An Actor Prepares (for Beethoven)

Text: Olivia Giovetti, VAN Magazine

Among the many Beethoven works programmed for 2020, one that has continued to gain new relevance and resonance throughout the year is the composer’s music for Egmont, written for Goethe’s play of the same name. Its plot, which tells the story of a young soldier who sacrifices all—including love and his own life—for freedom over tyranny, is like something out of Shakespeare.

No small wonder, then, that Liev Schreiber would add a new role to his repertoire this year as the speaker (who sometimes stands in as Egmont) in a concert version of Beethoven’s Egmont suite. Having played everyone from Orson Welles to Sabretooth to Ray Donovan on screen, Schreiber's Shakespeare credits on film and stage include The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and Henry V. With the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Schreiber starred opposite soprano Karen Slack in a new English translation of Egmont by playwright Philip Boehm. What would have been a live performance shifted to a socially-distanced online stream earlier this fall.

In our interview, Schreiber discusses his history with Beethoven, the similarities he sees between the composer’s music and Shakespeare’s works, and the one Beethoven piece he listens to when he warms up for a stage performance.

You grew up in a classical family. Was that your first introduction to Beethoven?
Yes, my mother has a fairly vast knowledge and awareness of classical music; I have an older brother who was a classical musician; and when I was very small, my mother had a boyfriend who was a classical pianist. He was primarily working on Bach’s repertoire, but Beethoven was always a favorite of my mother’s.

Do you remember the first work of his that you heard?
I think probably the Fifth [Symphony] in elementary school, but I’m not sure. I just remember it being a teaching device… Probably at some point, too, the “Ode to Joy” had to be in there. I think with my mother, probably what was played most in our house was the chamber music.… She was one of those people who, whatever she heard on the radio, she could tell you everything about it.

When you were approached for Egmont, was it a piece you knew beforehand?
I was familiar with the Overture, but I didn’t realize how beautiful the rest of it was. And I think part of that is because the Overture is really the only thing that gets performed, at least in America. I've heard that it gets performed in Europe with a little more frequency. But because of the text, generally, most people only know the Overture.

Yes, in Germany you have the benefit of it being by Goethe and in the original language. It’s like Shakespeare.
It’s a difficult piece of text. It’s a very tricky form, rhyming couplets, because the meter is so redundant, so repetitive. And the rhyme scheme is so repetitive that it’s very difficult to get context out of it. Beethoven’s writing [it almost like] an opera, and so he jumps around between politics and romance.

And yet, I don’t think anyone at the beginning of the Beethoven 250th year would have realized just how relevant it is, especially to American audiences today.
Absolutely. I think there is a real sense in this country that our democracy is being challenged by a very polarized Congress and a lot of civil unrest.… What I liked about [Philip Boehm’s] translation and [this setting] was the intimacy of it. And I thought that that was an exciting challenge, just because it is so contemporary in so many ways.

Can you say more about this new translation of the text and the intimacy?
One could read this text kind of with a nod, almost, to Thornton Wilder and his Stage Manager in Our Town. Or Brecht, for example, and the idea of Verfremdungseffekt. There was no artifice around the poetry or no artifice around the story. It was a very intimate kind of naturalistic portrayal of it, that might cut through to what’s reverberating now and what feels contemporary and prescient.

Do you hear Beethoven’s music differently when you have a new translation of the Goethe text?
Yes, I think in my interpretation of it, or in my take on it, rather than playing into the Sturm und Drang of the music, what I thought was really compelling was the idea of the text juxtaposing the music rather than joining it. Of course, there are moments where it becomes very large, [but] for me, it felt interesting to work against the swell of the music, to try and give it a contemporary almost news-like read. Now that’s impossible in some of these sections where you’re actually playing the character and joining the swell of the music that I think is designed to be inspiring and expressive.

So the actor’s tone of voice in Egmont becomes its own musicality.
I mean, it’s interesting how Beethoven realized that the clearest path to this political idea was an emotional, personal one. That the politics being what they were, at some level they just kind of become a polemic. But when you introduce a love story, then you can really get at something intimate and emotional. Once people feel the pain of the love story, they can then access the political, intellectual argument with much more intimacy and depth. You care about Clara and Egmont, and the music really helps guide you to that. And I think their impossible love becomes a kind of metaphor for our faith and hope for democracy.

You’ve done a lot of Shakespeare and classical theatre. I’m wondering if performing Shakespeare and performing Egmont have any similarities for you?
When you’re in full verse mode [with Shakespeare], you’re in iambic pentameter. Which is a relatively easy and comfortable verse form to follow. I always was much more frustrated by things like Alexandrine verse and rhyming couplets. I find them enraging. The’'re great in sonnets, because it’s so cute, it’s like a piece of music. But when you’re trying to tell a story with any kind of clarity and context, the redundancy of the form often gets in the way and kind of lulls people to sleep. They start following the verse form, which is the rhyming couplet, and they forget the overall picture and they forget the overall context, and you get into that pattern of listening, where you stop waiting for anything new other than the next rhyme. And so I was really nervous about this piece of text and was consciously trying to break the rhyme as much as I could so that it fed the overall understanding of the story, which is rather dense anyway.

You do have the music, which comes in and breaks things up a little, especially in the end with Egmont’s speech.
Yeah, I thought that section was particularly great, I really love that section. That’s the kind of ba-rum-pum-pum-pum. That’s the “Once more into the breach” speech. It’s very emotional and big, and it works very well. But there’s a section just before that where he’s talking about his vision of Clara, where literally it’s interspersed line-for-line with the orchestra and they play notes in between each line. That, I thought the orchestra just did so beautifully.

What does Beethoven represent for you today?
You know, there’s a piece of [his] music I listen to and have listened to for years. It’s part of my warm up when I work onstage… The String Quartet No. 1 in F Major. When I’m warming up, I’m trying to get in touch with impulse and feeling. And I think Beethoven, better than any other composer in my mind, was able to mimic human impulse and feeling in his composition.

And so you have these pieces of music that capture your imagination and emotion in a very visceral way, and allow you to travel emotionally. That piece for me is a perfect example of that. It’s a sigh. It’s a swelling of feeling in your chest that kind of resets your mind and body in preparation for being connected to your feelings.

That’s a beautiful way of putting it.
You know, Bach is exquisite and beautiful, but I find myself just admiring him. And Mozart is joyful and ecstatic, and I find myself being in a better mood. But Beethoven lands me in myself, or rather Beethoven lands me in whatever feeling he wants me to feel.… And the way in which he uses the orchestra to do that is extraordinary. It feels like breath.

Like in a meditative way?
In a physical way. It follows the natural rhythms of our breath. At least I find in particular in that piece. Absolutely, especially the Egmont. It moves through you like breath and swells like breath, and so I feel like maybe it’s just my own thing, but I feel like at some level he’s tapping into you anatomically. [He hums a bit of the String Quartet No. 1 in F Major, layering violins and viola lines over the cello.] And there’s a pulse behind it as well, which is like blood. And that’s the thing about him: Once you get on it, you can’t get off..… The rhythm has your pulse, and then the strings have your breath. You have to surrender to it.