(Note: This continues the dialogue begun December 6^th with a post entitled, “Further Afield?”)

JB: I’m very glad you ended your piece with this question of the single player of the sonatas versus the multiple players of the quartets, and whether that accounts for the fundamental difference between them. Very glad because as I was reading your piece, I felt – subject by subject – that you made a compelling case for the two bodies of work being more-or-less equal in terms of innovation, and yet I could not get away from my gut feeling that the quartets have a kind of impenetrability that I don’t associate with the sonatas, at least not to the same extent. And as it got more and more difficult for me to justify the feeling in the face of all the compelling evidence you were providing, I started asking myself where it was coming from.

So to answer your question briefly: yes, I think the solitude involved in performing the sonatas is a very fundamental ingredient in their nature, and I think the way in which the quartets are shared experiences for the performers is equally significant. (It’s probably worth pointing out that the quartets are by a substantial margin Beethoven’s largest body of chamber music, and the only chamber works from his late period, so for the purposes of this discussion, they are pretty well unique; the sense of communion between players of orchestral music strikes me as being a very different animal.)

Part of my argument is going to based on a premise about the quartets you might well disagree with, so I should probably state it upfront: compared to works in the same genre by other composers – and perhaps even compared to other chamber music by Beethoven – Beethoven’s quartets are not particular conversational in nature. What I mean by this is that while there are obviously moments of dialogue between the instruments, the message of the music tends be extremely unified among them, and the individuality of the voices is not really the point. Obviously there is plenty of music in these pieces which is argumentative, but because that is the voice of the music, not because the instruments are in argument with each other. Even in the Grosse Fuge – probably the most relentless and bloody-minded piece of counterpoint ever written – I always have the feeling that here are four people engaged in the same violent struggle with the universe, not with one another.

I think this is significant. To me, the central aspect – the central affect – of Beethoven’s music is its idealism. When the music is unsettled, the restlessness typically takes the form of raging – I don’t think this is too strong a word – against an unsatisfactory world. The first movement of Opus 111 among the sonatas, and the last movement of Opus 131 and first movement of Opus 132 among the quartets are obvious examples of this, though dozens of other would apply. When the music is at peace, it is utopian, a vision of the cosmos in sound. Most of the slow movements fit this description, but the second movement of Opus 111, the second movement of Opus 127, and the Heilige Dankgesang from Opus 132 make me particularly googly-eyed.

To my ears, anyway, these pieces – the sonatas and quartets both – go substantially farther than any music written before or since in this direction. “Spirituality” is a hopelessly vague word, but lacking a better one, I’m going to say that that is the very essence of these works. Given that, I think that the difference between going on these journeys alone and having three partners in them is absolutely enormous. Of course, it’s an important difference between solo piano music and string quartets in general, but I think this case is something special. When I think of Schubert’s posthumous sonatas and the G Major string quartet – music no less astonishing than late Beethoven – I’m less fixated on this difference, because however extraordinary the pieces are, Schubert does not strike me as a man on a mission the way Beethoven does.  It’s this sense of “I will do what must be done” in Beethoven – or, much better, to quote the man himself, “Es muss sein!” – that makes the prospect of going it alone uniquely problematic, or exciting, or perhaps both.

Let me go back to that same quote about the 1820s piano being “most unsatisfactory” – I’m always struck by it not because it seems ridiculous that it could have accompanied the creation of some of greatest works written for that instrument, but because the sense that the instrument is not quite equal to the task of realizing those works seems terribly important.  One of Beethoven’s favorite modes of composition (in the sense of painting) for the piano involves placing the two hands at the extremes of the keyboard. This very often happens at climactic moments – the end of Opus 110 is one spectacular instance of this, but there are many others throughout the late sonatas. This is a very literal manifestation of what Beethoven is constantly doing in every sense – testing the limits of the piano. In such moments, the piano is meant to roar, or shake, or emanate light, in a way that seems to be on the edge of its capacities; if the sound seems easily produced, something is fundamentally off.

And this sense of near-impossibility is not restricted to the instrument, of course; the audible struggle of the player is one of the most crucial elements in a successful performance of any of the last works. And I do think this sense of struggle is uniquely moving when it comes from an individual. Perhaps it is because I am so much more familiar with the piano and its limitations than I am with string instruments and theirs, but nothing in the quartets – not even the Grosse Fuge, which tends to sound and even look like a battle scene – sounds to me as much like an effort to say the impossible as the final variation of Opus 109, with its trills which act as eternal vibrations, and the main line at the very top of the piano, straining to be heard above them. Or the modulation into E flat Major in the second movement of Opus 111, where a series of trills of ever-greater urgency leads to an extremely bare-bones – and unbearably moving – restatement of a portion of the theme which demands a degree of sustaining power that the piano simply does not have. There is something, I think, about the image of a single person with gritted teeth and an open heart trying to make these things happen which cuts to the core of what the late sonatas are about, and which thus makes them different from the quartets.

And so the power of the quartets, to my ears at least, is drawn from different sources. The clarity of the counterpoint in the strings is something the piano simply can’t match – listen to the Grosse Fuge once in the piano 4-hands version and you’ll realize how huge this gap is – and it somehow makes the intensity of the music seem even more distilled, and thus more harrowing. (I’m thinking of the opening – “Number 1”, as you pointed out – of Opus 131 as much as anything.) And then there is the way in which the sound of a string quartet can shine, or glow – the Heilige Dankgesang and slow movement of Opus 135, respectively, often sound to me like the fulfillment of what the piano aspires to but cannot really achieve in the last movements of Opus 109 and 111.

But most of all, what I cherish about the quartets and feel is specific to them is the sense of communion, of shared idealism. Perhaps there’s a personal bias here: I am both envious and in awe of the way in which string quartets spend their lives working towards a shared musical goal. And that’s not specifically about Beethoven. But whenever I hear a performance of Opus 127, the very first thing that strikes me is the unanimity of purpose, the way in which the four people on stage seem joined in their energies. Of course, that opening phrase brims with optimism and determination anyway, but when it gives way to the mysticism of the slow movement, or even the riddles of the last, I still find myself marveling at that impression of singularity, of an extraordinary statement made jointly by four people. The sense of effort is, inevitably, not quite the same as in the piano sonatas, but the sense that something so rarefied could be collectively imagined – and collectively realized – is fantastically moving.

I have a bit of a bad conscience, as your essay went into enormous musical detail, addressing each major aspect of music methodically, whereas I’ve yammered on about the psychology of the music – about feeling, really. But while I tried to focus more on specific questions of timbre and register and articulation, I kept coming back to this same question of what it means to be (or not be) alone with music. I’d be very interested to hear if you think it is a question of as much significance as I do, and if so, if the reasons or similar.

And/or, another question I’m interested in: I’m pretty sure that we could agree that all these late works are extraordinary for their architecture (in addition to everything else). And yet, Beethoven obviously could be persuaded to make changes in the name of accessibility. I’m thinking first of all of the alternate last movement of Opus 130, but there’s also this remarkable letter wherein he tells his publisher that the middle two movements of the Hammerklavier can be flipped, and the introduction to the last movement omitted!

Do you think that we, as performers, are perhaps more fixated on the “big picture” of these pieces than Beethoven was? Was he perhaps more interested in moment-to-moment beauty than we tend to think? And is there any difference between the sonatas and the quartets in this area? Certainly, with the exception of the Hammerklavier (and on the other side of things, Opus 135), the quartets are much larger edifices than the sonatas. Your move!

From June through September I took a hiatus from playing concerts and called it,
a bit grandly, my “sabbatical”. My activities during this time included but were
not limited to: (re-?)acquainting myself with life at home, trying (and failing,
emphatically) to learn German, staring wonderingly at my empty calendar,
throwing myself mercilessly at a selection of previously unlearned Beethoven
sonatas, and finally — the only tangible result of my time off –writing
Beethoven’s Shadow, part confession, part manifesto, an attempt to express what
Beethoven’s music means, spiritually and practically, in my life.

This essay is available here in the US and here in the UK as a Kindle Single. You can read more about it here.
Writing it made my head spin a great deal; I leave it to readers to decide
whether it is a coincidence that the Beethoven sonatas have much the same effect
on me.

As I work on the Beethoven sonatas I spend a huge amount of time inside my own head (while attempting to inch my way closer to his!). And so it’s incredibly valuable – for reasons relating to musical perspective and sanity alike – for me to hear the viewpoints of other musicians who are engaged with his music.

To that end, I’ve invited Misha Amory, violist of the truly wonderful Brentano String Quartet (brentanoquartet.com), to have a dialogue about the late piano sonatas and string quartets. (The Brentanos are currently in the midst of recording the last five quartets.) Since each of us is inevitably more intimately familiar with one or the other, I was really curious to see where the perspectives would differ.

Below is the first installment. It’s probably not a great idea to invite a better writer/more knowledgeable person to be a contributor on your website, but nevertheless, I’m very grateful that Misha has agreed to take part in this project.

JB: I’ve always found it fascinating that shortly after Beethoven sent the final three piano sonatas off to his publisher, he wrote him a letter saying that the piano was a “most unsatisfactory instrument” and that he wouldn’t write for it any longer. Of course, then he went on to write two sets of bagatelles and the Diabelli Variations, so one can’t take the statement too seriously, but obviously the piano was his instrument and his relationship with it was complex. However much of an idealist he was, and however much he wanted to express his ideas purely, Beethoven understood the physical nature of the piano very well, and I wonder if it might have inhibited him, if only ever so slightly. Whenever I hear one of the last quartets, I feel that the language is even more unprecedented, and that his deepest nature comes through in any even more uncompromised way than in the last sonatas.

Obviously, you’re seeing this from the reverse angle. Do you agree that the late quartets go further than the sonatas in leaving behind standard musical language, in their abstractness? And if so, do you think this question of instrumentation plays into it, or that whatever difference there is between Opus 111 and, say, Opus 127 is attributable only to the three year gap between them?

MA: First of all, I have to thank you for initiating this conversation.  It gives me the incentive to revisit and re-examine the last piano sonatas, and be astounded all over again by their greatness.  As a result, I end up wanting to write only about them, and ignore the string quartets, which I know is not the idea here, so I’ll try to restrain myself.

As I listened to them, however, your quotation of Beethoven as “unsatisfied” with the piano was on my mind, and I was trying to assess what he would have found unsatisfactory as he wrote these masterpieces.  For my part, I was inclined to wonder how, after this achievement, he would ever want to write another piece for anything else.  Certainly the 1820s were a period of metamorphosis for the instrument.  On the one hand, you have Beethoven and Schubert writing some of the greatest solo pieces ever, for any instrument; on the other hand piano composition was about to be transformed utterly, at the hands of Chopin and Liszt.  I sometimes wonder what a pianist thinks when turning from Chopin’s piano writing to Beethoven’s late piano music — is there anything like “huh…how dated”?  Or is Beethoven held to be as great a master of pianism as the later composers, in his own way?

But to return to your main questions: I was struck by your choice of the very general term “musical language”.  This covers pretty much anything having to do with the compositional process, and I am invited to compare the piano sonatas to the string quartets across the boards: harmonic language, rhythmic and metric concepts, form within movements, form across an entire work, allusion to genres outside of instrumental composition, etc.  And, inevitably, I was forced to ask myself a question that is central to this entire comparison: what are the essential psychological/expressive differences between music performed by a single person, and music performed by a group?  This question is so big that I don’t feel able to engage with it more than in passing; but it would be impossible to ignore it altogether in this context.

HARMONY

To speak of the most immediate and obvious areas that are implied by “musical language”: is it possible to state that Beethoven broke new ground in his late quartets in terms of harmony, modulation, rhythmic or metric innovation?  To me, not really.  The late piano sonatas contain so much that is astonishing in these musical categories, as do the quartets, and it’s difficult to say which body of music is the more revolutionary in this regard.  Look at a few examples of modulation.  In the quartets, the most extraordinary moments of modulation are often absolute unisons.  Especially memorable is the transition from the first to the second movement of opus 131, where we are brought to a C-sharp tonic unison to close the first movement, and then we are lifted just a half-step to the parallel universe of D major to open the second movement: so close but so infinitely far, and surrounded with a kind of wonder as the first violin “discovers” the new theme.  Two other unison “moments” (among many) deserve mention as well: the drop from E-natural to E-flat in the slow movement of opus 127, coming out of the E major variation, and the magical E-flat triplets in the middle of the Cavatina, which transport us to C-flat major for the famous “beklemmt” passage.  Passages like these seem to mark a new era — how does the earth seem to move in the midst of such stillness?  But there are such moments in opus 109, 110 and 111 as well.  The first movement of opus 110 is, on the face of it, perhaps the most conventional and “well-behaved” movement of the entire cycle; but then you have the brain-rearranging moment of modulation at bars 77-78, wherein the entire solar system shudders for just a second, and then proceeds without a backward glance.  How about the completely inexplicable second ending of the first movement of opus 111?  Or what of bars 12-14 in the opening movement of opus 109, surely the most bizarre set of modulations that ever went nowhere: after the dust settles, the music is back in B major where it started.  

There is nothing in the late quartets quite like this.  Much is made of the “modern” impact of the Grosse Fuge; many are fond of pointing out that it sounds in places like 20th-century music.  This may be so; but the harmonic motion underlying the work is absolutely Classical in its logic, as any Roman-numeral-wielding theorist could demonstrate.  It is the overlay that makes the music so thorny — the contrapuntal density, the embellishment of the voice-leading, the rapidity of the harmonic progress, and the sheer ferocity of affect.

RHYTHMIC AND METER

What of rhythm and meter?  Again, we can pick the oddest moments from the late quartets.  The 9/4 variation from opus 131, where the absence of a downbeat, bar after bar, keeps the music hovering and disembodied.  The quirky scherzo of 135, which starts off balance, and by its stillest point (the unison just before the return) has become even more disoriented.  The furious rhythmic twistings and distortions in the first large section of the Grosse Fuge, which near its end pits jagged, leaping triplets against duple 8ths that are slurred against the beat, a centripetal world that threatens to fly apart completely.  Or the aforementioned “beklemmt” section from the Cavatina of opus 130, wherein drifting but constant triplets in the lower voices cannot be reconciled with the gasping, hopeless offbeat 8ths and 16ths in the first violin.

These are arresting, envelope-pushing passages.  In the piano sonatas, we have some counterexamples.  The modulatory passage that leads up to the final, fifth variation in opus 111 offers a counterpart to the Cavatina, with its offbeat murmurings.  Or consider the opening of opus 111′s fourth variation: like the 9/4 variation of opus 131, it is the still point at the movement’s center, the moment when we feel that the deepest truth is about to be revealed.  And yet this moment, in all its eloquence, is almost inarticulate: the theme, reduced to its most basic form, is a hushed, almost stammering whisper.  Turning to opus 110, we encounter entirely different, but equally startling, examples of rhythmic and metric misdirection.  One of these is the entire second movement.  How is it possible for a movement whose phrase lengths sound so irregular to be actually composed in regular 8-bar periods, with hardly a deviation — an overlap at the second ending, and one little 3-bar wrinkle in the middle of the trio?  Then we have the finale.  Start with the repeated G major chords just before the inversione return.  These could be monumental, triumphal, unshakeable; to have them occur on offbeats, though, with empty space in between, makes them terrifying and alien, like a bad dream.  And then exactly what is going on during the following thirty or forty bars?  Beethoven’s use of rhythm and pulse here is mind-blowing; we feel we are beholding the evolution of a single-cell organism, miraculously sped up.

Really this is a very long-winded way of saying that I find the last three piano sonatas every bit as revolutionary as the late quartets, in terms of small-scale musical categories like harmony and rhythm.  I could have just said so, but it sure is fun to visit my favorite spots.

WHOLE-WORK ARCHITECTURE

The comparison becomes more interesting when we consider the subversions that Beethoven visited on the usual architecture of a work.  The concept of a sonata — or a string quartet — in 1820 lay, fairly dependably, along the lines of a big first movement in sonata-allegro form, followed by a second and third movement, and usually a fourth, of shorter length and lighter heft.  Every quartet Beethoven wrote, until opus 130, 131 and 132, clove to this pattern, although a few later ones (opus 59 #3, opus 95) showed signs of becoming more finale-centric.  Among the late quartets, Beethoven honors the four-movement form for three of the quartets, but in each of those — 127, 132 and 135 — the primacy of the first movement is usurped by a later movement.  In opus 127, the first movement is gentle, sun-dappled, and rather succinct; inevitably the extraordinary slow movement becomes the center of gravity for the work as a whole, a 15-minute odyssey through an entire world of emotions and psychological states.  Opus 132 has a monumental opening movement, but after all is said and done, who would argue that this piece’s raison d’être isn’t the Heilige Dankgesang?  And in opus 135, inevitably the 3rd and 4th movements are the work’s substantive anchor.

In opus 130 and 131, of course, Beethoven jettisons the conventional organization of movements altogether.  Opus 130 needs to be considered in its original incarnation, with the Grosse Fuge as the last movement.  In this version, we have two enormous bookends, a sonata form and a fugal form, surrounding four much slighter character pieces.  In a way it is a kind of distortion of a Baroque suite, except that the fugue is at the end instead of following directly after the opening sinfonia.  In a sense, this new layout of movements makes for a less formal presentation: the piece is not submitted to us tied with ribbons, but rather we are invited to wander through it, and discover its design by degrees.  The fugue, when it does come, seems like the inevitable outward explosion that must follow the almost crushingly interior world of the Cavatina, with its unbearable intimacy.

Opus 131 is even stranger in this regard.  Beethoven designated the movements “no. 1″, “no. 2″ etc, which evokes an opera score rather than an instrumental work; and without a doubt, this is a kind of opera in quartet form.  There are no real pauses between “numbers”, so that we have the impression of a drama set to continuous music.  We have fugue – rondo – recitative – variations – scherzo – aria – finale, a seven movement work.  The composer delays the use of sonata-allegro form until the last movement, whose role (a brutal answer to six movements of questions) seems to require this more substantial structure.

Clearly, whatever dramatic or psychological truths Beethoven was seeking to express would not fit into conventional movement-architectures as exemplified by earlier quartets.  It is interesting to note how a similar need played out in the last five piano sonatas.  Opp. 101 and 106 are, at any rate, in four movements apiece; but the feathery impact 101′s first movement, and the immense gravity and eccentricity of the Hammerklavier’s fugue show that conventionally proportioned layouts are already no longer the point for him.  Then in opus 109 the whole thing is turned on its head.  We are given two movements in sonata form whose brevity is almost their main character, lasting perhaps 3 and 2 minutes respectively; and then the extraordinary variations movement, more than twice the length of the others combined.  Perhaps I’m exaggerating in my own mind, and I certainly don’t want to belittle the first two movements of this piece, but I can’t think of another Beethoven work where it feels as if one movement is the piece, with everything else providing the merest scaffolding.  In opp. 110 and 111, less obviously, the end again outweighs the beginning, opus 110 with its epic dialogue between the Lied and the Fugue, and opus 111 with another variations masterpiece.

Maybe I should stop here.  So far, I have been looking at surface details of harmony, rhythm and architecture, and in those categories I do not see the late quartets as “going beyond” the piano sonatas, in any significant way.  But looking at other, perhaps deeper areas, I wonder what you think of the following questions:

In what sense do the last piano sonatas owe their nature to being music for one performer?  Same question for the quartets: to what extent are these works different from the sonatas because they are for a group of performers?  And the (probably unanswerable) chicken-and-egg question: did Beethoven’s inspiration dictate that this music must be chamber music, or did his choice of genre lead to this different, non-piano-sonata-like music?

[Big, big questions, that could be deferred another exchange or two: comparing the two bodies of work in their exploration of forms normally outside their genres, particularly operatic forms and fugue.  Also, and this may relate to the questions in the preceding paragraph: each body of work examined in terms of what aspect of the human condition it explores?]

The following are the notes which will accompany the first recording, to be released January 9th, 2012.

The 32 Beethoven piano sonatas are often referred to as one of the greatest – if not the greatest – bodies of music ever composed. True enough. But to refer to them as such is to obscure the brilliance and individuality of each work, for what is perhaps most remarkable about the sonatas is that they really aren’t a ‘body of music’ at all: they are 32 masterpieces, 32 distinct structures, 32 fully realized, often awe-inspiring, always unique emotional universes. As individual works, each is endlessly compelling on its own merits; as a cycle, it moves from transcendence to transcendence, the basic concerns always the same, but the language impossibly varied.

In the end, I think, it is the nature of these concerns – which could crudely be described as being of the ‘man versus universe’ variety – which unites this music, in spite of the incredible amount of ground it covers both formally and stylistically. A favourite cliché about Beethoven is that he moved from thumbing his nose at the traditionalists in his first period, to magnificence in the middle one, to spirituality in the late. (Even the idea of three periods is a cliché, in fact – a figure as complex as Beethoven will probably always be vulnerable to over-simplification, and his compositional style was in a perpetual state of evolution.) But in fact, the last sonatas betray no lessening in his gruffness, or desire to shock, and the earliest ones have slow movements which already seem to stop time. (And this is to say nothing of the moments of extraordinary tenderness in the middle works.) And so it is with op.10 no.1. The middle movement forms an oasis of profound beauty, always searching, yet with a deep stillness grounding it. ‘Oasis’, because the music which surrounds it is among the most restless Beethoven wrote. This is one of the first of Beethoven’s many works in C minor, and the qualities one associates with this composer in this key – anxiety, rage, the shaking of the fist – are fully in evidence here. Beethoven was, throughout his life, attracted to opposition, to dichotomy, of character and feeling – in no other composer’s music do the tender and the furious coexist so closely – and in this sonata that idea is extended to tempo: where the outer movements are meant to quicken the pulse not only of the player, but the listener, life itself slows down for the second movement. Or: if the fast movements grapple with a world which infuriated Beethoven, the slow one imagines a different, more perfect one.

Where op.10 no.1, like so many of its neighbours, shows Beethoven inventing, op.22 feels very much like a summation. Despite the early opus number, Beethoven had by this point written more than a third of his piano sonatas, and in this work – a particular favourite of his – he demonstrates an enormous ease and confidence with the form; the sonata’s ideas sound as if they had simply flown from the composer’s pen. Beethoven surely had as restless an imagination as any great artist, but in this sonata we find him looking more backwards than forwards; the last two movements in particular adhere closely to a model he had established, and throughout the piece, one is reminded of one or another of the previous sonatas. But while the sonata is revolutionary neither in form nor in content, it is no less marvellous for it: the impish wit of the work’s opening, for example, or the never-ending, heaven-directed song of the second movement are indicative of a master revelling in his own mastery.

It may be that this mastery came slightly too easily for Beethoven’s liking, for the next four sonatas find him experimenting with form as boldly and as variously as any group of works he wrote. It is astonishing that the first of these, the Opus 26, was written within a year of op.22, its immediate predecessor; the only thing the two works have in common is that they are unjustly neglected – one hardly ever hears either, other than in the context of a complete cycle of the sonatas. While the 20th and 21st centuries may not have taken notice of this lovely and slightly peculiar masterpiece, the 19th certainly did: it was the funeral march from this sonata, not the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, which was played at Beethoven’s own funeral, and Chopin – almost alone among great musicians in his general indifference to Beethoven – admired it greatly, and was surely influenced by it. The aforementioned funeral march is the most obvious manifestation of that influence, but one imagines that Chopin was equally struck by the almost total absence of grand gesture, of rhetoric, throughout the work. The sonata opens with a theme of disarming simplicity and beauty, which – unprecedented in Beethoven’s output – becomes the basis not of a sonata movement, but a set of variations. So instead of developing – not to say manipulating – the theme, he embroiders it, allowing it to expand and contract, to unfold of its own accord. So often in Beethoven, one feels the composer attempting (and virtually always succeeding) to bend the material to his will; in this work, even in the funeral march, dedicated to ‘A Hero’, nothing ever feels imposed on the motives. The form of the op.26 may be unprecedented, but after the brilliance and bluster of the early sonatas, its quiet confidence and utter absence of any attempt to ingratiate may be its most striking features.

Being ingratiating, of course, dropped ever lower on Beethoven’s list of priorities as he aged, and while there is no shortage of beauty in the works of his last two decades, it is increasingly a rugged, even gnarled beauty, and one always at the service of the idea at hand. And the ideas themselves grow ever bolder – less and less reliant on any convention of musical language. This sort of innovation did not come easily: Beethoven’s first 20 sonatas were composed in the space of seven years, from 1795 to early 1802; the subsequent seven years saw the composition of only five, and it was not until 1810 that the ‘Les Adieux’ Sonata (Lebewohl in German, no.26) was completed. Conventional wisdom says that Beethoven’s late style was still several years away, but this work, despite the almost reckless exuberance of its finale, has an interiority which is a hallmark of every subsequent sonata he composed. (The ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata’s magnificently impenetrable slow movement is enough to make it qualify, despite the grandness of the rest of the piece.)

And accordingly, nothing about the sonata is business as usual. Its most obviously unique feature is its programmatic nature: whereas the Pastoral Symphony is programmatic only in the sense that it attempts to evoke the feelings attached to certain events, the ‘Les Adieux’ first movement is permeated with a three-note motif – actually marked Le–be–wohl at the sonata’s opening – obviously intended to mimic a horn call, a formal gesture of parting. While nothing in the second or third movements conveys in such a literal way the absence and return, respectively, of Archduke Rudolph, the sonata’s dedicatee and inspiration, the idea of a formal narrative has been planted so firmly in our heads by this point that we can supply the imagery ourselves.

More significant are the sonata’s formal innovations. What is so striking about the first movement is that while its body – its exposition, development and recapitulation – is perhaps the most compact of any of Beethoven’s movements in sonata form, it is flanked by an introduction and coda of extreme spaciousness. While this might in theory make the movement ungainly – think gigantic limbs attached to a modest torso – in reality, these appendages, in being far longer than one would expect, prove enormously effective in illustrating the pain of parting. This is the genius of Beethoven: his formal innovations are never theoretical, or merely ‘ideas’; his forms become maps of the works’ emotional content, of their truest nature.

There is one final way in which the ‘Les Adieux’ sonata points the way towards Beethoven’s last works. Early in his compositional career, Beethoven was content for his last movements to round the works off; this rounding off might be graceful (op.22), or brash (op.10 no.1), but there is nothing in these movements to alter the general course of the works. As Beethoven grew older, his conception of the multi-movement work changed so that ultimately he viewed them as emotional trajectories which were not resolved until the final notes were played. This is very much in evidence in ‘Les Adieux’. The last movement provides the work with a resolution not only because a movement called ‘The Absence’ must inevitably be followed by a return, but because the emotional ambiguity which permeates the first two movements absolutely demands the uncomplicated joy of the last.

Perhaps it is these two qualities – the complexity and ambiguity on the one hand, the optimism and occasionally even euphoria on the other – which best define what the Beethoven sonatas represent. To embark on this journey is thus both awe-inducing, and pure delight.

© Jonathan Biss, 2011