Ludwig van Beethoven: The Last Three Piano Sonatas

Description

Few works count as milestones of piano literature – and of music tout court – as Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Piano Sonatas do. And few of Beethoven’s Sonatas can claim a status comparable with that of his last three works. They are not just beautiful, masterful, touching; they also mark a moment in the history of piano music which clearly divides what came before from what came afterwards.
To the young Beethoven who was moving to Vienna from his native Germany, his aristocratic patrons wished that he could receive the spirit of Mozart from Haydn’s hands. This prophecy had a grain of truth, since he who uttered it had guessed that Beethoven, a brilliant youngster, would one day be remembered alongside Mozart and Haydn as the third member of what is now known as the First Vienna School. However, nobody could have imagined that the ironic, boisterous, bright young man would develop an aesthetics of suffering, of sorrow, and ultimately of intimate victory as Beethoven was doomed to do. “Mozart’s spirit” was then understood as referring to the proverbial lightness, elegance, refinement of Mozart’s music (in spite of the fact that darker sides are abundantly present also in Mozart’s music). “Haydn’s hands” were clearly that of the teacher with whom the young Beethoven was going to study. On the one hand, their relationship would not be idyllic: the two musicians were too different in terms of age, of character, of personality, of educations, of goals. On the other, however, Beethoven did learn a lot from Haydn, and, when he was inclined to do so, he could acknowledge the role of the elderly master in helping him to develop his own style.
However, if Mozart was not just lightness and elegance, and if Haydn was much more than mere irony and bonhomie, doubtlessly both musicians were quintessential representatives of the “Classical style”, even though both did venture in the shadowy paths of Pre-Romanticism, laying the ground for the inquietudes and dreams of the Romantic soul.
A foundational element of the Classical style was the Sonata form. It provided composers with a perfect framework not only for building masterpieces in many different genres (from the Sonata to the Symphony to the Trio or Quartet, but also, in some extent, to the Concerto), but also for expressing the basic values of the contemporaneous philosophical and aesthetical framework. The Sonata form (in which, typically, the first movement of works in the genres cited above is written) is in fact defined as bithematic and tripartite. Its three parts are called exposition, development, and recapitulation. In the exposition, the two main themes are presented distinctly and separately; they should possess two pronouncedly different characters (e.g. one melodic, the other rhythmic; one legato, the other staccato; one cantabile, the other brilliant etc.), and (as indeed Beethoven will discover and masterfully use) ideally they should be easily “breakable” into immediately recognizable motifs. In the exposition, furthermore, the two themes are presented in two different keys: the second theme is at the dominant if the first is in the major mode, and at the relative major if the first is in the minor mode.
In the development, the two themes battle, fight, struggle, but also make peace with each other: here is where their capability for motivic elaboration becomes extremely useful. If the listener does not need to hear an entire theme before recognizing it, but only requires a few, memorable notes, then it is possible to combine small fragments from both themes so as to suggest this epic battle.
Having survived this confrontation, the two themes are ready for the recapitulation, where both are newly performed, but in the same key, expressing their definitive reconciliation. This was seen as an efficacious symbol for the role of dialectics within an Enlightenment society. There was nothing – it was believed – that a robust discussion, a healthy and challenging encounter of minds, in the name of Reason, could not solve and make plain.
Beethoven’s first Sonatas adhered faithfully to the formal model outlined here, even becoming model examples of how to write a perfect, manual-like movement in the Sonata form. (It should be pointed out that in fact it was not Beethoven who mechanically applied the received model, but rather our model which is indebted to Beethoven!). As his career and his life progressed, however, things began to change. Beethoven was 19 at the time of the French Revolution, and therefore he lived – albeit from a distance – the hopes it arose, the anguish of the Terror, the enthusiasms and deceptions of Napoleon’s parable, the Restoration. And, even more importantly, he lived the terrible experience of progressive, increasing deafness. This experience, at first, made him question the meaning of life, the sense of his calling as a musician, the horizon of his life and his very existence, to the point that he pondered the idea of suicide. All these elements, together with his own unhappy affective life, concurred in turning the rough and at times bombastic boy from Bonn into a somewhat embittered and decidedly asocial middle-aged bachelor.
For him, the Sonata form represented both an inescapable reference point and something to surpass, to transcend. It was for him what light is to a night butterfly; but we might even say the contrary, i.e. that Beethoven was the light by which the Sonata Form was increasingly being attracted, but that could also, ultimately, destroy it.
Beethoven kept writing works in the Sonata form throughout his life; and if this applies to Symphonies and Quartets – to name but two genres – it applies a fortiori to Piano Sonatas, whose number vastly exceeds that of his works in any Sonata-form genre. As said before, his Thirty-Two Piano Sonatas are not “just” extraordinary masterpieces, each in its own right, but also represent the context in which Beethoven’s experiments in the handling of Sonata forms could be carried on.
With his last Piano Sonatas, Beethoven reaches points beyond which nobody had yet ventured, and which nobody had even dared to touch. What he does to and with the Sonata form is unheard of. If in the second stage of his creative life he had radically transformed the Sonata form from within, working on its content which had somehow determined what form itself could and should do, in the third stage he openly destructured and restructured form itself, treating it with disinhibition, as a matter which was malleable and could be reshaped.
The last Three Sonatas thus are framed by two gigantic masterpieces which mark the experimentalism of Beethoven’s late pianism. On the one hand, there is Sonata op. 106, Hammerklavier, with its extreme dilation of all parameters and the impressive Fugue it contains; on the other, the Diabelli Variations, equally monstruous in terms of demands, difficulty, and size. In between, these three Sonatas: not extremely long (Schubert’s last three Sonatas would be much longer, a few years later), not always titanic or awe-inspiring (at least at first sight), but certainly among the finest and most difficult pieces of piano literature.
Op. 109, in E major, seems to build a bridge with two other Sonatas preceding op. 106, i.e. the short and beautiful op. 90, and the larger but mainly cantabile op. 101. The first measures of op. 109 are deceivingly simple; in fact, this movement had originally been conceived as a Bagatelle, and it was only upon agreeing with publisher Schlesinger about the publication of this last triptych that Beethoven reworked it and made it an opening Sonata movement. After a handful of seemingly preludizing passages, there comes a singing, but also genuinely improvisational Adagio espressivo. These two elements will keep alternating throughout the first movement, reinterpreting the traditional Sonata Allegro form in a highly original fashion. This short, and deceptively naïve first movement, is followed by a Prestissimo in E minor, which seems to take the place of the traditional Scherzo. Its assertive and decided first measures are followed by others where the initial rhythm is contrapuntally enriched and acquires an anxious, almost panting quality. In this movement, Beethoven also widely employs timbral effects, demonstrating his interest in, and openness to, a deep research in terms of sound effects, in spite of his deafness.
This Sonata, however, has its heart in the third movement, a theme with variations. This genre, along with counterpoint and fugues, was one of the favourites of the late Beethoven, who imaginatively combined it with Sonata forms. The slow dance, Chorale-style, which constitutes the touching, singing theme, is then developed subtly and creatively by the composer, up to Variation 6, a breathtaking piece, where another typical trait of Beethoven’s late style emerges – the trill, as a symbol for stellar heights and transcendent meaning.
A religious interpretation has been proposed for Sonata op. 110, written in parallel with the Missa solemnis and dated on Christmas day. In fact, the first movement, “with amiability”, has a tender, innocent, and lulling style which could apply to the mystery of Christmas, whilst the dynamics death/resurrection which is enacted later lends itself to a “Paschal” reading.
Here too we have a chorale-style opening, which soon gives way to shining arpeggios throughout the keyboard. In this movement, Beethoven adopts unprecedented modulations, handled with impressive boldness.
The second movement is very orchestral; almost a scherzo, but in binary time. Sudden interruptions, unexpected accents, lopsided rhythms and a waterfall of quavers in the (almost) “trio” section make it a very surprising movement.
A tragic atmosphere opens the Adagio ma non troppo; here again Beethoven experiments with sound and effects, evoking the clavichord’s Bebung. A doleful song is one of the summits of Beethoven’s singing style, and its “death” leads to a majestic Fugue, whose compositional complexity is only matched by its musical effects of grandiosity.
The third and last of these Sonatas, op. 111, is in “just” two movements, but two movements after which nothing else could be said. It opens with a descending interval of a diminished seventh, the symbol for the Höllenfahrt, the “descent into hell” in the Baroque and Classical era. This solemn, dramatic opening is followed by a thrilling contrapuntal movement, a true whirlwind of notes, whose expressive power prepares the coming of the Arietta, one of the absolute masterpieces of Western music. Its enchanting simplicity is the wellspring whence the ensuing Variations are born, up to the last, marvelous Variations where, once more, seemingly unending trills bring us to the heights of human spirituality and creativity.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2024