When were Beethoven's sonatas composed?
Beethoven composed his Moonlight Sonata in 1801, the same year that —
A French silk-weaver called Joseph Marie Jacquard invents an automated loom capable of weaving complex patterns by using a series of cards with holes cut in them to allow hooks passing through the holes to raise and lower individual threads. These punched cards will be the inspiration for the first computers.
Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of post-Revolution France, invites the Italian inventor Alessandro Volta to Paris to demonstrate his new invention, the voltaic pile — the first electric battery. It consists of discs of copper and zinc, stacked on top of each other and separated by cloth soaked in saltwater.
In England, Beau Brummell is revolutionising men’s fashion: instead of extravagant brocade, lace, perfume and jewellery, the well-dressed gentleman – the ‘dandy’ — now wears close-fitting, pale-coloured trousers and waistcoat, a perfectly tailored dark tailcoat and a carefully knotted linen cravat.
Thomas Jefferson becomes President of the United States of America, which at this stage consists of just 16 states.
And in Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven writes his 14th piano sonata — now better known as the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata.
Facts about Beethoven's Sonatas
A sonata is a piece for one solo instrument, usually accompanied by the piano (unless the solo instrument is a piano, in which case it plays alone). It generally has several movements (typically three or four), the first of which is often in ‘sonata form’.
Sonata form is a musical structure that consists of three parts: first, an Exposition, in which two contrasting themes (melodies) are presented, one after the other. In the second part, the Development, those themes are used to take the music in new directions: played in different keys, or with different accompaniment, or combined together in different ways, either as whole melodies or even just picking out distinctive elements of the melody or rhythm. The movement ends with the Recapitulation, which returns to the original themes. These three sections give the music a sense of direction, of establishing a musical home ground, travelling away from it, and coming home again.
Beethoven started writing piano sonatas as a boy of 13, and his 32 ‘adult’ sonatas span his full composing career. Five sonatas are represented on this disc: the earliest of these, the Sonata Pathétique (No. 8), marks a period of transition in Beethoven’s professional life, from being famous as a virtuoso pianist who also happened to write music, to being a composer first and foremost. (Pathétique here doesn’t mean ‘pathetic’; the French word refers to music which is very passionate and emotional, especially with feelings of pity, grief and sorrow.)
The ‘Moonlight’ Sonata (No. 14) comes from Beethoven’s early years in Vienna, a time when he was experimenting with form and looking for a wider range of expression. Instead of being in sonata form, with its emphasis on contrast and direction, its opening movement is calm and tranquil throughout. Sonata No. 18, ‘The Hunt’, was written a year later: its cheerful mood is astonishing, given that this was also the time when Beethoven was almost suicidal with despair at the onset of deafness.
The ‘Waldstein’ Sonata (No. 21) and the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata (No. 23) were written a few years later, in the period when Beethoven was writing his ‘Eroica’ Symphony and other ‘heaven-storming compositions’, full of striking power and energy.
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas
Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53 ‘Waldstein’ (1803–04)
Perhaps the most ringing (in every sense of the word) product endorsement in the history of manufacturing, this is the first piano work that Beethoven wrote after being given a new Érard piano in 1803. The sonata certainly exploits several features of the new instrument – its extended range beyond the usual five octaves of the day, and foot operated pedals (rather than levers activated by the knee), exploited extensively in the last movement.
Apart from the hammering articulation and driving semiquavers of the first movement, two features of the last movement, Beethoven apparently felt, needed special comment. First, there are the peculiarly energised textures involving trills concealed in inner parts, which he was also to exploit in his late sonatas. This was something sufficiently new that Beethoven felt the need to rally the faint-hearted with an easier alternative, and the encouraging comment, ‘It is not at all important whether this trill loses here something of its usual speed.’
Second are the glissando octaves towards the very end, a technique which appears to have been easier on the Érard than on the heavier action of a modern piano (although it should be noted that the lighter action of the Stuart piano used in these recordings facilitates the execution of glissandi). Harmonically the work explores key changes based on the interval of a third – C major to E major – rather than those using the Classical convention of the fifth: an innovation of Beethoven’s in the early years of the century which was almost to become the norm in his late works.
Yet despite the great originality of the outer movements, there are some ways in which the small Introduzione to the last movement which Beethoven wrote between them is the most forward looking of the three,pointing to the way in which, in late works like the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, Op. 106 and the Ninth Symphony,Beethoven was able to meld formal composition with a spirit of improvisation.
The published Introduzione was not, however, the slow movement originally played by Beethoven to his friends. Ferdinand Ries, another of Beethoven’s piano pupils, describes how there had originally been a ‘grand Andante’ as the slow movement but ‘a friend of Beethoven’s suggested to him that the sonata was too long, whereupon he was taken to task most severely. Calmer deliberation, however, soon convinced my teacher that the remark had some truth to it. He then published the grand Andante in F major, in 3/8 time, on its own and later composed the interesting introduction to the rondo in its present form.’ The original slow movement today can be heard as a stand-alone piece, the Andante favoriin F major, WoO 57.
It should also be noted in passing perhaps that the person immortalised by receiving the dedication of this work, Count Ferdinand Ernst von Waldstein (1762–1823) was the first of Beethoven’s several patrons to recognise his genius while in Bonn. Waldstein used his influence with the Elector of Bonn to have Beethoven sent to Vienna in 1792 to ‘receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands’, as he famously wrote in Beethoven’s album, and helped him with contacts after he had arrived.
Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 ‘Appassionata’ (1804–06)
Ries’s description of the genesis of the last movement of this sonata gives an apt insight into the inextricable fusion between composition and keyboard improvisation:
‘During a similar walk in which we went so far astray that we did not get back to Döbling, where Beethoven lived, until nearly 8 o’clock, he had been all the time humming and sometimes howling, always up and down, without singing any definite notes. In answer to my question what it was,
he said: ‘A theme for the last movement of the sonata has occurred to me.’ When we entered the
room he ran to the pianoforte without taking off his hat. I took a seat in the corner and he soon
forgot all about me. Now he stormed for at least an hour with the beautiful finale of the sonata.
Finally, he got up, was surprised still to see me and said: “I cannot give you a lesson today, I must do some more work.”’
The subtitle ‘Appassionata’, so inextricably linked to this work, was not Beethoven’s but was added posthumously by a publisher in 1838, in an arrangement of the work for piano duet. It refers to the music, not the man: its moods of agitation and turmoil, building to a tragic climax. It is true, however, that the sonata was written during a time of high emotion in Beethoven’s life: the period of his apparently unrequited infatuation with Josephine Deym (née Brunsvik). This also coincides with his work on the opera Leonore (later Fidelio). The sonata was started in 1804, and although not published until 1807, it appears to have been finished by 1806, in time for the autograph to be almost destroyed in a rain storm on a trip home from Silesia, after Beethoven had had a towering row with one of his patrons, Prince Lichnowsky. The autograph today still bears the evidence of rain damage.
Sonata, quasi una fantasia (Sonata No. 14) in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2 ‘Moonlight’ (1801)
According to Czerny, Beethoven once said, ‘People are always talking about the C-sharp minor sonata. Really, I have written better things.’ Nevertheless, the originality of the concept should not be underestimated. In the context of a sonata principle which usually stresses duality and contrast, Beethoven gives us a single unfolding, and a texture unified by the simplest of triplet accompaniment figures, so that, while the movement can be analysed in terms of the contrasting keys and subjects of traditional sonata form, what strikes the listener is the ruminative nocturnal mood. Almost by way of apology for his originality, Beethoven called both this work and its partner, Op. 27 No.1, Sonata, quasi una fantasia. Indeed, the work could be seen as one of the first masterpieces in the history of piano music to exploit a sound which, with further development, was to become a trademark of Chopin’s and a cliché in the hands of others: the use of the sustaining pedal, together with deep bass notes and an undulating accompaniment under a singing melody to capture the piano’s particular capacity for poetic resonance. It was a style which appears to have derived from pianists of the so-called London School, such as Dussek, who apparently used the pedal almost continuously, and Cramer, whose playing Beethoven admired, and whose piano studies he insisted upon.
The use of the sustaining pedal in this piece has caused some controversy among pianists. Beethoven wrote on the score (although the first page is lost) Si deve suonare tutto questo pezzo delicatissimamente e senza sordino, which can be translated ‘This whole piece must be played extremely delicately and without damper.’ ‘Without damper’ in the modern sense is usually taken to mean to depress the sustaining pedal, which lifts the dampers on each string; it is not clear, however, what effect Beethoven was seeking in having the dampers raised for the entire piece, blurring the sound with overlapping harmonies. Some argue that such impressionist effects were part of his conception here. Czerny, who studied with Beethoven and taught his nephew, states in connection with a similar passage in the Third Piano Concerto that Beethoven’s habit was to keep the dampers up for the entire passage, but that this was due to the ‘weak-sounding pianofortes of that day’. However, it must be remembered that Czerny may be basing his advice on later perceptions, when the pianos were stronger and had pedals fitted. During the period when he studied with Beethoven, when knee levers would have been used, he was only 10 to 12 years old.
The subtitle ‘Moonlight’ was unknown in Beethoven’s day and was probably inspired by the critic Rellstab later in the 19th century.
Sonata No. 18 in E-flat major, Op. 31 No. 3 ‘The Hunt’ (1802)
One would scarcely guess from the grace, wit, vitality and charm of this work that it was apparently conceived and written wholly during the time of great personal anguish which culminated in the writing of the Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he pours out his despair over his worsening deafness. This sonata indeed could almost be taken as the physical embodiment of the hope expressed in that document, that Beethoven would henceforth find solace in his art.
Like the earlier two sonatas of the Op. 31 set, this piece was written in response to a request from the Zurich publisher Nägeli, for three piano sonatas for his Répertoire des Clavecinistes collection. The first two had been dispatched promptly and published the following year; the third appears to have been finished before October 1802, when the Testament was written, and was published by Nägeli in 1804. In spirit, the sonata could be seen as one of several works by Beethoven, such as the Eighth Symphony and last String Quartet, in which he takes an affectionate, half-ironic look back at the 18th century.
The title of the second movement, Scherzo, should be understood in its original meaning – a joke – rather than Beethoven’s customary accelerated minuet in triple time, since this scherzo is in duple time, in sonata form, and witty, using a vocabulary of repeated notes, rhetorical pulling-up of tempo, and deft use of the extremes of the keyboard.
It is remarkable that the sonata contains none of the intimations of mortality from which Beethoven was clearly suffering at the time that he wrote it. It is sobering, therefore, to think that, had Beethoven actually died after writing his Heiligenstadt Testament – and several passages in that document suggest he half expected to and that he had even considered, though rejected, suicide – then he would have died at exactly the same age that Schubert did. This would not only have left posterity without most of the works for which he is best known, but would also have made this sunny piece his musical last will and testament.
Sonata Pathétique (Sonata No. 8) in C minor, Op. 13 (1798)
With the publication of this sonata in 1799, Beethoven’s reputation in Vienna began to shift decisively, from that of a pianist who composed, to that of a composer who (increasingly rarely) played. It was the first work by Beethoven to receive an unambiguously positive review in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, the most influential music journal of its day. Beethoven’s previous work, the Op. 12 violin sonatas, had by contrast received quite a roasting: ‘Learned, learned and always learned – and nothing natural, no song...a striving for strange modulations, and objection to customary associations, a heaping up of difficulties on difficulties till one loses all patience and enjoyment.’ Yet by the time this work was reviewed in 1800, it was that very strangeness, reflecting a romantic shift in taste, which was starting to exert an attraction. The young and then impoverished pianist Moscheles describes how he was chastised for breaking the strict diet of Mozart, Clementi and Bach imposed on him, by secretly copying out the Pathétique Sonata in the library (having insufficient pocket-money to buy it), after being told by his friends that it was ‘crazy music, in opposition to all rule’.
Several recent studies have suggested that it was in fact the influence of Beethoven’s patrons which turned critical opinion. This work, along with the Op. 1 Trios, the Op. 26 Piano Sonata and the Second Symphony, was dedicated to one of Beethoven’s most enthusiastic early patrons, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, whose house Beethoven lived in from 1793 to 1795. So confident was Beethoven of the Prince’s good opinion that he even wrote to his boorish brother Johann, at this time sanctioning him to approach the Prince for money if he needed it.
Two other features mark out the Sonata Pathétique (the title was Beethoven’s own) as one of the most significant of the early sonatas. It decisively defined the ‘C minor mood’ which was to be so important in those works of the middle period which seem to wrestle with fate, such as the Fifth Symphony and the overture Coriolan. And it is the first of a series of pieces, many of them among Beethoven’s most popular, in which one can observe unified expressive resolve articulated through small recurring motifs, whose insistence over several movements takes on the character almost of psychological obsession.
The unity of motif in the work has been exhaustively described by Rudolf Reti, who observes that all the thematic material in the piece grows out of the first bar of the Grave introduction to the first movement, which unfolds a motif based on a musical third. While this doesn’t entirely account for the work’s engaging mixture of power and lyricism – it would after all be possible to write a very bad piece which followed the same strategy that Reti describes – it seems to accord with the experience of most listeners that the outer movements at least demonstrate a strong kinship.
The Pathétique was Beethoven’s first sonata to use a slow introduction, and although the slow tempo with dotted rhythms hints at the Baroque French Overture style, it is clear that this is more than a curtain-raiser for the entrance of royalty in pompous, majestic style. For a start, Beethoven’s introduction returns twice more in the movement, at the start of the development and in the coda, with the persistence of a recurring psychological motif or Berlioz’s idée fixe. The whole is governed by the powerful logic of improvisation, at which Beethoven, by repute, excelled above all others, and which was presumably the origin of this introduction.
After a towering first idea, the Allegro di molto e con brio which follows adopts the strategy Beethoven had used in his first sonata, Op. 2 No. 1, of extending the second key area (E-flat major) by deflecting it into its parallel minor. A striking example of the ‘strange modulations’ which so irritated the critic cited above comes at the beginning of the development section, with an enharmonic change to the remote key of E minor.
The second movement is marked Adagio cantabile; although Reti sees further thematic parallels here, it seems more logical to conceive this simple ternary structure as a respite from the obsessions of the outer movements, and certainly a contradiction of the accusation that Beethoven’s music was without song.
As with the later ‘Appassionata’ Sonata, Beethoven manages in the finale to convey the impression that he is running the preoccupations of the first movement through a different set of psychological tropes. When the motif of the Grave introduction appears in rapid triplets in the codetta, there is a powerful impression that we are in rapid flashback mode. When the same triplets push the piece over into the final scale, there is an unmistakable implication that the argument has been brought to its culmination, and that that which was ‘pathetic’, for better or for worse, has been resolved.
Peter McCallum -
https://www.abc.net.au/
