offers an open end.
Postscript
Forgiveness inevitably leans beyond the universal moral law toward aesthetics—an imperfect beauty and absolute beginning that must be found again by each generation. In Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann captured this exact tension when he wrote:
"To be frank, we do not like to speak of beauty. Does not the concept, the word, exude boredom? Is beauty not a sublimely pallid notion, a pedant's fantasy? It's said that it is based in laws; but laws speak to reason, not to emotion, which has no use for reason's strictures. That is why perfect beauty, which needs no apology, is so dreary. For emotion actually wants to find something it can forgive; otherwise, it turns away with a yawn. Beauty is magic worked upon the emotions—always half-illusionary, extremely precarious, and fragile in its very efficacy."
I would now also add Goethe’s line from Faust: “beauty but blesses her own face, but irresistible is grace.” My original notes ended with a rhetorical question – isn’t this passion universally accessible? – I am no longer so sure. Perhaps it is the most rare, extraordinary gift in the world.
Much has changed since 2014. We have now entered a new iteration of the digital age, where arts and culture, and indeed life itself, increasingly demand allegiance to a calculated, standardized approach—a hyper-rationalized reliance on literalism, pre-approved dogma, and recycled clichés that reduce creation to a measurable craft. However, artists are not artisans. Every choice cannot have a public paper trail, every risk must not be smoothed over to eliminate error. In our current time—where artists are relentlessly incentivized to document every inner impulse and portion of the artistic process to satisfy an economy of social approval—the paradox of absolute responsibility becomes even more urgent. To paraphrase Derrida, there is no true responsibility without an inventive rupture. To be absolutely responsible, the artistic decision must be made in the dark, without relying on consensus for validation. It demands the courage to step beyond the universal, embracing a truth that cannot be proved, but lived.
I am thinking of a recent lecture by Alexander Sokurov where he encouraged the next generation not to fear asking big questions, to give the best answer they can, and keep going. I find solace in knowing that this project was one such attempt, and will remain unfinished to grow within me. It is destined to carry a Plinian signature. Listening to the record now, I no longer feel the burden of whatever thoughts occupied me back then. The future will continue to present itself with unimaginable ruthlessness. As the last Kiev chant slowly oscillates, I remember the gentle snow that fell on those January days in Berlin while working in the recording studio. This movement brings to mind Virginia Woolf’s aphorism: that one should not wait for the great revelation, but recognize that through small daily miracles, there is beauty—like striking matches in the dark.