Daniel Barenboim - Piano Sonatas

“The Whole Development of a Genius”

Beethoven and the Piano Sonata

Thomas May

The role that the piano played in Ludwig van Beethoven’s development can hardly be exaggerated. Often regarded as a vehicle or even a ready-made laboratory for the composer, it also served as a kind of alter ego. The instrument provided not only a tool but a place apart that encouraged him to confide his boldest, wildest intuitions and creative aspirations.

Recalling the spell Beethoven cast when performing at the keyboard, his prodigy student Carl Czerny wrote: “His improvisation was most brilliant and striking. In whatever company he might chance to be, he knew how to produce such an effect upon every hearer that frequently not an eye remained dry, while many would break into loud sobs; for there was something wonderful in his expression in addition to the beauty and originality of his ideas and his spirited style of rendering them.” Czerny adds that, “after an improvisation of this kind, [Beethoven] would burst into loud laughter and banter his hearers on the emotion he had caused in them. ‘You are fools!’ he would say”—cultivating a contrarian image was part of the persona Beethoven presented to his aristocratic admirers.

The piano sonatas, tallying roughly a half-million individual notes, comprise one of the most extraordinary records in Western music of a creative spirit continually challenging the boundaries of what music can express. Spanning nearly his entire career, they chart a journey from Beethoven’s adolescence in Bonn—if we include the three unpublished sonatas he wrote at the age of 12—up to the visionary extremes of his late style. “There is hardly another output from any composer in any form,” Daniel Barenboim has observed, “that gives you such a clear picture of a composer’s development and transformation.” As Alfred Brendel put it, the piano sonatas “represent the whole development of a genius, from his beginnings to the threshold of the late quartets.” Perhaps most remarkable of all, he adds, Beethoven “does not repeat himself in his sonatas; each work, each movement is a new organism.”

Beethoven produced a greater number of piano sonatas than of works in any other genre: 32 remains the canonical number (though in his edition, by admitting into the canon the three works of the teenaged composer, the musicologist Barry Cooper has attempted to extend the total to 35). At the same time, the piano sonatas are less con ducive to being categorized into the conventional three- period model of Beethoven’s development: early, middle, and late (or, in Franz Liszt’s unforgettable phrase: “l’adolescent, l’homme, le dieu”).

For one thing, they are spaced with notable asymmetry across the composer’s career. While a span of nearly three decades separates the composition of the first and last of the 32 published works, Beethoven had written 20 of them by 1802. The epochal “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” Sonatas date from the onset of the “heroic” style associated with the middle period (1804–05), after which came a hiatus from the genre up until the final sonata trilogy, finished in 1822. Having apparently decided he had nothing more to say in the sonata form, Beethoven published his gigantic set of “Diabelli” Variations as his final large-scale expression for the solo piano, followed by a coda of enigmatic miniatures with the two sets of Bagatelles, Opp. 119 and 126.

Even more, the piano sonatas are simply too diverse to be assigned according to simplistic, prefabricated categories. Already with his first set, Op. 2, Beethoven announced his independence, casting each of the three works in four movements, in contrast to the three-movement format Mozart and Haydn (for the most part) had established as a precedent. Twelve of the sonatas contain three movements, but these include such instances as the remarkably innovative Op. 27, No. 2 (the so-called “Moonlight”), which fuses aspects of Beethoven’s persona as an improviser with the sonata, “quasi una fantasia.” Several of the works comprise only two movements, from the pair published as Op. 49 but written in the mid-1790s as easy sonatas for the amateur market to the tragic-ecstatic final one, Op. 111. Yet few works convey a more satisfying sense of completion—to the sonata on its own terms, as the finale of a trilogy, and as the culmination of Beethoven’s exploration of the genre across his career.

Another way of thinking of the singular variety of the composer’s approaches to the genre and its form is to consider analogies between the sonata and drama, as the contemporary composer Anton Reicha did. According to the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, Reicha posited an analogy between sonata form and drama, “which, according to the laws of classical poetics, consists of an exposition—the ‘tying of the knot’—and a dénouement, the ‘untying’ of the knot.” Far from abstract, predetermined molds into which Beethoven “pours” his ideas, the sonatas are shaped by the specific nature of the musical ideas themselves.

Thus even the “early” period incorporates several types of experimentation with the sonata as Beethoven had inherited it from his predecessors, most notably in Op. 13, the “Pathétique,” or Op. 26 and the Op. 27 pair. He can be seen working on a “symphonic,” epic scale as in the “Waldstein” (from around the time of the “Eroica”), returning to the genre with an approach of lyrical compression in Op. 78 (one of the composer’s own favorites) and then, still later, conceiving the vast edifice of the “Hammerklavier,” Op. 106, arguably his most radically innovative achievement in the genre. But the final three masterpieces, Opp. 109–111, were also genuine game-changers, each an idiosyncratic creation yet each connected to the others through ingenious macroscopic structural and motivic links. Here we find the nowmostly-deaf Beethoven imagining possibilities for the rapidly evolving piano and its expressive mechanisms that had no precedent.

There may be extra-musical associations involved, whether suggested by the composer himself (the “farewell— absence—return” scenario of Op. 81a, “Les Adieux”), or imposed by the popular imagination (readings of the “Moonlight” as reflections of unhappy love and/or even of the composer’s frustration with his worsening deafness), but these are always incidental to the musical drama that is worked out on its own terms. Dahlhaus considers this process in terms of the Hegelian dialectics of subject and object as articulated around the time of Beethoven’s early maturity: “The aesthetic subject is thus the empirical person of neither the composer nor the listener, but an imaginary subject that combines the creative activity of the former and the re-creative activity of the latter.”

In this context, a quick glimpse at the connotations of “sonata” may be of use. The word emerged in the 16th century to distinguish a piece of music that was played (sonata) rather than sung (cantata)—a binary that itself comes into question when we think of the “vocal” quality of certain movements in Beethoven’s sonatas, such as the quasi-operatic recitative and arioso embedded in Op. 110, the middle of the final trilogy. In the Baroque, such instrumental music was often written for multiple musicians, though in his violin Sonatas and Partitas, Johann Sebastian Bach imbued the solo sonata with weight and substance, while Domenico Scarlatti established the model of a single-movement sonata for solo keyboard.

It was in the Classical era that the multi-purpose implications of the term began to be restricted to a work with several movements, the first of which was usually in the form also known as sonata (perhaps the signature form of Viennese Classicism, which was used across the spectrum from solo instrumental music to string quartets, concertos, and symphonies). Sonata form, as the pianist-scholar Charles Rosen argued, is almost perversely resistant to definition or description, though Carl Czerny was among those who handed down the popular, simplified scheme of exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. Yet by its very nature, according to Rosen, true sonata form is too dynamic to be adequately conveyed by such taxonomies.

Mozart and Haydn, who were pivotal in forging this way of thinking into a viable style, were unquestionably significant models for Beethoven—the very first work of Op. 2, the Sonata in F minor, intriguingly conflates the voices of both. Yet a host of other influences helped shape his imagination as well, including the sonatas of C.P.E. Bach and Muzio Clementi. When Beethoven resettled permanently in Vienna in 1792 in his early 20s, he became part of a rich, complex keyboard culture that included a range of fellow virtuosi and rivals, some of whom were based elsewhere but traveled

to the Habsburg capital and competed with young Beethoven. To mention just one example, the London-based Johann Baptist Cramer (a student of Clementi) is recognized as the model for the perpetual-motion finale of Op. 26—a four-movement sonata not one of whose parts is actually cast in sonata form. (It would, in turn, leave a profound mark on Chopin’s Piano Sonata in B-flat minor.)

One explanation for the latitude of experimentation in Beethoven’s piano sonatas, especially early in his career, can be found in the sociological context of his status after re locating to Vienna. The musicologist Timothy Jones argues that Beethoven’s career as a pianist-composer was far from typical during a period in which the piano was gaining popularity among middle-class customers—with a corresponding increase in the demand for solo piano publications.

Yet the financial security provided by his small circle of aristocratic Viennese patrons “protected [Beethoven] from the mass-market forces that weighed heavily on his rivals.” Even more, writes Jones, these patrons were themselves of an adventurous aesthetic disposition and appreciated “serious music that was at odds with more widespread popular tastes. They encouraged Beethoven to pursue his already marked bent towards novel, difficult, and densely argued music.” As a result, because these patrons were “socially and artistically exclusive,” Beethoven had “no significant contact with the larger musical public and, free from the need to be a popular composer, he could afford to eschew middlebrow mass-market values in his performances and compositions.”

Even after deafness put an end to Beethoven’s career as a pianist in 1809—his final recorded public performance was in 1814, premiering the “Archduke” Trio, Op. 97—he continued to return to the piano sonata, in the process creating the very cornerstone of the solo repertoire.

Indeed, the curious fusion of private, intimate communication and public context that defines the modern piano recital did not yet exist when Beethoven was writing these works. It was Liszt who established (and helped to market) that construct in the decade after Beethoven’s death. Charles Rosen notes the paradox that, like Mozart before him, Beethoven introduced “into what was essentially private music the difficulties and the display of public virtuosity” while showing “still less consideration for the amateur than Mozart—in fact, famously less consideration for the concerns and comfort of the professional musician as well.” Thus, within decades of the above-mentioned burgeoning of the private household market, “the fitness of his piano music for the public sphere was quickly recognized.” Beethoven’s piano sonatas “constituted the first body of substantial serious works for the piano adequate for performance in large concert halls.”

The afterlives of these works have taken countless forms and continue to set expectations: for composers, performers, music lovers. And just as they chart the development of Beethoven’s genius, each encounter reflects a new stage in our understanding of what music, at its most challenging and under the pressure of that genius, can convey. Comparing Beethoven’s impossibly lofty status with that of Shakespeare as “virtual clichés,” biographer Jan Swafford declares that both figures “are too wild and too strong to be bound in those chains.” Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the composer “is that he survived the burden of being Beethoven… No wonder his time called him superhuman. But the truer and sadder reality is that Beethoven lived to the ultimate capacity of being human, and he encompassed that in his art.”