Hammerklavier

Beethoven smashes one piano after another. He shears through keyboards, a peasant scything hay. The composer's fingers don't grow deaf, they become deeper, more blunted, like mallets. His apartment is disorderly, tools and equipment are hidden in Dresden figurines, in elderly Delftware, ball-peen hammers crammed into the whittled stems of goose quills. Augers, grinders and rotary tillers are rendered into themes and motifs. Wrecking crews hum and stamp, tables thump out allegro dissonance. Into this din and demolition plows a heavy sonata the hard-nosed 'Hammerklavier' bulldozing its trenchant path into the cramped streets; where in the absence of safety barriers, a defiant deconstruction has begun.