The Complete Piano Sonatas

Abstract

The developments that took place during the nineteenth century both in the piano itself and in the techniques of writing for it (the two are, of course, not separable) should not obscure the fact that, of all who have composed for it, Beethoven was the most inexhaustibly inventive - in Stravinsky's phrase, the monarch of the instrument. Among the major masters only Bach, Beethoven, and perhaps Schubert revealed in keyboard music the full depth and range of their art. At Bonn Beethoven's first teacher, Neefe, introduced him to the "Forty-eight," in which the child must have found an unsurpassable paradigm of variety in textures, to say nothing of the imaginative splendours of the music itself. So, although the mature Beethoven would occasionally write some trifle for the drawing-room, the piano was, from his earliest years, an instrument to which he could entrust his deepest thoughts; in 32 sonatas even hostile criticism can find nothing making concession to polite sentiment or to fashion. Both Mendelssohn and Liszt noted the neglect of all but a few of the sonatas in the 1830s, when the piano repertoire was based on such facile masters as Hummel or even Moscheles. It is claimed by admirers of Clementi and Dussek - composers of impeccable seriousness - that Beethoven's piano writing is far less original than is supposed, being in fact largely founded on theirs. Such views assume a separation of idea and execution, but the idea is the notes on the page, or rather their transformation into sound. The "writing for the instrument" is not a tool to be passeo from one worker to another and Beethoven's piano style is uniquely original in each sonata, the textures being no more interchangeable than the themes. For instance, there are slow movements marked Adagio or Largo in six of the first seven sonatas (i.e. from Op. 2 to the "Pathetique"), each with its characteristic sonority evocative of, without simulating, the orchestra and other media including, as in Op. 10 No. 3, some that lay far in the future. In the middle period the very nature of the piano itself seems to be expressed with the "Waldstein" and "Appassionata," as was noted, though with reserved admiration, by Busoni, who complained that "the melodic element was lost in modulatory and figurative eloquence." That Beethoven himself later became impatient with even the grandest of keyboard eloquence is suggested by his reported dismissal of the C minor Variations (WoO 80) - "Oh Beethoven, what an ass you were!" Nonetheless, part of the unique greatness of the sonatas is the inseparability of thought and medium; the variation movements of Op. 109 and Op. 111 are as unrealisable in any medium but the piano as is the rondo of the "Waldstein," while the first movement of Op. 111 finds new meanings in that C minor rhetoric itself.