About two weeks ago I turned on the radio just in time to hear Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 18 conclude, and that made me wonder – just how many piano sonatas did Beethoven write? The answer is thirty-two, Therefore, I decided this week to listen to his first, written in 1795, and his last, composed some 27 years later in 1822. Beethoven’s first piano sonata is written in four movements:
The first movement begins with a run up a broken F Minor chord, and from the start, the piece has a bit of a Clementi-ish flavor (if you’re familiar with his sonatinas) – albeit with more of a sinister tone. Plenty of rocking eighth notes keep the piece moving along at a clip. The second movement, marked adagio, is at a much calmer pace, and the slower tempo and the shift to F Major set a much calmer tone. The piece is very pleasant although not particularly memorable. The third movement, a menuetto, is marked allegretto, and it opens with moderately rocking chords in A Flat Major. Again, like the second movement, the work is pleasant enough but not particularly memorable – although the eighth note runs in the trio section did call to mind the composer’s Six Variations on Molinara. The final movement, marked prestissimo, is just that, a rapid piece where fast-running triplets in the bass keep the work racing. There is a bit of a breather at about measure 60 that sounds a bit Mozart-esque – marked “sempre piano e dolce”; however, by around measure 130, the racing triplets are back and the entire piece speeds to the end. As I’ve said above, the entire work is pleasant enough – I’ve rated it BLUE, “Okay, it was,” on my scale of light sabres – but it is certainly nothing as memorable as Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” (No. 14) or “Pathétique” (No. 8). I was hopeful at the start of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 as it opened with a dramatic “maestoso” introduction like his Sonata No. 8, “"Pathétique.” Soon after the exaggerated opening, the piece takes off “allegro con brio ed appassionato.” However, the first movement never lives up to the drama and passion of Sonata No. 8. It is fast paced, and it is intense -- but it seems a bit too engineered. There is no particular melody and/or no particularly memorable or unusual rhythms – just arpeggiated chords racing up and down the keyboard. The second and final movement of the sonata, an Arietta with variations, is marked “adagio molto semplice e cantabile.” The time signature is 9/16, and the dotted-eighth notes just plod along lugubriously. If the melody were hauntingly beautiful then perhaps the piece would “work,” but it is just cheerless and dismal. After the second ending at measure 16 of the opening section, the time signature changes to 6/16 in a variation marked “L’istesso tempo,” and the rhythm has a bit of a swing to it – but I have to say, it was a swing and a miss (ba dump bump). Following that, the time signature shifts to 12/32, and Beethoven introduces a variation with bluesy syncopation. Who would’ve thunk? “Almost like Joplin,” wrote one commenter below the YouTube video linked above. Another said, “Who knew Beethoven swung?” To me, though – it was another swing and a miss. What follows is a bunch of high notes, a lot of trills, a few low, low notes in the bass, a plethora of plodding triplets – and – it’s all just very, very dull. LOL – I thought of that line from “Amadeus” when Emperor Joseph II says to Mozart, there are just “too many notes.” Were there too many notes? I dunno – but I will say that the combination of notes just didn’t do it for me.
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A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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