Let Beethoven Be a Beginning

28 Aug, 2026

Jon Batiste's Beethoven Blues makes the case that musicians can honour inherited music by transforming it, giving familiar compositions new life alongside faithful performances.

Jon Batiste treats Beethoven as someone a musician can answer. In a 2023 interview with Chris Wallace, he demonstrated that idea at the piano, transforming Für Elise through the language of blues and gospel. The familiar melody supplied a point of departure. Batiste supplied another direction.

His solo piano album Beethoven Blues, released in November 2024, gave that approach room to develop. Its 11 tracks begin and end with treatments of Für Elise, alongside other Beethoven transformations and original material. According to the album announcement, Batiste had explored classical transformations for years, and the response to the Wallace clip helped bring a longstanding album idea to fruition. The project grew from an established practice, with a popular performance helping it find an audience.

Calling the result classical or jazz settles very little. Beethoven supplies the source composition, and Batiste brings blues, gospel and jazz to his response. Those traditions deserve their own names. The useful question is what the pianist makes possible by bringing them together. A familiar phrase can establish an expectation, then acquire a different rhythm, weight or destination. Recognition gives the listener something against which to hear the invention.

Jon Batiste at the piano Jon Batiste at Carnegie Hall, 12 April 2023. Photograph by Totokik, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

What makes the Für Elise treatments satisfying is smaller than the genre question. The piece opens in A minor on an oscillation between E and D sharp. Beethoven spelled that D sharp as an augmented fourth above the tonic and used it as a chromatic neighbour leaning into E, which is what any teacher would call it and what it plainly does in context. On the keyboard it is the same key as E flat, the flattened fifth, and a reviewer at The Arts Desk heard a flat 5 sitting in the opening phrase. Both hearings live in the same pitch, and the difference between them is a matter of what a musician decides the note is for. Beethoven did not put a blue note in the first bar of the most over-taught piece in the piano repertoire. He put a note there that somebody could later decide to hear as one.

The title "5th Symphony in Congo Square" makes the encounter specific. Congo Square in New Orleans hosted gatherings where enslaved and free Black people sustained traditions of music and dance. Placing Beethoven's symphony there, even in a title, suggests a meeting between histories. I read it as an assertion that Batiste's inheritance belongs in the conversation as fully as Beethoven's does.

Beethoven's own practice gives that conversation another dimension. At the marathon concert of December 22, 1808, which also premiered the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Fourth Piano Concerto, he improvised the piano introduction to the Choral Fantasy because he had not had time to write it out. He prepared a written version the following year for the printed editions. The passage now belongs to a written work, and its first audience heard an act of invention.

The same period points the other way as well, which complicates the picture in a useful direction. In the Emperor Concerto, drafted across 1809 and finished around the turn of the following year, Beethoven arrived at the moment where a soloist would traditionally improvise a cadenza and wrote an instruction into the score forbidding it: do not make a cadenza, but go straight on to what follows. Around the same time he wrote out cadenzas for his earlier concertos, and the reason is less tidy than it first looks. He had stopped appearing as a soloist, the manuscripts survived in Archduke Rudolph's library, and Henle's editors conclude they were composed for his pupil rather than for his own use. He once refused a request for a cadenza outright, telling the pianist to write one and offering to correct it. The improvised cadenza was receding from concert practice across those decades for reasons that had little to do with any single composer, and later composers wrote their own into the published score. Beethoven's example belongs inside that shift rather than causing it.

Both impulses were his, working in the same few years. The pianist who invented in front of an audience and the composer who supplied written cadenzas so that a pupil would not have to invent are the same man, which is worth remembering before invoking him as an authority for either position.

What the history does supply is a distinction between 2 artistic ambitions. A pianist can pursue fidelity to Beethoven's composition or respond to his example as an improviser. Both require knowledge and craft. Neither guarantees a compelling performance. Historical precedent gives Batiste's approach context, and the music still has to earn the listener's attention.

An announced performance of Für Elise and an announced improvisation on Für Elise make different promises to an audience. Those promises should be kept. Listeners who want Beethoven's particular relationships of melody, harmony and structure have a legitimate expectation. Performers who honour the score also make consequential choices about phrasing, balance and time, and their work keeps the repertoire alive.

I want room for more openly transformative performances alongside them. Students could learn to invent at the keyboard as well as read. Concert programmes could make space for a composition and a musician's answer to it. Audiences could hear what changes, what survives and whether the encounter produces anything worth returning to.

None of that would be starting from nothing. Gabriela Montero has built part of her career on improvising in recital on themes called out by the audience, in a recognizably classical language rather than a jazz one, alongside her performances of the standard repertoire. She improvised privately from early childhood and only began doing it in public at Martha Argerich's urging, which says something about how much room the concert hall had been leaving for it. Organists never lost the skill at all, and have been holding an international improvisation competition at Haarlem since 1951, where finalists receive their theme an hour before they play.

Two musicians and a competition do not make a movement, and I am not going to claim one is underway. The preference is mine. In A Musical Joke, I considered how music can acquire meanings beyond its maker's intentions. Batiste approaches that freedom from the performer's side, deliberately giving inherited material another life. Beethoven remains available in the score. Batiste offers a reason to listen again.

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