[MUSIC] Welcome to week three of Exploring the Beethoven Piano Sonatas. If we can get through today's lecture together, then we will be past the midway point. In 1802, Beethoven wrote a letter to one Wenzel Krumpholz, of all extraordinarily named people, in which he said, "From now on I am going to take a new path." One could argue that few statements in the history of music have had more import than this one, as once Beethoven determined that he would remove his one remaining foot from the past, from the style and norms of the second half of the 18th century, once he determined that the conventions of the early classical style were not for him anymore, his music began to undergo changes that had a huge ripple effect--tsunami effect, I guess. Really, once Beethoven began to question the foundations on which his early works were based, the history of music itself changed course. This can be seen as the beginning of the more than long, more than century long dismantling of first the classical style, then the sonata form, and finally of the tonal system itself. Now interestingly this "new paths" remark of Beethoven's must have been well known to 19th-century composers. When Schumann wrote his famous 1853 article announcing his discovery of a still unknown Brahms, he also called it "Neue Bahnen"--new paths. It speaks volumes that the Romantic generation not only imitated Beethoven's music, they even copied his speech patterns. I've always been slightly surprised by the timing of the letter however. Beethoven wrote it shortly before he wrote the three piano sonatas Opus 31. While each of these does have certain structural innovations, the four sonatas he wrote immediately preceding the new paths remark strike me as being the ones that mark a clear break with the past. As I've mentioned, dividing Beethoven's music into period is a fool's errand because in each work there is invariably something that's new. But this is to my ear the clearest demarcation point he ever gives us. The first 13 sonatas, which were the subject of last week's lecture, create, reach a kind of a culmination point with the Sonata Opus 22. It's the only sonata of Beethoven I can think of which conforms precisely to a model he has already established. And it really is notably reminiscent of the very first sonatas, the Opus 2s. And also of Opus 7, which, frankly, I find more compelling. Opus 22 is brilliant in its faster movements. It has a kind of an operatic beauty in its slow movement and, and throughout it's, it's impeccably wrought. But whenever I play it, I find there's just the slightest sense of routine about it. For the record, now, Beethoven disagreed with me. He was inordinately fond of Opus 22, having written to his publisher that, "diese Sonata hat sich gewaschen." It's an untranslatable idiom which means something like, the bee's knees. Maybe what I sense in it is not so much routine but self-satisfaction, which Beethoven did not typically allow himself the luxury of. Anyway, the sonatas up until this point, despite plenty of variety among them, have all stuck to a certain model. Each four-movement sonata has featured a sonata allegro followed by a truly slow movement-- an adagio, not an andante, as Haydn and Mozart often used--then a minuet or scherzo, and then finally a rondo. Whereas the three-movement sonatas have invariably followed the Mozartian pattern. And regardless of the total number of movements, every sonata has begun with a movement in sonata form. So Beethoven has to this point taken an established model, tweaked it slightly, and perfected the tweaked version. Having done so, he will now proceed to, essentially, reject it and not just for the moment but really for the rest of his compositional life. The four sonatas that first find Beethoven veering off the path are the Sonata Opus 26, the two Sonatas quasi una fantasia, Opus 27, and the so-called "Pastoral" Sonata, Opus 28. They are written in short succession, the first dating from the tail end of 1800, the last completed already by the end of 1801. Now, interestingly only a few months separate the conservative Opus 22 and the forward-looking Opus 26 as well. Since it clearly wasn't the passage of time that changed him, we probably never will know what motivated this stylistic u-turn. Opus 26 breaks ground in, really, many ways. But the most obvious thing is that for the first time Beethoven eschews sonata form for the first movement. In fact, none of the four movements are sonata forms. Now this is a very big deal. Among the hundreds of three- and four-movement works that Haydn and Mozart wrote and that Beethoven had written up to this point, I can think of exactly three that do not begin with a sonata form. And each case it was an experimental work. And in each case, the specific experiment was not repeated. For Beethoven, though, Opus 26 becomes the first of a series. Some of the later sonatas, really even, arguably, the next two, are outwardly more radical, but Opus 26 is pretty extraordinary in that it is probably the only one out of all 32 that makes no effort to unify the movements. Or put another way, he throws out the old system, and replaces it with nothing. I suppose there is a bit of a pattern here. The first and the third movements of Opus 26 are fairly lengthy and they're both on the slow side, the second and fourth movements are quick and brief. So, in a sense the sonata is composed of two pairs of movements, two go-arounds of first tension and then release, though, the first and third movements otherwise have absolute zero in common with one another. This slow-fast-slow-fast construction makes the work a bit of a throwback, as Baroque sonatas, such as the Bach gamba sonatas, for example, often had the same succession of tempi. The similarity, though, ends there. If anything, Opus 26 looks forward, not backward. In Schumann's unusually critical review of Chopin's second sonata, he complained that Chopin had not really written a sonata at all, but rather had, "united four of his most unruly children." In many ways, the same comment--I would not personally deem it a criticism--applies to Beethoven's Opus 26. In the case of both the Beethoven and the Chopin, it's not cohesion, but the imagination on display and the inarguably high quality of the material that makes the works distinguished. Or rather, the cohesion of the work cannot be explained by examining the structure, or fishing around for motivic connections between the movements. There simply is an emotional logic to the succession of events-- another link between this sonata and the Romantic era, which sometimes valued feeling over form. And the comparison of Opus 26 to the Chopin sonata is really a pertinent one for other reasons as well. While Chopin was pretty much alone among the top-shelf composers of the 19th- century in that he didn't like Beethoven and didn't admit to being influenced by him, he did like this particular sonata. And as we will see shortly, part of the work clearly took up residence in Chopin's head. So, having abandoned the sonata form for the first movement, Beethoven instead gives us a series of variations in a leisurely tempo. This does have certain precedence. Haydn occasionally began his two-movement sonatas with slow variations. But honestly, his two-movement works really constitute a genre unto themselves. They don't belong to a discussion of Beethoven and the piano sonata. Mozart began his "Alla Turca Sonata: with a set of variations, but that sonata is a set of unruly children if ever there was one in the Classical period. Really, the first movement's form is only one of many rules it is the exception to. And again, none of the experiments were ever repeated. So really, these variations, they're a brave new world. Now other than bringing the element of surprise, simply because it really hadn't been done before, what does it mean, practically, that the first movement is a set of variations rather than a sonata form? This is the question that we will begin exploring in the next segment. Let's take a short break for a review question.
