My first exposure to Sorabji’s mammoth Opus clavicembalisticum – a five-hour epic that is inevitably not performed often – was when I was about 15. Looking back, it seems strange given the general direction that mainstream media has taken throughout the world, but around this time I saw a rather long interview with Geoffrey Douglas Madge, who was talking about this work on Belgian television. This must have been in the mid-1980s, when Geoffrey was playing and recording this work. Several years later, I was playing Ives’s Concord Sonata in Holland and Geoffrey came to my dressing room and introduced himself – we became friends and have since played many concerts together. It was some time before we ever mentioned Sorabji, since we were both more preoccupied with playing Busoni and Beethoven, but at some point we got around to discussing this unique composer’s music. Although Geoffrey wasn’t at all involved with my playing of Sorabji, our discussion of Busoni certainly influenced my approach.

I first performed Opus clavicembalisticum in public 20 years ago in Belgium. It wasn’t very good. But then I was asked to play it in Madrid, and it was better. Then in 2016 a festival in Berlin wanted me to perform it, and it was better still. Then I played it in Berlin again in 2018 and I was starting to feel comfortable with it. When the pandemic came, someone called me and said ‘now you have time, as we all do, so do you want to record the Sorabji?’ I did.

It goes without saying that not many people have played the complete Opus clavicembalisticum in public, so talking about it makes me feel a little bit like an astronaut, having done something that few people can relate to. But even having played it publicly only four times – and who knows, perhaps following the recording someone will invite me to play it again – a noticeable pattern to the audience’s response emerges. After the first part and second part they are totally with you, especially as the passacaglia is so audience-friendly and draws the listener into the work. But then in the third part – especially the final fugue and coda, which together make a very long section – Sorabji seems to push back, rather like Beethoven seems to in his Hammerklavier Sonata, where the Adagio draws you in before the final fugue becomes almost misanthropic. This same process is present in Opus clavicembalisticum, but on a much grander scale. Finally, at the very end, everything is reunited again.

One of the great challenges of Opus clavicembalisticum, apart from the stamina involved, is to play it lyrically, to sing the lines and build the structure with a proper sense of architecture. This often means not allowing the music to climax too soon, or in the wrong places; you often feel like you’re postponing the climax. Being prepared to wait longer than you might expect before allowing the music to release its tension is one of the keys to a successful performance of this work.

One needs at least to try and understand a work – its language, structure and aesthetic – before performing it, and Opus clavicembalisticum is no different. In this work several aesthetic contexts come together. The most obvious is a forward-looking language that embraces modernism. Think of the fugue in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier – this could only have been conceived in the context of a society that started to think of itself as modernist, as heading towards a future that is different from what has gone before. Beethoven took an ancient form, the fugue, but made it sound completely modern, and Sorabji does the same. But Sorabji does much more than build on a tradition of using ancient forms with modern language. He clearly wants to write a magnum opus in a kind of grandioso style redolent of a 19th-century sensibility, quite unlike the later Viennese expressionists, who wrote in dense, concise forms. Another aesthetic point is that many of the more poetic passages have a certain late Symbolist feel. Opus clavicembalisticum was written at the same time as Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – big statements in literature that also have a post-Symbolist feel in which one gets the sense that you can keep digging and will continue to discover new facets to multi-dimensional works.

Last but not least, for me there is an enormous conflict that lies at the heart of Opus clavicembalisticum that can be described as an East-West collision. Sorabji wrote a kind of essentialist theme, as Western composers do – think of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which our Western mind thinks of as having a certain ‘meaning’ (for example, ‘fate knocking at the door’). Sorabji does this as well, writing the same kind of ‘Western’ themes; but much of his music, and especially Opus clavicembalisticum, is not Western at all, in the sense that there is so much competing information, which is a typical attitude of non-Western composers, or composers who incorporate non-Western approaches to their music (the music of Clarence Barlow, for example). You can compare this with the feeling one gets when you see the different buildings at the Alhambra in Granada, reflecting different cultures: it is impossible to grasp them in full, because when you focus on one aspect you don’t see other elements, and vice versa. You might get a similar experience when looking at the stars: if you focus on a certain constellation then you don’t see the others, and there are too many to appreciate in one go. In this sense, as with the cosmos, Opus clavicembalisticum defies the imagination.

What is important here is how I do not view Opus clavicembalisticum. My approach to this music is very different from Madge’s. When Geoffrey was playing Opus clavicembalisticum he was very involved with the music of Xenakis and strategies of how to play New Complexity works, and it is understandable that these approaches influenced his playing of Sorabji. But my own view of Opus clavicembalisticum has very little to do with this. I do not think Sorabji is about playing as fast as possible, but I think one must make sure the audience can understand and absorb this very dense music. This is even the case when the pianist has to overwhelm the audience with demanding piano-writing – breakneck speed, cascades of notes, complex rhythms – that cannot possibly be followed in the way that a ‘normal’ piece of music can be followed. This itself becomes an essential part of the communication.

There are numerous other recordings of Opus clavicembalisticum and I have obviously listened to these, but if anything they helped me to establish my own ideas. Clearly one can have completely different ideas about the work from the ones I have – to a greater extent than many other piano works, there is no single ‘correct’ way of playing it. Opus clavicembalisticum is open to a multitude of insights, and it is likely that if I ever perform it again, my interpretation will change.

Opus clavicembalisticum is notorious for its length and complexity, and for pianists and listeners alike I would recommend Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica as a good way to approach its aesthetic. Once you have built up to Opus clavicembalisticum you could even view this as a stepping stone to Sequentia cyclica, Sorabji’s eight-hour epic that has been recorded by Jonathan Powell. What is important, I think, is that listeners should listen again and again; even when one might get a bit lost, repeated listening and increased familiarity reveal Opus clavicembalisticum to be a highly rewarding experience, especially in these times of easy-listening simplicity. 

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today