performed by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
Photo by Giggle Jutsu on Unsplash
The last actual music article I wrote was exactly 7 years ago to the day, and it was the first of this opus 14 set. What have I been up to the last seven years?
Preface
Lots of musical unrelated things, but last year I decided it was time to get back in the symphonic saddle and felt like I wanted to focus on the problem of beaten-dead-horse stagnant programming, so my writing has now taken the form of biweekly concert programs. Please go check them out and subscribe there. I have them already planned for the next couple of years: normal concert program length, one every two weeks, concert standards paired logically/thematically alongside more obscure works.
But in a further effort to get back to as much possible meaningful writing as I can possibly do, I thought it time to revive my original little corner of the internet here, and what better place to start than picking up with Beethoven?
I poked around recently online to see what kind of SEO success I have with my articles from years past, and was very pleased to find that there are many pieces for which my article is the top result, or second or third. Below that is a little less ideal, but many, many articles are at least first page of search results, and let’s be honest: how many of you ever go to page two of search results on Google for anything?
But the pieces that do rank highly are oftentimes not for Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms, etc., not the real famous stuff that everyone knows and reads and writes about. That market is cornered. I’m first for pieces like Bartok’s first and third string quartets and first piano concerto, Kalevi Aho’s first two symphonies, Bruckner’s second and third symphonies (surprisingly), some Myaskovsky, some Prokofiev, Holmboe, David Diamond, of course Robert Simpson, generally some more obscure stuff. However, I do rank highly with a few of Beethoven’s less celebrated works, like the second piano concerto.
I always thought Beethoven was sort of a cornered/covered market, but in staying true to the original purpose of the blog, this writing and listening is primarily for me myself, not for traffic or attention, and his ninth piano sonata, op. 14 no. 1, was where we left off seven years ago to the day, so let’s get going.
I should say, too, that if you haven’t yet discovered them, Sir Andras Schiff’s lectures from 20-ish years ago on each of Beethoven’s sonatas are some of the greatest gifts ever given to humanity and something I feel is such a privilege to have access to and enjoy with score in hand, so that’s where a great deal of my information about these pieces comes from.
Background
This “exquisite little work” according to Donald Francis Tovey was composed in or at least finished by 1799, meaning it falls safely into what is considered Beethoven’s early period. It’s dedicated to Baroness Josefa von Braun, a Google search for whom returns the Wikipedia pages for these two op. 14 sonatas, so they may be the most famous thing about her.
His first fifteen sonatas fall into the ‘early period’ category, but this label is not at all to dismiss them. As you’ll learn if you listen to the Schiff lectures, there’s plenty here to digest and appreciate as Beethoven grows and synthesizes his own voice and style, and indeed, both the Pathétique and Moonlight sonatas, very famous works, are included in this early period. Opus 7, his fourth piano sonata, is a remarkable work and the second longest piano sonata he would write, after the Hammerklavier, so there’s big stuff in those first 15 to be sure, but unfortunately those with the subtitles or nicknames (even if not from Beethoven himself) tend to get all the attention.
Music
It’s a small little sonata of only about 15 minutes, but it packs a lot of music an intention into its brief three movements:
The first movement is in sonata form and of deceptive depth (think the “it’s bigger on the inside” of Dr. Who or House of Leaves, but far less terrifying than the latter). We have two pleasant, perfectly cute themes, both of which I find to be operatic in a lyrical, warm, round kind of way. Schiff describes the second theme as “an operatic duet of two divas,” and you can certainly hear it.
We have an exposition repeat, as one might expect, but there’s nothing form-expanding about this movement yet: no tonally nebulous introduction, no modulatory transition phrase, just two back-to-back themes with a closing that is “anachronistic” in its similarity to Schumann, says Schiff. Thus, we might expect that the development would also behave and play its part in this near-miniature proportioned sonata, but no. Things suddenly get serious, dark, heavy, even turbulent. There are clear quotes or callbacks to the first two themes, so while there’s a lot of rhythmic, virtuosic stuff going on, it’s not that difficult to keep a handle on where we’re at and what’s going on.
Delightfully, we do get a false recapitulation in the wrong key before returning to the dominant and only after that does the recapitulation begin. Beethoven and his jokes. There’s also a coda that plays with the first theme from earlier and the movement “evaporates” into nothing, as Schiff says. Unassuming, even almost self-effacing.
The second movement is a theme and variations, even more notably, as Schiff says, the first variation movement in the Beethoven sonatas. He also says he finds this a very “funny” movement, but that “they don’t think this is funny in Germany… nothing is funny in Germany.” He says it calls to mind the march of miniature tin soldiers. There’s that word again: miniature. It is small. We get three variations and a codetta here.
Not only is that relatively brief as variations go, especially for someone as adept at them as Beethoven, but the texture here feels… thinner. It’s a bit clicky and clacky, not much in the way of real rich, full-blooded, heavy handed, or even just warm, full piano texture. Again, Schiff’s ‘tin soldiers.’ It’s cute-ish, but with a flagrantly mood-shattering splat of a final chord.
The third movement is in rondo form marked as a scherzo, which feels Classical-era in having the faster-paced scherzo as a finale rather than an inner movement. We also start to get the… I guess the scaffolding that feels more like later Beethoven. Obviously audiences or performers at the time of this release wouldn’t have known what else was to come from Beethoven, but relative to his grander, later, far more complex works, this entire piece does feel like a miniature. What we have here, though, is a slightly more complex form with a rondo, and it feels like material that later Beethoven would have run with and spun out for a 7-8 minute movement rather than the dainty three-and-a-half we get here. It’s satisfying and playful and mischievous and has all the requisite parts, but it feels like the later composer would have done more with this playground of material.
Still early, we are. And that’s something to appreciate about these early pieces. It’s not even 1800 yet. There are textures and colors that suggest the composer’s mindset may have been moving toward orchestral work, and by this time he may have written that WoO piano concerto and might have already been working on the op. 19 and 15 piano concertos, but for now, we get a sonata that’s much more very late Classical than the early Romantic Beethoven with which the casual listener may be familiar.
So that’s all for now. It only took seven years to write another proper music article, but from now on I’ll be posting here every other week on Wednesdays between the two monthly concert programs on Substack. There’s a Concert Program A and B, and there’s no specific difference between the two, just first of the month and second of the month. They’re first and third Mondays of the month, so posts here will come on second and fourth Wednesdays.
I suppose that’s actually quite a bit of writing, but gosh it feels wonderful to get back at it. Please go subscribe on Substack, follow me there, on Instagram, even on Twitter/X, whatever. There’s plenty more of this to come.
As always, thank you for reading.
Fugue for Thought 