(MUSIC) At the end of this second B section, though, comes the first – and really, only – intervention in the whole movement. The first B section, when it came to an end, melted back into the return of the A. (MUSIC) This time around, the equivalent passage leads us not back home but into foreign territory. (MUSIC) At this juncture, we find ourselves in C major – which is as far afield from E major as we’ve traveled at any point in this movement. The sixteenth notes go away for the longest stretch they ever have or will. And the music’s progress, in sharp contrast to the natural and open quality of most of this movement, grows furtive, as we dart through many surprising key areas – D minor, B-flat minor, F sharp major. (MUSIC) And finally, order is restored! That chord (MUSIC) is the dominant of E major, which means we’re headed home. And the return of those sixteenth notes (MUSIC), that also means that we ARE home, in a broader sense, already. When the sixteenths went away, it seemed almost as if we were in an ellipsis – like the piece had been put on hold. When they come back, the comfort of the familiar instantly comes back with them. So, the very mild anxiety of the C section (MUSIC) had already made the previous return a bit more loaded with meaning. Now, coming on the heels of the only genuinely dramatic passage in the movement, we finally do get a truly altered version of this movement’s eternal melody. (MUSIC) The theme has been transferred from the soprano to the tenor, and that simple change of register has made it more glowingly warm than ever. Schubert did something really similar in his A major rondo for piano 4 hands, so similar that I suspect it must have been intended as an homage. Three or four times, the theme comes in the top line – and forgive me, I’m two hands short here, but I’ll do the best I can. (MUSIC) The very last time it appears, though, the theme is taken over by the secondo player. (MUSIC) In the case of the Schubert, the difference in sonority is even more obvious, because it's literally a different person playing! But even in the Beethoven, the new register makes this music more open-sounding and more open-hearted than ever. And what is especially moving is that it has now become a duet – a dialogue between the hands, with the main line being passed back and forth. (MUSIC) I'm not insane, and therefore I'm aware that is all just one person playing, but to me, this movement is so obviously inspired by the voice, I can't help but hear that this is an aria transformed into a duet. And this theme’s evolution into a conversation ultimately takes it into a truly new direction: as we enter the coda, it turns more ardent than it ever was previously. (MUSIC) Finally, after a good five or even six minutes of music, there is some actual evolution – of sonority and of character. And this evolution leads us to the only moment of real drama in the movement: a silence. The only real silence we experience over the course of seven minutes and hundreds of measures, a real Beethoven silence, coming as it does in mid-phrase, with a huge question mark hanging over it. (MUSIC) I’ve often used the word “pregnant” to describe Beethoven’s silences, and this is certainly a pregnant pause. Sometimes he follows these pauses with an assertive or combative statement, but here, it’s quite the opposite. In keeping with the rest of the movement, the continuation, post-silence, is gentle; in contrast to much of the rest of the movement, though, the silence has rendered it quite vulnerable. (MUSIC). And finally, after that long, winding phrase, we come back to the opening theme. Despite being in a coda; and the tail end of the coda by now, the theme does come back, for the nth time. This is structurally not necessary, and it's out of the ordinary for Beethoven: he seems to have come back to this this uniquely lovely theme one more time because he is reluctant to say goodbye to it… …And the goodbye, to the theme and to the sonata, when it does come finally, is extraordinary. First we have four bars of the theme. (MUSIC) Then he truncates it to two. (MUSIC) And finally, a two bar phrase that brings melodic closure (MUSIC). It seems as if the piece is finally poised to wrap up neatly, with a bow wrapped around it. But instead, Beethoven wanders off, and has a stream-of-consciousness-on-the-theme. (MUSIC) I rarely feel the need to clarify this, but that is the end. This movement, so rhythmically stable, so grounded, so generous and healthy in character, comes to end – such as it is – with a flight of fancy and a disappearance into the thin air. This remarkable, off-the-beaten-track ending begins first with a ritardando (MUSIC), and then an accelerando (MUSIC), and then finally, in pianissimo, the “a tempo” conclusion: (MUSIC) There is a cadence there (MUSIC), but it is the most evanescent, open-ended cadence imaginable. This last phrase has plenty of freedom written into it, but just as with the first movement, Beethoven explicitly instructs the pianist to keep the very end strictly in time: the ending, that final cadence, is not to be spotlighted or dwelled on. But the suddenness of the first movement’s ending – the same phrase, you’ll remember, that had come twice previously, with a ritardando (MUSIC) when it comes at the end without the ritardando, it becomes definitive, uncompromising, and devastating. In the case of the last movement, though, this last phrase is new material, and it moves quickly, darting around the keyboard, and so the suddenness of the ending seems abrupt, ambiguous, open-ended. In fact, it is the most open-ended…ending… of any Beethoven work up to this point. This final disappearance into thin air is yet one more highly personal touch in what, to me, is possibly altogether Beethoven’s most personal sonata. And as I’ve so often said, Beethoven is always reinventing the wheel – he takes the genre somewhere new with each sonata. But op. 90 really seems almost like a private communion. As a point of comparison, think of the Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas – only a decade separate them from op. 90, but their rhetoric and heroism seem a whole world away. The ending of op. 90 vanishes in mid-air, and while it's surely a coincidence, its hugely ambiguous ending leads remarkably naturally into the equally hugely ambiguous beginning of the very next piano sonata, op. 101. (MUSIC) Too much time passed between the composition of these two masterworks for the connection to be intentional, but still, it serves as an apt metaphor for the way modest, unassuming op. 90 opens a gate into the late period, and with it, into an unfathomable future…
