Andreas Whittam Smith: Beethoven, Barenboim, and a moment of magic

Among the countless thrilling experiences that classical music provides, there are two sets of performances that are always special. You may wait for years for either of them to come round. Very fortunately, however, London has provided both in the past six months.

Last autumn the Royal Opera House staged the four operas that comprise Wagner's "Ring Cycle" – Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, with just a day or two between the performances. And as each lasts some four to five hours, one hurries to the Opera House during the afternoon for a five o'clock start. How strange, you think. Other people are still at work and I am going to Wagner.

Then, yesterday afternoon at the Royal Festival Hall, the second of these great musical events was completed. Daniel Barenboim gave his eighth and final recital of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. He has mixed early, middle and late period works in each concert, so that yesterday he performed the opus 7, written in 1797 when the composer was 27, as well as opus 111, the last in the series, finished shortly before Beethoven began work on the Ninth Symphony 25 years later.

Again, there was a huge sense of occasion. As with the "Ring Cycle", every seat was taken as soon as they went on sale. The Festival Hall had even provided 150 extra places on the platform itself. As a result, Barenboim has appeared more like a boxer in a ring, with the spectators bearing down on him, than the usual aloof pianist sitting at a piano set on the broad expanse of a stage that normally accommodates a full orchestra. The applause he received as he came on to play was more than most artists receive at the end of a superb performance.

This is because we knew, before a single note was struck, that we were in the presence of a great man. Not only is Barenboim one of the best two or three pianists in the world, he is also a distinguished conductor. He has conducted the aforementioned "Ring Cycle" at Bayreuth. Moreover, as a Jew he has insisted on playing Wagner in Israel because, "I don't see how you can really understand Mahler and Schoenberg if you don't know your Wagner". Even more boldly, in partnership with the late Edward Said, the Palestinian-Arab scholar, he set up the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. At each desk, an Arab is placed next to an Israeli. After a concert in Ramallah, Barenboim said: "Either we all kill each other, or we share what there is to share."

But it wasn't just the crowds, the wild applause and Barenboim's achievements that made the occasion at the Festival Hall. The "32" are the touchstone of a pianist's ability. Not only do they contain fiendishly difficult passages but they have that timeless quality that all great art possesses. Equally remarkable, there yet remains the odd movement here and there which the amateur pianist can tackle. The result is that the audience tends to know and love the work with a rare intensity.

Both the Wagner and the Beethoven provided challenges for the music lover. A single phrase I had read haunted me throughout the "Ring Cycle": "What at first may seem to be a disjointed accumulation of broken musical fragments becomes with familiarity a huge unbroken span from the opening notes to the final chord." If only I could have kept that great conception entire and in one piece in my head as I listened.

And then with the 32 sonatas, there is the familiar notion that they represent, as Barenboim has said, the most complete creative diary ever kept by a composer. Yes, so long as one does not try to connect what one hears with specific events in Beethoven's life. I don't think you can really find his friendships in them even though individual sonatas are dedicated to various friends and supporters. You certainly cannot find the anguish that his deafness inflicted on him, even though from his late 20s onwards he was complaining that his ears continued "to hum and buzz all day".

Yet, as I hurried off to the last recital yesterday, how could I not think of all that I know about Beethoven – and Daniel Barenboim – as the tumultuous opus 111 begins, with its urgency, its startling variations in volume, its passages that hark back to the style which Beethoven knew in his youth, its fugal elements that go back even further still, its force that carries the punch of an entire symphony orchestra, and its questioning, wistful passages as well as its supreme self-confidence.

In gratitude to Beethoven-Barenboim, now become one artistic personality, we rose to our feet at the end, clapped and cheered and asked for more. But Barenboim had done enough. There really was nothing to add.

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