[MUSIC] Welcome back to what is, to my amazement, already the final week of exploring the Beethoven piano sonatas. I'm very happy that you've stayed with me up to this point because the music that we're going to look at this week is, from many points of view, the most remarkable of all. Now I would like to think that four lectures in, the question of why the Beethoven sonatas matter, as a body of music, would have answered itself, at least to some extent. But before we delve into the Late Period, which can be quite a disorienting experience, I thought it would be useful to focus briefly on that question directly. Obviously, the quality of these works is beyond all argumentâ in terms of mastery, in terms of their charisma, the draw they have on the listener, they are unsurpassed. On top of that, and this hopefully has hit home over the past several weeks, the variety demonstrated in these sonatas is just tremendous. If there's any set of piano works that can compete with the Beethoven sonatas in terms of sheer quality, it's surely the Mozart piano concerti. But while I would never be able to place one over the other in terms of their musical level, the Beethoven sonatas are incomparably more diverse in terms of style, of musical language, of structureâ everything except for pure emotional content, really. With the Mozart concerti, while each has magnificient ideas, there is a rough template in place which he rarely veers too far from. Beethoven did not really do templates. But the issue is not simply one of variety, but of evolution. While Beethoven does sometimes careen wildly from sonata to sonata in terms of character, there is undoubtedly an overall direction in terms of structure, away from straight sonata forms, away from the absolute primacy of the tonic-dominant relationship, away from the normal passage of time, away from this business of decreasing the heaviness as the work progresses. This is true not merely in the sonatas, but throughout Beethoven's output. It's just slightly more easily demonstrated through the sonatas because there are so very many of themâ [LAUGH] 32, compared with 16 quartets and just nine symphonies. When a point in his life is illustrated by just one symphony, it's a bit of a stretch to assume that it is emblematic of something. But, four or five sonatas written in tandem, or in one stretch, with similar concerns and similar solutions to the compositional problems they pose, these can be said to represent a step along a path. Now, that path is a very dramatic one, and most dramatic of all is the moment, late in life, when Beethoven steps off it altogether. I really don't mean to diminish Mozart, of all people, here. His piano concerti were a huge inspirationâto Beethoven, first of allâ but they did not, through their content, force later composers to reckon with them. But given what Beethoven achieved, what he left behind, and what he moved towards, it was not possible to write a piano sonata in the 19th century, or naturally the 20th, as if these works had not been written. They set the agenda and they established which elements of the Classical style and tonal system were still usable, and which onesâmanyâwere now obsolete. Beethoven's achievement with the 32 sonatas ensured that most great composers of the subsequent generation wanted to write their own, while simultaneously making it almost impossible for them to succeed in the genre, at least not without reinventing it almost beyond recognition, beyond its own definitions. Beethoven was a huge inspiration, but at the same time, he was a hell of a problem for the Romantic generation. All right, enough with the generalities. The work that we will be dealing with today is the Sonata Opus 109, the first of the final three which were composed almost concurrently in 1822, conceived almost as a unit. They have many connections, some mysterious, inexplicable, a few of them literal. Over four lectures, we've discussed the development that has taken place in the Beethoven sonata-writing up to this point, the same developments we just reviewed a moment ago. But until now, despite that "New Paths" letter, and despite some rather wild works, the development has been step-wise, incremental. From Opus 2, Number 1, to Opus 90, there have been 28 sonatas representing nearly 20 years of Beethoven's life. The development found in the late sonatas, by contrast, is a leap. This final trinity of sonatasâalong with, perhaps to a lesser extent, the preceding two sonatas, Opus 101 and the enormous "Hammerklavier"â these represent a summation, the perfection of all the forms he has been grappling with his whole life, a fulfillment after the crisis years, a perfect balance that one sees him seeking in the experimental works Opus 90 through Opus 97: the last Violin Sonata, the Serioso Quartet, the Archduke Trio. At the same time, these last sonatas step way into the unknown. The music world is still trying to come to grips with what Beethoven achieves here and, in the last string quartets also, written several years later. I'm hard-pressed to think of any other works throughout history that have had this same kind of an effect. It could be argued that Schoenberg, in inventing serialism, threw out the rule book as heedlessly, but plenty of composers have simply ignored his work. I mean, surely they are aware of it, but their rejection of it has been complete, and composition has remained possible. Coming to terms, though, to some very limited extent, with late Beethoven is one of the central tasks facing any serious musician, like it or not. Again, we have already discussed plenty of impressive innovations in the earlier sonatas, but they are always explicable. By contrast there are moments in these last works that I simply do not understand. Take this harmonic progression, for example, in the first movement of the Sonata Opus 110. [MUSIC] Three measures to get from E major [MUSIC] to A-flat [MUSIC]â four sharps to four flats, two keys which do not even exist on the same map. And midway through, there is a chord... [MUSIC] whose function I just cannot identify. [LAUGH] It makes emotional sense in context, but to play it is to experience a kind of delirium. Incidentally, one possible explanation for why we find ourselves in E major in the middle of A-flat major 110: That is the key of Opus 109. Now don't misunderstand, these works can and do stand alone. But the more I know them, the more I think that even if they were not meant to be played together, they are the product of one creative burst and that these small links between them are probably not accidental, and certainly not coincidental. A brief passage in the first movement of Opus 109... [MUSIC] reappears as the main theme of Opus 110's slow movement. [MUSIC] And the key relationship between all three sonatas is fascinating. We keep moving up a major third from E [MUSIC], to A-flat [MUSIC], to C [MUSIC]. The next move up a third would take us back to E [MUSIC], where we started. Interestingly, this business of cycling through major thirds is something that Schubert would often do within a work. In fact, in the B-flat major trio, he twiceâ first in the first movement, then again in the secondâ presents the same material in each of those specific keys, E, A-flat, and C, one after another. It's impossible to know if this is in any way intentional, but as we'll see later, it's just one instance of Schubert taking an idea which is just a germ in Beethoven, and giving it full expression. Let's take a short break for a review question.
